The U.S. officers who screen migrants at the border to determine eligibility for asylum have been plowing through cases at a record clip since May, when the Biden administration placed tougher restrictions on people who cross illegally. Officers are completing twice as many monthly interviews as they did a year ago. Under the tighter rules, the percentage of migrants who are rejected and referred for deportation has more than doubled, according to Department of Homeland Security data. The number of people screened remains a small fraction of the number who cross the border illegally. And the government does not have the detention capacity to hold others long enough to interview them. As a result, the government has limited ability to reduce border crossings by adjusting the U.S. asylum system, whose delays and dysfunction are widely recognized as a driver of illegal immigration, reports the Washington Post.
Biden officials are anticipating a seasonal increase in illegal entries this spring, and the administration is under significant pressure to avoid chaotic scenes of mass border crossings that would hurt the president’s reelection campaign. The latest DHS statistics show that changes to asylum policy would have little effect without a major increase in staffing to process migrants’ claims and expanded detention and deportation capacity for those who don’t qualify for protection. The department has assigned nearly all of its 1,000 asylum officers to work on border cases and to boost output even more, and staffers with previous asylum training have been reassigned to border cases to help screen migrants. Despite the all-hands-on-deck approach, the number of interviews the officers completed was dwarfed by the nearly 1.7 million illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border during that time. “We are maxing out the system, and it hasn’t kept pace with the increase,” said a DHS official.