The official said that President Donald Trump ordered a shake-up of his top immigration officials in recent days because they were moving too slowly, or even actively obstructing, the president’s desire to confront the surge of migrants at the southwestern border. The asylum changes are one of many policies the president wants to put into effect with a new team in place, the official said.
Trump denied on Tuesday that one of those changes would be to restart his policy of separating migrant families at the border, though he boasted that the act of taking children from their parents — which drew global condemnation — was effective.
“Now I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you see many more people coming,” Trump said. “They are coming like it’s a picnic, because, ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’”
The administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity even as Trump was making his remarks, said a modified version of family separation, in which parents are given a choice of whether to be separated or to accept indefinite detention alongside their children, continues to be under consideration.
But the so-called binary choice proposal is “not ripe for White House consideration,” he insisted, because the government does not currently have the detention space to hold families.
The asylum changes being envisioned could drastically alter the role that the United States plays as a refuge for people fleeing poverty, violence and war. U.S. and international laws require it to allow migrants to request asylum once they come to the country.
But the official said that an initial assessment of an asylum-seeker’s claim — known as a “credible fear” screening — too often accepts the claim that the migrant was persecuted. The official also said that many more asylum-seekers should be rejected during that first step.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.