Absolute blockbuster report from @aflores w an early look at unpublished DHS IG report. At the peak of the family separation crisis in spring/summer of 2018, DHS officials insisted that there was a right and a wrong way to seek asylum at the border. 1/ buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfo…
The "wrong way" was to cross the border *between ports of entry*. Anyone who did this was fair game for prosecution (i.e. separation from children). The "right way" was to ask for asylum at ports of entry. (This formulation isn't accurate or legal, but that's another issue.) 2/
According to this report, DHS was doing 2 things at the same time as it was telling people (falsely) that their only legitimate option for seeking asylum was to go to ports. (1) It formally instituted metering *at the ports* as a way to keep out up to 650 immigrants per day. 3/
This meant blocking asylum seekers from entering the US to make their claims by limiting the # of people allowed to ask for asylum each day at a given port And it happened in concert with something else: DHS closed a handful of additional ports to asylum seekers altogether. 4/
(2) At a moment of soaring numbers of asylum seekers at the southern border, which DHS officials described as a full-blown crisis, DHS allowed directors at ports to assign officers *away* from helping with asylum claims. 5/
The M.O. all along was to shut down asylum. And in the meantime, for the families caught at the border, the Administration deliberately kept changing the rules and funneling people into increasingly elaborate forms of punishment to reinforce its ideological point. end/
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