President Biden entered office in January 2021 with bold promises and a vision for restoring the U.S. asylum system, which the first Trump administration decimated.2 While the project faced substantial challenges, many observers, including this author, were optimistic that Biden could reframe the political conversation and use his executive authority to rebuild the asylum system. In his first two years in office, he eliminated many of Trump\u2019s more draconian rules and policies, and instituted creative approaches to enable safe and lawful access to the U.S. asylum system. Many of Biden\u2019s efforts on both fronts \u2013 dismantling Trump\u2019s harmful orders and establishing new approaches \u2013 were bogged down and even stymied by legal challenges. And in 2023, faced with the re-opening of the southwest border after the Covid-19 public health emergency officially ended, Biden headed down the same dark path as the first Trump administration, implementing harsh new federal regulations to deter asylum seekers from arriving at the southwest border. Written six months into the second Trump administration, this essay traces the arc of Biden\u2019s approach to the U.S. asylum system, from vision and promises, to litigation battles, to Trumpian restrictions that likely violate the immigration statute. It begins by offering a basic description of the U.S. asylum process. The essay then describes the numerous ways in which Biden fixed the harms that Trump wrought on the asylum system, from regulatory freezes to parole programs to vacaturs of improperly decided case law. It discusses the legal challenges that the Biden administration faced in these efforts, focusing on their attempts to end the Remain in Mexico process and the Title 42 program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Biden entered office in January 2021 with bold promises and a vision for restoring the U.S. asylum system, which the first Trump administration decimated.2 While the project faced substantial challenges, many observers, including this author, were optimistic that Biden could reframe the political conversation and use his executive authority to rebuild the asylum system….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,466],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-2","category-current-issue","category-volume-58-issue-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4537,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}