Thread by @RAICESTEXAS

🚨 While the election results have been a respite for many, in its final weeks the Trump Admin is still hell-bent on destroying the U.S. asylum system.

5 dangerous regulatory changes are set to go into effect on Jan 11, 2021.
raicestexas.org/2020/12/16/las…

The changes would, among other things, do the following: 🔽

1⃣Require all asylum apps be filed within 15 days of an asylum seeker’s first court hearing.
2⃣Assess a filing fee for all asylum apps, for the 1st time in U.S. history with no opportunity for a waiver of the fee.

3⃣Place onerous burdens on asylum seekers to ensure their apps are accepted by the immigration court, including permitting outright rejection of applications that do not conform to specific form-filling instructions and providing limited opportunity to remedy errors.

4⃣Change the role of the immigration judge from a neutral arbiter to one that can enter its own evidence into an asylum seeker’s case regardless of the parties’ position on that evidence, and permitting an immigration judge to deny asylum apps w/o considering any evidence.

5⃣Shift the burden from the gov't to the asylum seeker to prove certain elements of asylum applications, and to ensure evidence is admitted in court.

6⃣Narrow the definition of torture, and the scope of protection under the Convention Against Torture.

7⃣Limit the types of harms that can make one eligible for asylum, essentially prejudging claims, and ruling out claims based on domestic violence, LGBTQ persecution, and harms committed by transnational criminal organizations

We hope and expect for @JoeBiden to take bold executive action to rollback the impact of ALL of these regulations in the first days of his administration.

#DontLookAway. Not now. Not then.