Tuesday’s vice presidential debate brought exchanges over the question of asylum and border security, with Sen. JD Vance lying—without real-time fact-checking—about the ease of obtaining asylum. He offered a baseless assertion that people can be “granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand,” courtesy of a mobile phone app. Instead of addressing the realities of our immigration system, Vance used falsehoods to dehumanize asylum seekers and continue to misrepresent a long-standing, international system designed to protect people from persecution.
The problems faced by asylum seekers encompass much more than a glitchy app, and both political parties are to blame.
We learned during research for our forthcoming book that winning asylum is extremely difficult, and the horrific conditions forcing women to seek protection from gender-based violence in Central America and Mexico show no signs of abating. Asylum—a system enshrined into U.S. law during the Cold War—is in desperate need of reform to save the lives of thousands of women.
The challenges to winning asylum are many.
If an asylum seeker is allowed to apply for asylum after crossing the border, she must then traverse a complex legal system and reach a high standard of proof to win the right to stay here permanently. Specifically, she must prove that she will suffer persecution or death if returned, and that the severe violence she experienced happened because of her race, religion, political belief or membership in a recognizable social group. And she must prove that her own government is unwilling or unable to protect her.
Finally, immigration court judges enjoy wide latitude in determining whether the asylum seeker is telling the truth. Data on asylum grant rates show wildly divergent outcomes among judges.
We spent four years interviewing women from Central America and Mexico, asylum seekers who described the rapes, death threats, kidnappings, extortion and gang recruitment of children that compelled them to make a dangerous and expensive journey to reach the border.
One example that stays with us is the story of Elsa, a Honduran woman, who walked in on a robbery at a restaurant. Two men forced her into a backroom, where one raped her. Her boyfriend encouraged her to report the crime, but she was terrified to go to the police. In a comment typical of many that we heard, Elsa argued that the police only sought arrest and prosecution for crimes done to the nation’s wealthy residents. “Unless you’re rich, they’ll never look for the person,” she said.
Asylum—a system enshrined into U.S. law during the Cold War—is in desperate need of reform to save the lives of thousands of women.
Recent surveys show that such beliefs are widespread: Almost 70 percent of Guatemalans, 49 percent of El Salvadoreans and 47 percent of Hondurans share the feeling that the police are part of the problem.
We repeatedly heard that women who did go to the police were told that they couldn’t intervene, and the police encouraged them to come here to seek asylum. Others witnessed police corruption firsthand, including a woman whose gang-affiliated boyfriend bribed a police officer with a motorcycle. These untenable conditions are unlikely to be easily remediated, giving these women few options to save themselves.
Unacknowledged by Vance is the fact that—contrary to the storyline that President Biden and Vice President Harris have been soft on immigration—President Biden shut down the border to asylum seekers in June by banning applications for asylum until the number of people crossing without authorization slows to 1,500 people or less for one week. Recently, the president issued another directive mandating that the numbers stay that low for 28 consecutive days. The Biden threshold has yet to be met, meaning that thousands are unable to request asylum for the foreseeable future.
Human Rights First, a watchdog organization, reported in June that appointments through the CBP had stopped at 1,450 per day, leaving vulnerable asylum seekers waiting for appointments in Mexico.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz laud the bipartisan border bill that former President Donald Trump successfully urged Republicans to scuttle as a campaign tactic. But this bill would have been disastrous for the women who need asylum: It would impose an emergency authority to suspend asylum claims at ports of entry—including the Mexico/U.S. border—for three years. In short, even the nation’s liberal leadership fail to acknowledge the asylum system’s realities.
There are steps that could be taken to streamline the asylum system, which we recommend.
- If elected president, Harris could lift the order that President Biden imposed in June and recently made more arduous. These asylum restrictions are contrary to both national and international law, which state that everyone has the right to cross an international border to seek asylum.
- She could ensure that asylum seekers have appointed legal counsel; today, asylum seekers must hire lawyers at their own expense. Research shows that having a lawyer makes the asylum process quicker and more efficient. The next president should sufficiently fund the immigration court system and hire enough asylum officers and immigration judges to handle the extensive backlog.
- The next president should codify that gender-based violence is grounds for asylum and update the strict legal criteria to include the distinctive types of persecution women typically face.
What the women we met want is the right to remain in the United States where they could receive freedom from persecution, find jobs and support their families. Since the asylum system came to fruition shortly after World War II, our nation has played a important role as a sanctuary for those who would otherwise suffer. Given the animosity that Vance showed in Tuesday’s debate, it’s clear that women who need the system’s protection during a Trump presidency will instead face grave danger and possibly death.
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