Minnesota immigration advocates, policy experts concerned about Biden’s border order

The Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) is organizing a protest on Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on Saturday in response to President Joe Biden’s new border restrictions.

President Biden signed an executive action that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border exceeds 2,500. 

The restrictions will continue until the seven-day average of migrant crossings remains below 1,500 for 14 consecutive days. 

Julia Decker is the policy director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. She says it’s too soon to tell how the new border restrictions will impact Minnesota.  But they may pose a threat to an already complicated and nuanced immigration system which has historically created limited legal pathways for people to gain citizenship in the U.S.

“When we talk about immigration reform, it’s, not just asylum and it’s not just the family immigration systems, but potentially how do we create other pathways for folks to be able to access the legal immigration system and use that system to attain lawful status because currently there are just so few ways for many of these folks to do that,” Decker said.

She says refugees and asylees are often grouped together in statistical data. Both groups are made up of people fleeing persecution, but refugees have been granted status outside the U.S, usually in a refugee camp, and arrive in the U.S. with that refugee status. 

Asylum seekers are people who are physically in the U.S. and are applying for asylum protection here.

Adjunct Policy Fellow with the Center of the American Experiment Bill Glahn, says he doesn’t have a strong stance on the new restrictions, but is concerned they don’t offer long term solutions. 

“Either, we’re going to say, this is the process for bringing in new immigrants, or we’re going to stop the flow for a time until we can rethink it. This is a neither nor solution. This is we’re going to try to reduce some of the chaos, some of the bad optics, but we're not really actually taking a position one way or another,” Bill Glahn. 

Biden’s policy comes as the 2024 presidential campaign is heating up.  

However, Erika Zurawski of MIAC, the group organizing the protest, says it doesn’t matter which party promotes policies which she believes unfairly restricts or represses immigrants.

“We do not have allegiance to the Republican Party, we do not have allegiance to the Democratic Party, our only allegiance is to the immigrant community, and to the right for people to seek asylum for the right for people to find safety and a new homeland,” said Zurawski. 

According to data from Syracuse University, there are nearly 13,000 pending asylum cases in Minnesota’s immigration court — 1,920 of those cases involve people from Ecuador. 

Decker says the new border restrictions prompt questions about how the immigration system was created and its future implications.

“Is this system reformable or do we really have to go back to that root of what is the system intended to do and what should the system be intending to do?,” she said

Apart from the restrictions, the new rule allows entry to the U.S. for permanent residents, unaccompanied children, victims of severe trafficking, and other noncitizens who have a valid visa or lawful permission.

Decker says there is likely to be legal challenges with Biden’s restrictions, but it’s tough to say now how those would pan out in court. 

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