No. of Recommendations: 7
So why are we letting hundreds of thousand of them run around freely?
Because we haven't appropriated funds sufficient to detain hundreds of thousands of asylees.
To again borrow an analogy from the criminal justice system, a jurisdiction might have the theoretical ability to deny bail or pre-trial release to anyone who is arrested. But if you deny pre-trial release, you have to have somewhere to put them - and pay to feed and clothe and supervise them. If you don't provide enough space to keep all of them locked up pending the hearing, then you have to provide pre-trial release to everyone you don't have a space for.
The size of the population "running around freely" is a function of a number of factors - how many folks have made asylum claims, how many get dismissed before being adjudicated, how long it takes to get them adjudicated, and how much detention space is available. The proposed bill would have responded to the increase in claims by improving all of the last three factors. It would have tightened the criteria for the summary dismissal (the credible fear criteria would become stricter), it would have shortened the time to adjudication (by increasing the number of immigration judges and shifting many cases into a faster administrative process), and it would have increased the detention capacity of the system.
Congress absolutely has the power to build tons of refugee detention camps, and feed and clothe and house and provide medical treatment and guard these folks pending their hearings. But just like we don't fill up the jails with countless ordinary people who are awaiting trials for run-of-the-mill criminal violations, it just doesn't make sense to pay for all that.
