Sessions: The United States will no longer be asylum against violence
Attorney General Jeff Sessions approved on Monday a court ruling that eliminates domestic violence and criminal gangs as grounds for granting asylum to…
The U.S. Department of Justice has strengthened its fist around anti-immigrant measures.
This time the department has furthered its hostile stance through a ruling by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that has overturned a 2016 court precedent that allowed women, victims of domestic violence, to apply for asylum in the United States, the Washington Post reported.
In what Sessions has described as a "correct interpretation of the law," his decision contradicts the previous ruling of the Board of Immigration Appeals in order to "restore sound principles of asylum and long-standing principles of immigration law.”
However, despite the growing media paranoia of the Trump administration, figures from the same Department of Justice have shown that, since 2014, "people seeking asylum from gang violence have only rarely succeeded," explained the New York Times "Those who were granted entry often argued their cases for multiple grounds."
Even so, this new measure will harm thousands of women and children fleeing the rampant violence in Central America to seek refuge in the United States and may cause the death of many of them, as assured by Michelle Brané, director of the Women's Refugee Commission, an immigrant rights and justice program.
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But Sessions insisted that "generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum."
Maybe then the thousands of immigrants subjected to the cruel mistreatment in the detention centers of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Agency should be candidates for asylum because, as Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal explained after her visit to the SeaTac prison, their conditions are "cruel, inhuman and heartbreaking."
Of the 206 immigrants in the center run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons that the congresswoman visited in Seattle, "most were women in seeking asylum," explained Splinter News. "After speaking to some of the 174 women there, (Jayapal) found that more than a third of them are mothers," all of whom were separated from their children after being detained.
What I heard from the women being held at the federal detention facility today was saddening and disturbing. They cried so much.
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) 9 de junio de 2018
Every asylum-seeker should be immediately released, reunited with their children and connected to legal services. Anything less is cruel and barbaric. pic.twitter.com/29dZrCX3Ug
Likewise, the "inhuman" conditions of the facilities - low temperatures and “dog pound” confinements - could qualify as "mistreatment in the hands of governmental actors," to use the words of the attorney general, and as an open violation of human rights from the purest common sense.
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