Trump Closed the U.S. to Asylum Seekers. Will Biden Reopen It?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Immediately after Inauguration, the Biden Administration began trying to unwind some of Donald Trump’s most notorious policies on immigration. But, over four years, Trump’s advisers made more than a thousand seemingly bureaucratic, technical rule changes that have had profound consequences. Sarah Stillman reports on the case of a mother and daughter who arrived at the southern border from Honduras. After the family ran afoul of local politicians and crime figures, the father was assassinated and an older daughter was raped in the presence of a police officer. Yet their appeal for asylum was rejected by a Trump-appointed judge, who went to unusual lengths to explain her reasoning. Replaying a recording of the hearing, Stillman walks through the series of legal barriers designed to send the women back into severe danger. “In order to qualify for asylum,” Stillman remarks, “you almost have to have been murdered to show that you could be murdered.” (Many of the Trump Administration policies were driven by Stephen Miller, the ultra-hard-line immigration adviser; The New Yorker Radio Hour reported in 2020 on Miller’s influence.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.4	On day one of Joe Biden's presidency, he issued a barrage of executive orders that some have described as shock and awe.
0:20.4	And he immediately set out to undo some of
0:22.5	Donald Trump's most notorious immigration policies. The Muslim ban or travel ban was overturned.
0:28.8	Biden wanted to halt construction on the border wall and to fortify DACA after Trump had tried
0:34.4	and failed to scrap it entirely. But those are the headline policies.
0:39.1	The Trump administration spent four years quite deliberately and subtly,
0:43.4	rewriting America's entire immigration system,
0:45.8	and Biden can't undo it all with just a stroke of a pen.
0:49.5	My name is Sarah Stillman,
0:51.2	and I've been covering immigration along with other topics
0:53.9	for the New Yorker for almost a decade now.
0:57.6	Back in 2018, I set out with a team at Columbia Journalism School to follow the vast array of changes to immigration policy happening during the Trump era, and especially the evisceration of the asylum system.
1:09.7	Sarah says there are upwards of a thousand changes to immigration rules and processes,
1:15.3	bureaucratic, technocratic measures that might seem small, but taken together, they've had profound consequences.
1:23.7	I wanted to see how these changes were playing out in real people's lives, and that led me to a mother-daughter pair. I'm going to call them Gabriella and Maria.
1:32.2	Did you leave Honduras?
1:35.0	Senora, and get back to say you're in Honduras.
1:38.4	They came from Honduras. Gabriela worked for a powerful political party in her seaside town, which caused her to run afoul of local gangs.
1:49.8	Eventually, she denounced that party, which endangered her life.
1:53.1	Her husband told members of the party to leave the family alone, and not long after that,
	...

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