By Elliot Spagat -
The Associated Press
Will the migrants have to report to an office on the border with Mexico and ask a US official for asylum there?
Apply online?
Go to an embassy or consulate of the United States in their countries of origin?
The Joe Biden Administration has not yet clarified how migrants will be able to request asylum, once the Title 42 health regulation, initially scheduled for this December 21, is annulled.
And the lack of clarity about the next steps has fueled rumours, confusion and doubt.
“I absolutely wish we had more information to share with people
,” said Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services at Jewish Family Service of San Diego, which since 2018 has assisted more than 110,000 migrants who crossed the border.
Some 2.5 million migrants have had their right to seek asylum under Title 42 denied since the rule went into effect in 2020, under the pretext of COVID-19.
The rule was due to expire on December 21, but the Supreme Court temporarily halted its end to give Biden time to argue why it should be overturned.
Two young migrants from Venezuela share a coloring book as they wait for help in downtown El Paso, Texas, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2022.AP
Title 42 has been disproportionately applied against migrants from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and, more recently, Venezuela.
Asylum claims are expected to increase dramatically when the rule is removed.
Requests through an app
Many hope that the United States Government will use a digital platform called CBPOne, created in 2020, for the registration of appointments in order to request asylum.
This mobile application of the Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, in English) has been mostly used so far by those who request travel permits, or those enrolled in the 'Stay in Mexico' program who seek to learn about their audiences in the immigration courts.
Some think that
the application will be used to make appointments to request asylum in the United States
, but the applicants would have to remain outside the country until the date and time assigned to them.
[Biden asks the Supreme Court to end Title 42 at the southern border, but after Christmas]
Opposed by some on data privacy grounds, the CBPOne tool may be impractical for immigrants without internet access or English skills.
Nicolas Palazzo, an attorney with the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, fears that scammers will charge immigrants to register them and that CBP's limited capabilities will cause unbearable waits.
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“Unless they increase the staff, whoever applies to be admitted to the country through CBPOne will have to wait about a year,” says Palazzo.
Process only those who enter through official ports
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said CBP officials told him last week that they plan to process asylum seekers who cross through official ports of entry,
but return illegal border crossers to Mexico
, at the greatest extent possible.
If this happens, it is likely that it will be challenged in court, since the asylum law establishes that people who enter irregularly have the right to request protection.
No one disputes that Border Patrol is ill-equipped to process migrants, even as Title 42 kept the numbers in check.
['Stay in Mexico', Title 42, Title 8... what is happening at the border and what Trump measures are still in effect]
As of October, the Border Patrol had released nearly 450,000 immigrants in the United States on parole — 68,837 in October and 95,191 in September — saving its agents the lengthy work of issuing subpoenas before immigration courts.
According to a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), preparing a court case typically takes about two hours, while putting someone on probation takes just half an hour.
Migrants released on parole can move freely within the country.
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Meanwhile, the immigration court system has more than 2 million asylum claims backlogged, which translates into multi-year waits for judges to make decisions.
According to Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, waiting two years to enter the court registry means the
system is "totally broken."
Online registration through CBPOne would be "antithetical to the whole concept of asylum" because it could force people to wait in unsafe places, said Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Hastings Law School Center for Refugee Studies. University of California.
She and others believe that CBP could process many more people on a daily basis than it has been doing so far.
Earlier this year, the agency processed up to 1,000 Ukrainians a day at the San Ysidro, San Diego, California border crossing, about three times its custody capacity.