Biden administration will propose changes to the asylum process

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is proposing changes in the asylum process, which will allow immigration officials to reject migrants with criminal records sooner.

The Department of Homeland Security revealed details of the proposed new rule on Thursday.

Under current law, a migrant who arrives at the border and undergoes an initial "credible fear" screening is allowed to continue with the process even if they have a criminal background. They are detained in such cases.

"This is really intended to be a national security and public safety measure," the senior official said. "It’s intended to ensure that the people we are most concerned about can be removed as early as possible in the process."

Individuals "who pose a national security or public safety risk" would be subject to the new rule, "specifically those who have been convicted of a particularly serious crime, participated in the persecution of others, are inadmissible on national security or terrorism-related grounds, or for whom there are reasonable grounds to deem them a danger to the security of the United States," according to a DHS statement.

Compared to the vast majority of cases, "the number of migrants who are subject to these bars is small," DHS said. The Homeland Security official refused to quantify the potential asylum seekers it would affect.

Immigration experts say asylum eligibility is complicated and questioned whether migrants applying for asylum will have access to legal representation that early in the process.

“The main issue here – which we have found repeatedly – is that when cases move quickly, people can’t get attorneys,” said Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies federal immigration enforcement.

“An attorney might be able, on the client’s behalf, to make interventions and provide some balance. But the way the policy is being proposed, they want to move this part of the process so fast, it’s going to be almost impossible for people to get attorneys,” Kocher said.

In an election year, the president is under significant pressure to keep unlawful crossings down.

"Congress hasn’t done anything meaningful on immigration in the lifetimes of most migrants,” Kocher said. “I can completely understand why the Biden campaign and the president himself would want to show they’re doing things to make it tougher at the border to balance out what is an extremely hardline position from the other side.”

President Joe Biden had been considering new executive actions to crack down on record migration at the southern border after congressional Republicans in February blocked border legislation backed by the White House.

The legislation, which was killed in the Senate, would have given the Department of Homeland Security the power to shut down the border to migrants crossing illegally when daily crossings exceed a daily average of 4,000 in any one-week period.

And if migrant border encounters surpass an average of 5,000 a day ? a threshold now met ? DHS would have been required to close the border to migrants seeking to cross without prior authorization between ports of entry.

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @SwapnaVenugopal

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Asylum seekers with criminal records will be turned away sooner