The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the finalization of a new rule further incentivizing individuals to use lawful and orderly pathways to enter the United States.
“This Administration has led the largest expansion of legal pathways for protection in decades, and this regulation will encourage migrants to seek access to those pathways instead of arriving unlawfully in the grip of smugglers at the southern border,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas said. “At the same time, we continue to urge Congress to act on President Biden’s immigration reform proposal, bipartisan legislation to protect Dreamers and farm workers, and repeated requests for additional resources to hire more asylum officers and immigration judges so we can finally fix our long-broken immigration system.”
The rule builds upon efforts to combine lawful pathways with consequences for failure to use them, by placing certain limiting conditions on asylum eligibility for those who fail to use the pathways. The rule goes into effect once the Title 42 public health Order terminates this month.
The DHS and the DOJ finalized the new rule after receiving and considering more than 50,000 public comments in response to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued earlier this year.
The rule presumes those who do not use lawful pathways to enter the United States are ineligible for asylum and allows the United States to remove individuals who do not establish a reasonable fear of persecution or torture in the country of removal. Noncitizens can rebut the presumption based only on exceptionally compelling circumstances.