President Joe Biden’s administration will bolster a sweeping restriction on immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border, making it less likely that the changes will be reversed any time soon, CBS News reports.
A June order initially restricted asylum-seeking entries to a quota of just 2,500 crossings per day and closed the border altogether after certain thresholds were reached. The new order will extend those restrictive quotas indefinitely.
Per CBS, the Biden administration could announce the extension of the policy, which sent border crossings to a four-year low in July, as early as Monday. The administration has not announced those plans yet, but officials touted the success of the June rules, which ended the longstanding U.S. policy of accepting asylum applications more broadly.
The tweak came as former President Donald Trump attacked President and then-candidate Biden for rising asylum claims, attempting to frame the race around immigration.
Immigrant justice advocates criticized the rightward shift earlier in the summer, sentiments that were echoed Friday. Some criticized the cap on asylum-seekers as a violation of U.S. and international law, which guarantees the right to seek protection.
“This asylum ban is illegal. It endangers the lives of asylum seekers and subjects refugees with the strongest claims to life without a future, for no merits-based reason,” Anwen Hughes, director of legal strategy for refugee programs at the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote on X.
The ACLU, which had initiated a lawsuit over the June policy, is still suing the Biden administration over the restrictions.
“The administration is unfortunately doubling down on a patently unlawful rule that is putting people in grave danger and will hopefully be blocked by the courts in our lawsuit,” Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the ACLU, told CBS News.
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