Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn is, once again, co-sponsoring a bill to tighten restrictions on immigration.
It’s the third try for retiring Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe’s legislation, called the “Asylum Abuse Reduction Act.” Blackburn first signed on as one of five co-sponsors in the bill’s second iteration in 2019.
If passed, the measure would require migrants to declare asylum at embassies in Mexico or Canada before they can enter the United States, or risk being turned back to the nearest embassy at the border.
The proposal would also amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to make asylum seekers who traveled through at least one country to reach the Southern border ineligible if they didn’t first apply for asylum in, say, Guatemala and Mexico on their way.
And, as a record number of children are crossing the Southern border, this new version of the bill would also make the Flores settlement not apply to immigration detentions. That 1997 settlement improved conditions at holding facilities for minors who crossed the border and made sure they couldn’t be held for more than 20 or so days.
In a release announcing the re-introduction, Blackburn blames President Joe Biden’s border policies for the influx of migrants. The goal of the legislation is to cut down on alleged asylum fraud through “loopholes,” which she claims are being used by “human traffickers and drug cartels.”
There are an estimated 124,000 unauthorized immigrants in Tennessee, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey compiled by the Migration Policy Institute. That’s about 2% of the state’s population, with no way of knowing how many of them are applying for asylum.
Read the proposed legislation in its entirety here.
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