Hi Rulers! Happy Friday and welcome to this week’s edition of Women Rule, where your host is fighting the urge to abandon her computer’s endless Slack notifications and bask out in the sun. Before I follow the sun, let’s get into it: Give me your tired and your poor … but I’ll send them right back. That’s how many immigration advocates perceive the state of immigration since President Joe Biden signed an executive order last week cracking down on asylum seekers at the southern border. The action, which enables the White House to suspend asylum claims between ports of entry once border crossings hit a daily threshold average of 2,500 over a seven day period, sparked immediate outcry from advocacy organizations who say that the move is illegal. Women in particular, immigration experts say, will face heightened risk as a result of the action. The restrictions can be lifted only two weeks after daily crossings have dropped below 1,500 for seven consecutive days. According to Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, which is suing the Biden administration over the order, the border action is “flatly inconsistent” with U.S. asylum law. “Basically we're looking at a ban on asylum, which is the principle form of relief that Congress has created for people in danger, that won't be available for people entering between ports,” Gelernt says. Melanie Nezer, vice president of advocacy and external relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission, says the action will inflict more “needless suffering” on people coming to the border in search of a better life. According to Nezer, limiting asylum won’t actually deter people from coming — it’ll only make their journeys more dangerous. “Law enforcement does not actually keep people home, because people are in part coming to the U.S. because of the opportunities that are offered here, but mostly because they are fleeing very desperate situations at home,” Nezer says. “What that means is that they'll find more dangerous routes, pay more to smugglers.” The dangers asylum-seekers face are multiplied for women. In her role as director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, Casey Swegman works with women who are survivors of gender-based violence seeking safety in the U.S. These survivors are often fleeing the worst forms of violence — rape, child marriage, genital mutilation and domestic violence — and see entry into the U.S. as their only viable option for protection. According to Swegman, asylum denial sends survivors back to abusive people and systems that would continue perpetrating violence against them — or worse. “Denying immigrant survivors of gender-based persecution their right to seek asylum could very well be a death sentence,” Swegman tells me. Swegman says Biden’s new order essentially shuts down access to asylum at the border, with the small exception of people who manage to get an appointment through the notoriously difficult-to-use CBP one app, a process that Swegman says can take between four to seven months — assuming asylum-seekers have access to a phone. “It's like forcing people to use Ticketmaster to get access to the emergency room,” Swegman tells me. “At this point, it’s the most deadly lottery in the entire world. And it's having a disproportionate impact on women and girls and those who are uniquely disadvantaged, even within that subset.” There are some exemptions to Biden’s sweeping order — in particular, for unaccompanied children and victims of trafficking. But Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration, a think tank that advocates for limiting immigration, argues these exemptions will encourage more women with children to cross the border — potentially putting them at increased risk for violence. “This is going to continue to entice women with children to put themselves into the hands of a criminal smuggling organization and potentially subject themselves to a very dangerous journey in which they might be harmed or abused,” Vaughan says. Gelernt says the exception for children will lead to more family separations, which also happened under the Covid-era Title 42 immigration restrictions, as parents typically send their children across the border alone in hopes that they can evade violence — or even just build a better life. And according to Gelernt and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies’ Blaine Bookey, the exemption for trafficking victims requires survivors to prove that they are scared to return, a newly reintroduced barrier for migrants seeking an asylum screening interview. Under the policy, people trying to cross the border will be subjected to what is colloquially known as the “shout test,” which requires people to demonstrate a “manifest fear” of return in order to be granted an asylum interview. That means they have to show fear without being asked, either by speaking up or showing physical signs of distress like crying or shaking. People seeking asylum may not be aware that they must meet this manifest fear standard. Even if they are, women are less likely to be willing to show fear to border authorities — especially men. “The shout test is undoubtedly going to impact women disproportionately given their circumstances and the fear they have in manifesting their fear to, in most instances a male border control officer,” Bookey says. The shout test, or manifest fear standard, was previously employed under Title 42. According to Bookey, of 100 families CGRS interviewed at the border a few months after the implementation of the standard, over half had verbally manifested fear and three-quarters had manifested fear nonverbally, but none were granted an interview. All 100 families were expelled. But being granted a screening interview also does not guarantee smooth sailing — both Bookey and Swegman mention a woman who, just this week, was shackled to a chair while she was asked to recount her experience of trauma. They say the interview took place in front of her children. Vaughan also points out that the risks faced by women don’t end at the border. As she sees it, there’s continued potential for abuse and trafficking in women’s workplaces and housing situations once they cross the border. And there’s no mechanism in place to ensure the sustained security of migrants once they make it into the U.S. “There's no monitoring of the wellbeing of people once they get here,” Vaughan says. For the time being, Swegman says, the border is “very unlikely to be reopened.” “The need is high because there’s conflict and there’s instability and there’s economic collapse,” Swegman says. “And we have no small part in any of that. We have a responsibility and we have laws that require us to allow people to seek asylum.”
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