It is bad enough that we have to contend with President Donald Trump’s extreme hostility to immigrants and refugees. This contrasts starkly with the views and actions of other U.S. presidents starting with George Washington, who asserted that “the bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and the respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions."
The government’s arguments in the Supreme Court case of Mullin v. Al Otro Lado are based on the Trump administration’s warped and improper claim that our laws empower it to turn away those seeking asylum right before they reach our borders. This is a distortion of the law, and a display of callous indifference to the tragedies that moved Congress to pass the Refugee Act.
The plight of the passengers aboard the St. Louis has haunted, and should continue to haunt, U.S. refugee policy. Many Americans have vowed never to allow another St. Louis to happen again. Indeed, it was against the background of World War II and the St. Louis catastrophe that the U.S. signed onto the 1967 Protocol to the Refugee Convention, barring the U.S. from expelling or returning “a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers or territories where his life of freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
The issue should be a no-brainer for the Supreme Court. The plain language of the 1980 refugee law prohibits turning away asylum seekers at our borders without first determining whether they have a valid asylum claim.
Desperate refugees risked their lives on small, unseaworthy vessels, hoping to reach the shores of neighboring Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, or Hong Kong. Tens of thousands drowned, while others were raped, robbed, and murdered by pirates, finding vulnerable prey. I saw these tragedies unfold with my own eyes, as I slogged through refugee camps in Southeast Asia.
The Refugee Act of 1980 was not politically controversial. The Senate passed the bill unanimously, and it received strong bipartisan support in the House as well.
During oral arguments at the Supreme Court on March 24, however, a number of Justices became fixated on subsequent additional statutory language referring to any asylum seeker “who arrives in the United States.” They asked, over and over again, whether the words “in the United States” mean that U.S. officials can physically push back asylum seekers a few steps short of the border line, and then argue they have no rights as they are not yet “in the United States.”
The Congress in which I served, in legislation which I co-authored, intended to give asylum seekers who encounter a U.S. official at the border the opportunity to exercise their right to seek asylum. It’s that simple.
The Supreme Court should not distort our laws. Lives are at stake, as are American values and the rule of law.
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