The Trump administration said Friday it has halted all asylum decisions after a top immigration official said in a statement to the Financial Times that the government must “ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, said the freeze follows a statement from its director, Joseph Edlow, who told the Financial Times the agency would suspend all asylum processing after the fatal shooting of a National Guard member and the wounding of another near the White House.
Roughly 2.5 million people could be affected because the asylum backlog includes nearly 2 million cases awaiting hearings in immigration court and more than 1 million affirmative asylum applications pending at USCIS, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and a Department of Homeland Security inspector general report.
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