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| Jerry Glaser/U.S. Customs and Border Protection |
The Trump administration can and must permanently improve asylum integrity, or risk our border looking like Spain again.
The most powerful people-magnet on Earth was at the root of last week’s epic mass migration event that swamped Ceuta, Spain’s city enclave on the Moroccan coast: the perceived opportunity among poor laborers to lodge political-persecution asylum claims they know would allow their probable release into rich destination countries, pretty much forever.Video footage shows hundreds of migrants crossing into Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta on Thursday, with many entering on foot or by sea. pic.twitter.com/wJV1pKZjy5
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 30, 2026What just happened in Spain must serve as a seminal warning to the Trump administration that its admirable work to quiet the U.S. southern border — the same formula Ceuta used to deny migrants the globally coveted asylum claim process — is very far from complete.
Spain’s Supreme Court triggered the human torrent when it struck down a policy uncannily like Trump’s border policy. It promptly expels arriving migrants and denies all a chance to start the lengthy asylum claim process that leads to interior releases. The Spanish court required that Spain adjudicate asylum claims before expulsion.
Trump’s border expulsion and asylum-denial policies, which reduced crossings to historically low levels, are just as legally fragile and politically reversible. The administration can and must use Spain’s misfortune as a catalyst to permanently improve asylum integrity that will forever prevent an American Ceuta. But time to do so is short and dwindling.
The One-Two Punch
On Jan.20, 2025, Trump issued the presidential proclamation “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion.” It triggered U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act section 212(f) to suspend the right of illegal crossers to apply for asylum. That plus orders for Border Patrol and U.S. military personnel to catch and expel every arriving migrant abruptly ended the 2021-2024 mass migration crisis.
It’s all reversible by a court or a new president without the following two-punch combination. First, withdraw the United States from the United Nations treaty, the 1967 “Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees,” which extended to the United States a 1951 global obligation on which to model its current abused asylum law. Second, power-drive several legislative amendments to restore the intent of asylum protection before the next Congress takes office in January 2027.
Leave the UN Treaty
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the “Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,” which committed the United States to asylum-processing obligations of the 1951 “United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.” President Harry S. Truman had refused to sign the 1951 treaty, but Johnson did via the 1967 Protocol, and the U.S. Senate ratified it.
Article 31 of the Convention obliged the United States to adopt as a human “right” the ability of migrants who can reach U.S. soil to claim asylum on five mainly government persecution grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. Eventually, Congress passed the current version of America’s asylum law as the 1980 Refugee Act, which contains the asylum process provisions that millions have abused ever since to get released into the United States.
The treaty and law are obsolete, founded to offer sanctuary first to those fleeing Cold War-era communist government persecutions. The elements of who is a persecutor and what is membership in a particular social group have expanded and been abused for decades, watering down eligibility standards to grant asylum to more people. --->READ MORE HERE
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