November 12, 2017
By Ian Mason
In a Thursday address, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took aim at the ballooning burden of asylum claims on the American immigration review system.
Days after the White House included the asylum system in its immigration reform priorities, Sessions spoke about fraud and abuse in what he called America’s “generous asylum policy,” at the headquarters of the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) in Falls Church, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC. “[T]his system is currently subject to rampant abuse and fraud. And as this system becomes overloaded with fake claims, it cannot deal effectively with just claims. The surge in trials, hearings, appeals, bond proceedings has been overwhelming,” he said in his prepared remarks.
Sessions went on to describe a once functional system that, under the stewardship of President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, became a loophole through which countless illegals have made their home in the United States while EOIR’s immigration courtrooms are swamped in litigation. As he related, the single greatest change came in 2009, when the Obama administration issued a directive to release into the United States, instead of detain, asylum claimants who merely made an initial credible claim of fear from returning to their home countries. … Read the full story by Ian Mason.
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