The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Just about the only thing that one can say about the migrant transports sponsored by Republican governors in the South is that the picture is sure to get uglier as more facts emerge.
“GOP governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Greg Abbott of Texas, and Doug Ducey of Arizona have been sponsoring bus and plane transfers of migrants from their states to northern jurisdictions including New York, Washington, D.C., and the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
“The right-wing press has called the passengers ‘illegal immigrants,’ but in many if not most cases they’re asylum-seekers who have completed the initial step in their processing by scheduling a hearing, getting fingerprinted, and undergoing background checks. While awaiting their hearings, they are in the U.S. legally. . . .
“The transports made it impossible for some to attend their scheduled hearings or other procedures; federal officials have suspended processing until their relocations are worked out.
“‘They’re not illegal aliens,’ immigration attorney Taylor Levy told immigration law podcast Redirect. ‘They’ve been processed, they’re in the system, they have upcoming court dates.’” – Immigrants Transports Dehumanizing History, Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 9/25/22 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: The statement of the immigration attorney cited in this article is not accurate. Andrew Arthur, a former assistant general counsel for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, observed that “Every alien who has entered the United States illegally is removable from the United States, at least until the moment that the alien is granted some sort of status here.
He also noted that “Unlike criminal proceedings, where the government bears the burden of proving the defendant’s guilt . . . applicants for admission — not [the Department of Homeland Security] — bear the burden in removal proceedings to prove ‘clearly and beyond doubt’ that they are ‘entitled to be admitted’ . . . .” In other words, these aliens can be presumed illegal until proven otherwise.
In any case, most of the asylum requests are fraudulent. For some time, illegal alien advocates have encouraged foreign migrants to make bogus asylum requests. The apparent goal is to overwhelm immigration law enforcement with these claims and make it impossible for authorities to control the border. A genuine claim for asylum requires the applicant to show a fear of persecution based on religion, ethnicity, or other factors. The migrants arriving are mostly people seeking to improve their economic conditions.
If these migrants had really sought refuge from persecution as their main goal, they could have found it in one of the other countries they passed through, instead traveling all the way to our border. They persisted to come here because the economic payoff was far greater. If this writer truly wanted to expose an “ugly picture” he could have focused on the systematic effort to sabotage our rule of law at the border.