Harmeet Dhillon Appears on Fox Business’ ‘Making Money’ with Charles Payne To Discuss Showdown at the border
According to Dhillon:
Well, there is no automatic admission on the basis of a claim, but basically the rule is a very simple one: You are entitled to seek asylum if you can state a credible fear of persecution in your home country on the basis on some defined categories, including sexual orientation, transgender, religion, political activism. And then there is a catch-all category which these people are taking advantage of, which is membership in a social group that is disfavored. I’ve sat in court in the 9th circuit just two weeks ago, and watched a number of arguments where lawyers, volunteer lawyers, argued that if you lived in one part of El Salvador and had to cross into the gang territory of a different gang across a bridge, that put you into the category of a somebody in a protected social group because one gang would think you are a member of the other gang by crossing that path. But that’s basically the whole country. If you have a gang-ridden country, anybody moving from one place in town to the other, that’s not a tenable system. So this catch-all category is what these lawyers in the caravan in Mexico are coaching people to apply for the most part. They’re all illegal.
You know, I’m an immigrant, first of all, I’m a legal immigrant. Second of all, I’m the only person on this panel who’s actually argued asylum cases in front of the courts, and I’ve gotten asylum for people. It angers me as a person who believes that there are many credible people who fear violence and persecution in their countries, that this joke is happening here at our southern border. These people are not in the same category as somebody who is being chased by people because of their religion or because of any of these factors that are traditional asylum grounds. And number two, they have been in a safe country for several weeks. They have been crossing across a safe country and they have had the opportunity to seek asylum at a previous country. Now, the law is that you can seek it anywhere, but it doesn’t mean America has an obligation, just because you shout the word asylum at the border, that we have to take you. And one more problem here that the president has talked about as well, is there is this huge loophole in our immigration laws for so-called unaccompanied minors. If you come to the border, even if you are a gang member, and gangs have been using this loophole to get into the country. You come into the country and you’re a minor and say “I’m unaccompanied.” Under a court decree the government can only hold you for 20 days total. So what they do is they bring these people in, they release them to a so-called sponsor, and then only 3.5% of those people are ever deported, ever leave the country regardless of the merits, and a lot of them are gang members. This is a real huge problem for our country.
