Trump regime officials have repeatedly said refugees should enter the country the legal way by applying for asylum at legal points of entry, but they're also denying a record number of applications for asylum.
According to a Syracuse University study, applications are now being denied at almost twice the rate they were throughout most of the Obama administration.
From CBS News:
Immigration judges rejected a record-high number of asylum cases this year, refusing 65 percent of immigrants seeking the refugee status, according to a recent report published by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). More than 42,000 asylum cases were decided in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2018, the most since the group began tracking the data in 2001. [...]
"I worry that people's due process is at risk and that's at play in the rise of denial rates," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy analyst at the American Immigration Council, in a telephone interview with CBS News. "People's claims are getting denied not because it wasn't valid, but because there just wasn't enough time to collect evidence and representation in an environment that's seeking speed."
Under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, resources were diverted from criminal courts to immigration courts and judges were told the process as many cases as they can in as little time as they can. The Trump regime is now churning through tens of thousands of applications and denying the large majority of them.
Trump's commitment to deporting brown-skinned humans as quickly as possible is very expensive to taxpayers and the costs don't end when their claims are denied with a rubber stamp. Physically deporting them out of the country is even more expensive than their short court hearings.
It doesn't have to be this way, of course, and for the most part it wasn't under the Obama administration.
The Obama administration also deported a significant number of people, but their resources were focused on deporting actual criminals and threats instead of women and children in diapers. The Trump regime has gone far out of their way to rewrite the priorities of federal law enforcement to make every immigrant a target including local business owners and grandmothers who've been here since before I was even born. What makes them any less American than I am other than a piece of paper?
The moral vagaries of our immigration system will never be fully solved until Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans have scuttled the last several attempts to do so.