essays
In the United States, the Right to Asylum is Under Attack
by Amir Khouzam
July 23, 2019
Amir Khouzam is a humanitarian specialist who has worked in refugee protection with the UNCHR in Egypt and with Syrian civil society in protection policy throughout Syria. He was the managing editor for print and editorial at Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs from 2018 to 2019. This is his second piece published with frank news.
With the rhetoric around immigration in the United States reaching new heights, it can be easy to overlook subtle changes in policy and official practice that can dramatically affect those most directly involved in immigration enforcement. Such is the case with an email outlining new policy directives for Asylum Officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Our Southern border,” opens the email, credited to Kenneth Thomas Cuccinelli II, “is facing a daily crisis of aliens overwhelming our ports of entry, many of whom are attempting to enter and remain in the country in violation of our laws.”
Mr. Cuccinelli is the Acting Director at USCIS, the federal agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security that is tasked with executing American immigration policy. He assumed office on June 10th, following the resignation of former director Lee Cissna at the request of President Donald Trump. Mr. Cuccinelli is a long-standing supporter of the president and shares many of his extreme views. One of Mr. Cuccinelli’s first official acts was to blame a young man for his own death and the death of his daughter after they drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande. In his previous job as Attorney General for Virginia, he defended anti-sodomy laws, sued the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, and pushed for legislation to prevent children of undocumented migrants in the United States from attending university.
But the recent note to his employees tasked with processing and filing legal claims of asylum threatens to do serious harm to some of the most vulnerable subjects of American immigration policy.
The email, in which the acting director thanks agents for their service to the United States and reminds them of their oath to defend the constitution, is an alarmist call to action against abuses of American law.
Upon reading the email it would be easy to assume that the act in question – claiming asylum in the United States, by those who may have crossed the border under irregular or unclear circumstances – is a crime. In fact, the opposite is true.
The Trump administration clearly does not appreciate this reality. The email makes no mention of it and instead goes to great lengths to obscure it, with urgent language and misleading statistics.
Among its claims are that USCIS agents are being too lenient in granting positive ‘credible fear’ determinations following initial screening sessions with migrants. This is not true.
Credible fear screenings, conducted by federal officials when people first enter the United States seeking asylum, are organized around three major questions: has the applicant ever been harmed in their home country; have they or their child ever been threatened with harm, and; have they been harmed as a result of discrimination based on religion, race, nationality, social affiliation, or political opinion.
These are broad questions by design, and most people have historically received positive determinations. That is because the screenings are not themselves determinant of whether applicants have a legitimate claim of asylum. They are instead an opportunity for immigration officials to decide whether an individual should be deported immediately, or be granted an asylum hearing in front of a judge. Given the circumstances most asylum seekers are fleeing, a high rate of positive determinations has been consistent across both recent Republican and Democratic administrations.
But there are strong indications that, contrary to Mr. Cuccinelli’s claims, fewer people than ever are receiving positive results due to new obstacles put in place by the Trump Administration. Its zero-tolerance policy and practice of separating families, draconian interpretations of whether or not minors at the border are ‘unaccompanied’ even when they arrive with close relatives, and a new directive that precludes people from claiming violence at the hands of gangs as a legitimate fear from which to flee have all contributed to heightened rates of early denial, long before a judge has looked at a claim.
This leads to Mr. Cuccinelli’s second misdirection. In his email, the acting director suggests that of those who are granted positive results and permitted to remain in the United States, most skip town, disappearing into the masses of Undocumented America. This is a false claim and a pernicious one, that is no more true for having been repeated by the Vice President of the United States on live television. This year, the Washington Post fact-checked Vice President Pence’s claim that 90 percent of applicants do not show up to their asylum hearing by referring to the Department of Justice’s very own statistics, which showed that in 2018 about 40 percent of applicants skipped their hearings. Even these numbers are an anomaly: from 2013 to 2017, the no-show rate was between 5 and 11 percent.
But these facts and the lies and misdirection Mr. Cuccinelli deploys instead are academic. At the core of the issue is a simple reality.
The Trump Administration is asking immigration agents to break the law. They are requesting that federal officials refuse more people their legal right to claim asylum, and they are couching this request in peaens to patriotism and the constitution.
Mr. Cuccinelli calls the American immigration system ‘abused.’ Rather it is abusive, as we have seen this week, and last week, and long before that, with children separated by their parents, and adult detainees held in overcrowded and underserviced facilities, forced to drink from toilets and denied access to showers.
Recent images of Vice President Mike Pence standing stone-faced in front of desperate and detained men have rightly dominated the news cycle. But it is important too that we take notice of the less public forms of abuse being exercised by the American government. In Mr. Cuccinelli’s email is contained a naked appeal to American officials to ratchet up the abuse, to formalize it, to deny more people the protections that both international and American law says is their right.
Hope for the sanctity of asylum lies for now in the integrity and good judgment of immigration officers, who Mr. Cuccinelli himself acknowledges have the power to grant or deny temporary reprieve. But what this email reveals is that formal American institutions are now actively at cross purposes with whatever humanitarian, legal, and empathic instincts their staff might exhibit. That the institution might in this case prevail should very much be a credible fear to us all.
essays
WORLD YOUR WORLD
by Max Moinian
May 31, 2018
Max Moinian is an urban planner from New York, researching climate change and urban design. This work is adapted from the Future Earth Catalog, a project done for her master’s thesis at MIT.
Earlier this year I wondered how the ozone layer was doing. I remembered being terrified as a kid and constantly drenched in sunblock. “This is a completely different Earth you are growing up in,” my mom would say. And she was totally right.
Climate change is the environmental narrative of our time. It occupies the same anxiety as nuclear warfare, the population bomb, and the ozone hole. It ebbs and flows from popular consciousness with big events like the Kyoto Protocol or COP21, and with extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts, and fires.
The problem is the ebb and flow - where does a story start and where does it end?
We hold onto shocks delivered through sensationalist media but we cannot possibly grasp stressors - the slow warming of temperature, melting of glaciers and rise of the sea. When Trump tweets “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice” he reveals a common misconception.
But weather that we can see and feel is not climate. Climate is the history of weather. It exists on an expanded timescale and involves incremental change that cannot be perceived firsthand. Climate is always mediated, and it’s pattern is irregular. Dr. John Holdren says we should call it “global climate disruption” rather than “global warming,” a misleading term which suggests that the phenomenon is uniform around the world, all about temperature, and gradual.
Climate’s official story is mostly told through data by scientists, journalists, and politicians. We listen without realizing we can be storytellers ourselves. Rebecca Solnit wrote about the power of the stories we tell in her book, Hope in the Dark. “Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories.” In the helplessness of climate change, I found agency in challenging the narratives I consume. I can reflect on many stories to tell my own.
Our ability to measure and understand the past seems to be directly proportional to our imaginative capacity for the future. It is hard to be hopeful when you are told to see the world as parts-per-million of CO2. This is a really big problem. Not only are we hyperaware of our past, but we can measure our individual impacts on the future — through efforts to make the world a better place, but also through carbon footprint calculators.
We might need to ‘unlearn’ some of these climate change communication and education logics (individual consumption as parts-per-million of CO2) in order to imagine a different future. Like a process of ‘unlearning’ candy as an adult, because the ingredients are ‘bad for you,’ the current narrative of climate may be bad for our society: an ingredient list full of toxic fear, individual responsibility, and irreversible loss.
Back to my mom, who used to give kids clementines on Halloween. Although I resented her for it, I take much wisdom from it now: we might not have the future that we wanted, but we can have something different that is just as sweet.
As you click through the timeline, choose your own adventure. There is no answer, no ‘aha!’ moment, only fragments I am suggesting to be part of our cultural construction of climate. In a quest for knowledge we struggle to accept that there might not be any to find. Uncertainty is a theme here: the uncertainty of climate models, 1-in-100 year storms, how we got here, and where we are headed. But the uncertainty of our future Earth means it is somewhat up to us. This is where Solnit finds hope: “the future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave.”
Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. We have always relied on it to explain uncertainty. To bridge the gap between what we observe and what we cannot understand, through myth, fiction, and fantasy. Our cultural construction of climate is a perception that has as much to do with science fiction as the science we call fact.
Fantasies of utopia or apocalyptic doom are powerful narratives. They indulge our senses and give license to world, a verb philosopher Martin Heidegger uses to describe the continuous process of world-building, perception-shifting, and responsiveness to our own realities. To world new worlds in the time of climate change is to break the barriers of our own capacities, whether these barriers be real or perceived.
In Space Colonies, Fabian Reimann writes, “heroism is successful foolishness; and is space travel anything but government-funded foolishness?” Space exploration, in fiction and not-fiction, is hope. We stuck our flag on the moon ten years after Kennedy declared the space race. What can’t we do?
By the way, the hole in the ozone is still there, it’s just growing slower.
A revisionist history for linear thinkers who prefer not to go down cycles and spirals of internet holes uncovering stories and events, and always working backwards. Grounded in the present, rooted in the past, and ready for lift off.