The administration of United States President Donald Trump has held a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to claim the global asylum system is broken.
On Thursday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau led a panel called “Global Refugee Asylum System: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It”, where he called upon other countries to crack down on asylum seekers.
“If you have hundreds of thousands of fake asylum seekers, then what happens to the real asylum system?” Landau said. “Saying the process is susceptible to abuse is not xenophobic; it is not being a mean or bad person.”
Trump has sought to overhaul the US immigration system and recruit other countries to join in its efforts. Thursday’s panel included representatives from Kosovo, Bangladesh, Liberia and Panama.
Among the changes the Trump administration has sought is a reimagining of the asylum system, which started to take shape following World War II.
Landau explained that the US would like to see asylum become a temporary status, with claimants eventually returning home.
The Trump administration also emphasised that there is no right to receive asylum in a country of choice.
Under the current system — enshrined in US law in 1980 — people seeking asylum are able to apply once they are on US soil, regardless of whether they arrived through legal pathways.
To qualify, applicants have to show a fear of persecution in their home country because of specific reasons related to their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinions.
Applications can sometimes take months, if not years, to be reviewed. Still, Landau argued that the system has become vulnerable to fraud.
“The asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws,” Landau said. “I think we have to be realistic that these laws are now being abused.”
But suspected fraud in asylum claims accounts for a small fraction of unsuccessful claims, according to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting in April.
Trump champions immigration crackdown
Since winning his second term in the 2024 elections, Trump has made stemming immigration a core focus of his presidency.
Part of that campaign has been tightening the asylum process. On January 20, his first day back in office, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as a means of restricting asylum at the southern US border.
“This authority,” Trump wrote, “necessarily includes the right to deny the physical entry of aliens into the United States and impose restrictions on access to portions of the immigration system.”
The proclamation was necessary, he argued, to halt what he described as an “invasion” of immigrants.
But in July, a federal court ruled that Trump overstepped his authority by barring asylum claims.
Congress, the court explained, had established the laws governing asylum. If the president were allowed to disregard those laws and establish his own asylum policies, he risked creating an “alternative immigration system”, according to the ruling.
That same month, a federal judge ruled the president could not block approved refugees from entering the country under the guise of a wider travel ban.
Critics have long argued that Trump’s policies risk forcing asylum seekers back into dangerous circumstances where their lives and wellbeing could be at risk.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Bill Frelick, the director of refugee and migrant rights at Human Rights Watch, said the US’s plan “looks like the first step in a bid to tear down the global refugee system”.
But Trump himself has used his platform to warn of the dangers he claims are associated with immigration.
In his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, Trump argued that accepting immigrants was “destroying” other countries. He pointed to Europe as an example.
“They’re being destroyed. Europe is in serious trouble. They’ve been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody’s ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe.”
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