Ben Johnson, Executive Director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) responded to the interim final rule published today "Affirmative Asylum Referrals Without Interview " with the following:

"This rule will worsen the massive backlogs clogging the immigration courts by shifting thousands of cases from USCIS to judges who take much longer to hear cases than asylum officers. Not only will this rule throw sand into the gears of the immigration courts, it will stack the scales of justice against vulnerable people fleeing torture and persecution by putting them into adversarial court hearings and likely also into detention. Detention is a cruel and unjustified tactic to pressure people to give up their cases and accept deportation without ever getting a fair day in court. This is one more nail the Administration has hammered into the coffin of the U.S. asylum system that has included closing off the border to asylum seekers, arresting them at court hearings, and sending them to dangerous, conflict-ridden countries where they've never lived or even set foot. "Instead of wasting court resources and depriving asylum seekers of due process, more cases should be directed to asylum officers who can do a thorough review of their case far more quickly than judges. That's just one of the solutions AILA has proposed as part of 'A Better Way Forward' to make the asylum system fairer, more efficient and orderly."