Thread by @gabrielmalor

Skimmed through the GOP's funding/wall/temp DACA & TPS bill, and this will (and should) get zero votes from Democrats.

It makes it so Central American minors are ineligible for asylum if they don't apply at a processing center (to be established) in Central America.

Asylum is a form of relief for people who are being persecuted in their home countries and the authorities there are unable or unwilling to protect them (or are the source of the persecution).

You can't condition asylum on people remaining in the place where they are persecuted.

The idea is that alien minors will leave their home countries and then reside in one of the other central american states while their asylum application is pending.

Unfortunately, most Central American states suffer from the same sorts of persecutory harm. It's unrealistic.

This also feels hastily put together.

The bill provides that unaccompanied alien minors applying at these processing centers have the right to counsel and also that unaccompanied alien minors aren't eligible for asylum. So.

It's a very odd bill. Sure, you can have a lawyer present bc you're a UAC (meaning no parent or guardian in the U.S. capable of taking care and custody).

But, hah hah, having no parent or guardian present in the U.S. capable of taking care/custody disqualifies you from asylum.

The bill also drastically reforms whether and when applicants for asylum can be found to have filed a frivolous application, which comes with severe consequences.

Currently, there are robust procedural protections before such a finding can be made. This bill eliminates those.

The bill also says an asylum application is frivolous if it is untimely.

But timeliness depends, in part, on a fact-intensive examination of changed circumstances affecting eligibility or extraordinary circumstances related to the delay.

The CA minor bar is pretty bad and reason alone to oppose this bill.

But the changes to whether an application can be found to be frivolous applies to ALL applicants, and it's completely unreasonable.

The consequence for filing an application found to be frivolous is permanent ineligibility for any benefits under the INA.

It would be one thing if timeliness had a clear-cut line, but it doesn't. It ends up a judgment call, and oh, BTW, the Act makes it unreviewable.

Anyway, I'll look through it again tomorrow, but Democrats shouldn't support this bill, and to be honest, Republicans should be shooting question marks at McConnell too.

I should add, I haven't seen anything in here that affects Central American minors' eligibility as *derivatives* on their parent's asylum application.

The ban is on Central American minors making asylum applications of their own from within the United States.

The poor construction of this bill also creates a gap where CAMs outside the U.S. at the time of enactment are ineligible to apply except at these service centers AND those service centers can only grant applications to people under 18.

But if you're a CAM outside the U.S. and a day under 18 on the day of enactment, you then become ineligible for asylum AT ALL the next day because the service centers cannot grant asylum to people unless they're under 18.

The bill thus creates a small, but ever-growing group of people who are simply ineligible for asylum no matter what persecution happens to them, up until the three-year sunset.

It's not a terrible funding/wall/temp DACA/temp TPS bill as far as those things go, but it's got these two terrible poison pills—the CAM ban and the frivolous app reform—appended to it.

https://twitter.com/Dawnsfire/status/1087576533013852160

Last on this GOP proposal, and then I hafta hit the hay.

Tomorrow morning, SCOTUS may tell us whether it's going to take up DACA. So the GOP bill, insofar as it purports to extend (or, er, create) DACA in law, might be overtaken by events in about eight hours. Sleep tight.