Yet ANOTHER attack on asylum seekers from @DOJ_EOIR. This new proposal reg would:

- Set 15-day filing deadline for asylum/withholding-only proceedings
- Allow judges(!) to submit evidence
- Restrict asylum-seekers' evidence.
- Restrict continuances

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-21027.pdf

Thousands of people who are ineligible for asylum are placed in "withholding only" proceedings, where they can only apply for a limited form of asylum.

This new rule would require those people—who often don't speak English—to submit an asylum application within 15 days.

Under current rules, when a person submits an asylum application by mail to the immigration court, if the court takes more than 30 days to process it, the application is deemed complete.

Under these new rules, that deadline would be completely eliminated.

Under the new rules, immigration judges could deem a mailed application incomplete even months after it was received, even if the court lost the file.

There would then be a new 30-day deadline to resubmit the application—and missing the deadline means application denied.

The rules also put a thumb on the scale against asylum seekers.

Judges would be required to automatically accept evidence from US government sources on country conditions, but asylum seekers would be required to first prove that their evidence was "credible and probative."

Even worse, the regulation would allow immigration judges themselves to act as a party and submit evidence into the record.

In practice, this means judges disinclined to believe certain types of claims would just constantly submit the same evidence proving their own prejudices.

In another attack on due process, the regulation would also turn every single asylum case into a sprint.

Once the application was submitted, a judge would be banned from granting a continuance beyond 180 days after the filing, unless there were "exceptional circumstances."

The new proposal also integrates new procedures for paying the USCIS filing fee into @DOJ_EOIR regulations, making all asylum applicants mail the $50 fee to USCIS and get a payment receipt before they were allowed to submit the application.

The reg would also incorporate in immigration court the USCIS "blank spaces" policy that @crampell has highlighted, declaring an asylum application "incomplete" if not submitted "in accordance with the form instructions."

If you don't fix that within 30 days, application denied.

Even worse, the proposed regulation also acknowledges that EOIR will not budge and has refused to create a fee waiver process to go along with @USCIS's creation of an asylum fee.

Asylum seekers earning $1/day in ICE detention will be required to pay $50 just to seek protection.

These rules, taken together, create a Kafkaesque system for adjudicating asylum that none but the lucky few could ever navigate. Those in detention and without lawyers would be rushed through an opaque process with no real chance to do it correctly. Due process would abandoned.

These new rules were issued by an immigration court that is housed within @TheJusticeDept, meaning that the court is at the whim of AG Barr.

This is why we need independent immigration courts now.

Finally, as a promise to @Bos_imm, here’s a picture of Petra I just took, who is upset I’m analyzing these rules and not playing with her.

One last thing. At the start, I noted that asylum-proceedings are rare. But in June the Trump administration proposed to make asylum-only proceedings the *default* for asylum seekers arriving at the border. That would mean tens of thousands of people subject to a 15-day deadline.