FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 5, 2024
Contact: Pablo DeJesús | info@uusj.org | (202) 600 – 9132
Bill offers some positive provisions but overall sets up a contest of compassion between those arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border and all others
Washington, DC— UUSJ opposes the Senate Supplemental funding proposal which, in our view, would advance extreme changes to the U.S. immigration-asylum system at the cost of migrant safety, even as it provides some much-needed improvement. Instead, UUSJ would support proposals to modernize, reform, and fully fund our immigration and asylum system.
Negotiators have finally released the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, bill text, and a summary via the Senate Committee on Appropriations, and includes the “Border Act” negotiated by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), and James Lankford (R-OK) that proposes significant changes to the U.S. asylum system. The proposal links emergency assistance for Ukraine, Israel Taiwan, and others to wide-ranging restrictions on asylum protections, pairing them with $18.5 billion in funding for border operations, receiving communities, and hiring additional asylum officers, border agents, and immigration judges. The proposal would create a new authority that leverages a system of triggers for expulsions. Yet the proposal fails to legalize any of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. without documentation, such as recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) like the Dreamers and other longtime residents.
With few exceptions, the new authority would allow officials to expel asylum seekers without asylum screening interviews when border encounters average 4,000 per day over a week. In addition, expulsions would become mandatory if encounters reach an average of 5,000 per day over a week, or if they reach 8,500 in any single day. However, even if invoked, U.S. border officials would be required to continue processing a minimum of 1,400 asylum seekers per day at official ports of entry, as a safeguard against backlogs.
The proposal would also allocate 50,000 new family- and employment-based immigrant visas per year for five years, and it would provide lawful permanent residency to tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated to the U.S. following the war and takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and provide immigration status to the children of H-1B visa holders, the category for highly skilled visa holders, among many other items.
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Pablo DeJesús, Executive Director of Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, stated: “We understand that efforts to comprehensively reform immigration laws have been made extremely difficult. The number of migrants arriving at our southern border is a logistical challenge. However, we feel those can be surmounted by partnering with community-based organizations to provide welcoming services and increased resources for the orderly processing of applications. A more pernicious difficulty is the attempts by some politicians to use this circumstance as a way to demonize those fleeing danger and oppression and their efforts to dismantle the right to asylum.
“The capacity to summarily expel people should not be the function we lean upon most heavily in updating and modernizing our immigration and asylum system, as in this proposal,” continued DeJesús.
“While we appreciate some features of the bill, items that we have long supported, especially provisions for Afghans, additional green cards and work authorizations, legal representation for children, more funding for hard-pressed cities, more grant funding for community-based services, and the hiring of more immigration judges to help deliver just and impartial decisions promptly, we view those ‘sweeteners’ as a political maneuver, in this context, not policy solutions. Those features are insufficient to overcome our apprehension for a bill that sets up a contest of compassion between those arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border and all others. Nor do the sweeteners outweigh the fundamental challenge to due process. Instead, as a whole, the bill undermines asylum by weakening court review, and extending the use of deterrence and detention tactics which are antithetical to the welcoming approach UUSJ endorses.”
“The answer to our difficulties is not to race toward further border militarization and to deny asylees their rights under established international and U.S. law. Instead, the answer is to create multiple legal pathways so that seeking asylum is no longer the singular viable and legitimate avenue for entry to the U.S.,” said DeJesús.
“We must take the time and steps needed to disaggregate measures needed to secure our borders from those needed to uphold humanitarian protection, or those needed to allow people coming to the U.S. to fill labor needs, in areas of the economy and jobs Americans do not readily fill. Secure borders and effective humanitarian protections are not mutually exclusive, nor is a dignified and welcoming system.
“As Unitarian Universalists, we begin in love. So we support proposals to modernize, reform, and fully fund our immigration and asylum system. This proposal is not that, and it is too far off the mark to swallow what amounts to a series of poison pill measures restricting asylum,” concluded DeJesús.
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Established in 1999, Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice is a network of Unitarian Universalist individuals and congregations that lifts up the light of reason, the warmth of community, and the flame of hope to advance equitable national policies and actions aligned with UU values through engagement, education, and advocacy. We envision a just, compassionate, and sustainable world community.
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