Asylum-Seeking Children Are Not a "Public Health Threat"
The administration has been relentless in its attack on asylum and has increasingly used COVID as a pretext for ignoring asylum law. Most recently, the government has issued a proposed rule that would prevent asylum-seekers from accessing asylum by labeling them a public health threat simply for traveling through another country where COVID is present, who merely exhibit symptoms of the virus, or who come “into contact” with the virus because of government policies that insist on detaining people seeking safety in jails where the virus is rapidly spreading.
The proposed rule reveals a policy that is not about public health. In fact, a recent report examining continued migration during other influenza-like diseases, including the first months of the current COVID-19 pandemic, found that “there is no statistically significant relationship between persons requesting asylum and the prevalence of the flu” or flu-like communicable diseases within the United States. Rather, the proposed rule allows the administration to further its anti-immigrant policies in violation of clear Congressional intent and law. Not surprisingly, the administration’s proposed rule contains no exceptions for children.
At the Young Center, we are deeply concerned about both the legality and the impact of this proposed rule, which uses specious public health claims to justify a new mandatory bar to asylum in violation of U.S. law and treaty obligations to protect asylum seekers and unaccompanied children. The proposed rule will jeopardize the safety and well-being of immigrant children by denying them asylum either at the border or once in the United States and returning them to their persecutors, traffickers or abusers in violation of U.S. law and basic principles of child welfare and human decency. Here are only three of the many ways in which this proposed rule would harm children.
Children should not be blocked from asylum in the United States and deported to persecution based on determinations by agencies that lack relevant expertise. Yet neither DHS nor DOJ has the medical and public health expertise to declare a vast array of communicable diseases as national security threats, determine the countries experiencing outbreaks, decide the periods of “incubation and contagion” of covered diseases, and block, bar and deport asylum-seekers on the basis of these determinations.
Children who travel with adults are subject to the decision-making of those adults—including how they come to the U.S. border. Those adults may be well-intentioned parents or adult family members. But children also travel to the United States under the control of smugglers or traffickers. Children traveling alone are even more unlikely to know or control just how they will journey to a new country. Rather than take those realities into account, the proposed rule would likely deny children asylum—including those who have legitimate claims of persecution or fear persecution upon return to their country of origin—simply because of the route of arrival into the United States, factors that are rarely under their control.
The proposed rule would allow an adjudicator without any public health expertise or qualifications to assume a child is having symptoms related to a covered disease and deny that child asylum. Rather that penalize children for their developmental stages and varying immune responses to disease, the government should ensure that children in need of protection from persecution have access to asylum.
Using children’s best interests and guidance from public health experts as primary considerations, the government can adhere to the law and continue to allow unaccompanied children into the United States while protecting health of the children and the public. The United States can both protect public health and ensure continued protections for the most vulnerable in our world and is in fact obligated to do so.
To oppose this most recent attack on children’s rights and the U.S. asylum system, we submitted a public comment opposing the proposed rule. Please join us in making a comment of your own today before the deadline of Monday, August 10, 2020 at 11:59pm ET. You can find a template and more information about submitting comments here.
Download the Young Center’s comment.
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