Trump Admin Announces New Rules for Asylum Seekers

The Trump administration has issued new regulations that could result in hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers being sent directly to deportation proceedings instead of giving them a chance to be interviewed first by an asylum officer. The rule could impact 440,000 cases. Doris Meissner, the director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, said, “The ultimate impact of making this change certainly seems to be to try to deny as many cases as possible, without regard to the fairness of the determination.” This comes as the Trump administration has fired more than 100 immigration judges and replaced them with military lawyers and former prosecutors for the Department of Homeland Security. www.democracynow.org