Is Asylum Dead in the U.S.? Trump administration grants asylum in two cases in two months

In the nearly two months since the Trump administration’s immigration restrictions have been in effect, only two people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border have been granted permission to stay in the U.S., reports Nick Miroff in The Washington Post. “Lucas Guttentag, an immigration-law scholar who served in the Obama administration and now teaches at Stanford and Yale universities, said the border measures ‘are designed to pay lip service’ to U.S. law and international treaty obligations ‘without providing any actual protection or screening. The whole purpose of asylum law is to give exhausted, traumatized and uninformed individuals a chance to get to a full hearing in U.S. immigration courts, and this makes that almost impossible . . . .  It’s a shameful farce.’”

KJ