Biden’s relaxed new border rules mean Baltimore residents would qualify for asylum

In 2018, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, applied existing law to set standards migrants must meet to receive asylum. Shortly after he took office, Biden’s new AG, Merrick Garland, erased those standards and expanded asylum eligibility to cover victims of the sorts of gang violence that plagues numerous crime-ridden US cities.

If only suffering Americans could receive the kind of concern the president has shown toward those so-called “asylum seekers.”

To be granted asylum, migrants must prove they fear “persecution” on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or “membership in a particular social group.” The first four factors are straightforward, but the last is virtually limitless, as reviewing courts have found.

Recognizing that Congress didn’t intend to allow every migrant facing any possible harm abroad to be granted refuge in the US, those courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals — DOJ’s appellate immigration tribunal — erected a framework to define “membership in a particular social group.” Session’s 2018 opinion in Matter of A-B- was the culmination of that effort. Congress has directed the AG to decide questions of immigration law, and Sessions used that power to make clear that “social groups defined by their vulnerability to private criminal activity” likely wouldn’t qualify for asylum, though he admitted that in “exceptional circumstances” they might.