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All through the 80s, the US gov denied asylum applications from Salvadorans & Guatemalans at exorbitantly high rates for political reasons: the US was supporting the regimes that were brutalizing their own people & forcing them to flee. 1/
The political logic was simple & brutal: if the US granted asylum claims, then it would have to acknowledge that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments it was propping up (with aid $$, military advisors, etc) were murderous and incorrigible abusers of human rights. 2/
Eventually, after major legal challenge, US gov't conceded that it had politicized the asylum process & violated national (& int'l law). The settlement that followed (ABC v. Thornburgh) gave hundreds of thousands of Central Americans another chance at asylum/legal status in US 3/
Now, after four years in which the Trump Administration has systematically dismantled the asylum system, a new DHS whistle-blower complaint supplies evidence that at the highest levels of DHS officials worked to squelch & suppress information relevant to asylum determinations. 4/
In the 80s, officials at State Dept issued boilerplate reports on "country conditions" for Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to use to deny asylum claims. Now: DHS officials are demanding that these reports be rewritten to support Trump's attacks on asylum seekers. 5/