Refugees International President Jeremy Konyndyk. | linkedin.com/in/jeremy-konyndyk-686b9b33/
The Biden administration's expansion of a controversial COVID-19 era rule's parole authority is a positive step forward that should not replace asylum, said Refugees International's new president in a statement last month.
Title 42's expanded parole program, announced by the White House on Jan. 5, established a parole program for people coming into the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, while also expanding the rule's expulsion of asylum seekers from those nations when they're apprehended at the southern border.
The rule's new policies have some positives, but there are worrisome negatives, said Refugees International President Jeremy Konyndyk in a statement issued shortly after the White House's announcement.
"The Biden administration's expansion of parole authority contains positive steps to increase protective pathways from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela but needlessly ties this new policy to an unacceptable weakening of core U.S. asylum commitments," Konyndyk said. "As Refugees International has argued, expansions of parole must not be premised on widening the Trump era abuse of Title 42 or other measures that undermine fundamental asylum protections."
Konyndyk, previously executive director of USAID's COVID-19 task force, became Refugees International's president earlier this month.
Title 42 was issued in the spring of 2020 during then-President Donald Trump's administration to slow the spread of COVID-19 by holding back the tide of immigrants, particularly along the United States' southern border with Mexico.
Biden wanted to end the program, but a federal judge ruled in May that Title 42 must continue. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court said that Title 42 must remain in place while the high court considers to keep Title 42 in place while the court continues its deliberations.
In his statement, Konyndyk noted that Title 42's parole pathway expansion will allow up to 360,000 people a year into the U.S. and will help manage migration but he cautioned that the expansion should not be used as a stop-gap for those seeking asylum.
"Parole is not a substitute for asylum," Konyndyk said. "Conflating those measures, as the administration proposes, would undermine the importance of asylum as a measure for protecting vulnerable people."
Asylum should not depend "on access to a phone app, a passport, an expensive plane ticket, and a domestic sponsor," Konyndyk added.
"Denying asylum eligibility to those who do not pursue this new parole pathway would violate the long-enshrined legal right to seek asylum and would, in practice, deny protection to many people urgently seeking safety," he said.
In a separate Twitter post issued the same day as his statement, Konyndyk said there is a better policy for the Biden administration to find.
"Expansion of parole 'alongside' fair and robust asylum access would be a great policy, and ease pressure on the overall system," Konyndyk said in his Twitter post. "But parole 'instead' of asylum will cause a lot of suffering."
In the executive summary of its report, "Supplementary Protection Pathways to the United States: Lessons from the Past for Today's Humanitarian Parole Policies," released in November, Refugees International defines parole as a specific immigration status that requires official permission to enter and temporarily remain in the United States. No statutes or regulations exist to specifically limit the "urgent humanitarian reasons" or define "significant public benefit" for parole.
The same report defines "a refugee" as someone with "well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. The process to gain refugee status in the U.S. can take months to years, but people with such a status can achieve permanent residency.
Parolees need not prove that they meet the definition of a refugee, and they also lack a way to receive permanent residency, according to the report.
