🚨SCOOP: Biden Team Plans One More Asylum Ban

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s senior immigration advisor Blas Nuñez-Neto is quietly pushing for another asylum restriction before the end of the presidency. Together with homeland security advisor Liz Sherwood Randall, Nuñez-Neto is pressing the president through White House chief of staff Jeff Zients to move the asylum bars up to the initial screening process, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

If enacted, the change would make it much easier for border agents to remove migrants before they can meet with an attorney. None of the unilateral asylum bars passed by the Biden administration are part of statute, leading some to question their legality.

The push by Nuñez-Neto and Sherwood Randall comes as migrant rights advocates desperately push the president to do anything he can to protect communities before Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States on January 6. Trump was elected on a broad mandate to deport millions of migrants.

For their part, Nuñez-Neto and Sherwood Randall have worked tirelessly throughout Biden’s term to make mass deportations easier, greasing the policy skids for Stephen Miller, the senior Trump advisor expected to command the immigration policy portfolio at the start of the new presidency.

Formerly the Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at DHS, Nuñez-Neto’s was responsible for managing the southern border, a portfolio that became arguably ugliest political pie in the eye of Biden’s term.

In May, Zients rewarded Nuñez-Neto’s ineptitude by promoting him to the West Wing to work under deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian. The move made Nuñez-Neto the most powerful anti-migrant policy advisor in the White House, answerable to neither the Domestic Policy Council (DPC) nor the National Security Council (NSC).

Meanwhile, Sherwood Randall has worked overtime throughout the Biden administration to militarize the border through her role as a top homeland security advisor to the West Wing. Advocates say Sherwood Randall has been instrumental in “outsourcing Biden’s human rights abuses” by forcing foreign governments throughout the region to detain migrants with impunity.

Biden has seventy-one days left in the White House. As the Trump transition team prepares to take over, advocates hope the outgoing president will enact a series of proposals that will protect migrants already in the country from the next presidency. Zients, Quillian, Nuñez-Neto, and Sherwood Randall are clearly pushing for the opposite.

The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment.