The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it will deport some asylum-seekers seeking protection at the southern border to El Salvador under a kind of policy that legislators have previously said “violates the law and endangers their lives.” BuzzFeed News reports that plan was initially announced last year, with talks going into March but sounding like the effort had been stalled.
That was good news for asylum-seekers. Advocacy group Human Rights First said earlier this year that at least 138 people were killed after being deported from the U.S. to El Salvador. The fact is that these so-called safe third country agreements forcing people seeking asylum to another nation are dangerous. But now with just over 30 days left of this wretched administration, DHS said the policy with El Salvador has been finalized.
The Trump administration had already been sending some asylum-seekers to Guatemala under the policy with the claim that vulnerable families can just apply for protection there. That, of course, has been a lie: Guatemala itself produces thousands of asylum-seekers a year. And yet, U.S. officials have gone forward with these agreements knowing full well that they’re deporting vulnerable people, including children, back to danger.
”Earlier this year, the Biden–Sanders task force, organized after the president-elect won the Democratic nomination, recommended an end to the agreements signed with the Central American countries,” BuzzFeed News reported. “Biden has said he wants to convene leaders in the region to discuss larger, structural issues regarding migration to the US border.” That’s the kind of direction we should be going in, but instead the outgoing administration has actively put up fights that only worsen conditions for these families.
“It’s hard to see the point of this particular bit of theater from both the outgoing Trump admin & the Bukele govt,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer. “Biden has said he’d abandon these agreements once in office. I asked a former DHS official what the play cld be. Official replied, ‘Chad Wolf just wants to travel?’”
That’s not a stretch in the least—the unlawfully appointed acting secretary loves his taxpayer-funded cosplay and travel, with a giant bill to prove it. Now he’s added a trip to Central America just days after holding an unmasked DHS holiday party. But as we’ve also noted before, the outgoing administration is intentionally creating a mountain of cruelty and policy for the president-elect to have to clean up, including another rule gutting asylum that’s set to go into effect just nine days before his inauguration.
“If enacted, this rule will send countless migrants to certain harm or death,” National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) Executive Director Mary Meg McCarthy said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “The asylum regulations put forth by the Trump administration violate our obligations under U.S. and international law. Amongst a barrage of hostile policies and regulations, these rules are the most comprehensive assault on the right to asylum yet seen.”
NIJC has called on Biden to reverse the policy, which he can do. The same for the rest of the outgoing administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies. But that doesn’t stop the human costs of this rule until that happens, or the human costs of the dozens of other rule changes the administration is trying to push through at the last minute.