From “The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border” by Cristina Rathbone
This dismantling of our nation’s asylum system has been intentional, that’s the thing: the result of an evolving, calculated, step-by-step take-down of the protections we were – and are – legally obliged to offer. As one administration official put it in a leaked memo to colleagues back in July 2019, “My mantra has persistently been presenting aliens with multiple, unsolvable dilemmas.” To this end, hundreds of protocols, large and small, were enacted in order to ensnare, confound, and ultimately deter thousands of applicants from effectively pursuing their asylum claims. And when a particular group of people found a way around one, another would be dreamed up, and then quickly implemented, in order to block their progress.