‘Harm And Cruelty’: MSNBC Guest Claims Not Offering Asylum To Illegal Immigrants Is Against ‘Law’
Harold Hutchison on November 25, 2022
An immigration attorney on MSNBC claimed the United States is breaking its own laws for not offering asylum to illegal immigrants while discussing the pending end of a Trump-era immigration policy.
“There is an American law that allows for asylum. The use of title 42, a 1944 law that was done around the same time we were imprisoning Japanese-Americans in internment camps, it is a Stephen Miller special exacted to give harm and cruelty to these individuals,” Allen Orr, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told MSNBC host Jose Diaz-Balart.
The Trump administration used Title 42 to immediately remove illegal immigrants from the United States starting in March 2020, with over 2.4 million migrants being expelled according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered an end to the use of Title 42 in a Nov. 15 ruling, but allowed the program to remain in place until Dec. 21.
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The Biden administration initially sought to end Title 42 in May, but the effort was blocked by a federal judge.
“The current immigration policy is that asylum is legal, and that’s the problem, that we’re not following our own laws,” Orr continued. “We’re saying that we can’t handle the number and we’re afraid of the amount of people coming to our border. We’re just concerned about the southern border. So we’re not addressing immigration comprehensively. We’re only saying let’s talk about the southern border.”
“In fact when we say, as you said earlier in the segment, that if we were to pass some type of immigration reform, we could address a lot of the pull that is pushing these immigrants to the border,” Orr continued, before accusing Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Minority Leader, of using “stunts and tricks” at the southern border to avoid drafting legislation.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported that agents encountered more than 230,000 migrants at the southern border in October, following a record 2.3 million migrants in fiscal year 2022.
‘Harm And Cruelty’: MSNBC Guest Claims Not Offering Asylum To Illegal Immigrants Is Against ‘Law’
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