Lindsay Harris & Dree Collopy in WaPo: “Trump’s Attack on Asylum is Based Entirely on False Claims”

“As immigration lawyers, we know he’s just trying to scare you,” write Lindsay Harris and Dree Collopy  in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, in reference to Trump’s asylum policies and rhetoric.  In addition to clarifying the international law basis for asylum and the life-threatening reasons why people seek asylum in the U.S., they take aim at the statistics cited most recently by Trump (such as his claim that only 3 percent of asylum seekers show up to court, whereas DHS’s own studies have shown that 60-75 percent of non-detained asylum seekers appear in court) as well as the claim put forth by the Administration that Central American asylum seekers can settle in Mexico.  The op-ed is grounded in the authors’ legal expertise, data as well as their experiences representing asylum seekers in the law school clinics they teach (at the University of District Columbia and Catholic University, respectively).

-JKoh