Moreno’s first bill as a Senator targets asylum-seekers

After winning the most expensive Senate race in history, Bernie Moreno is off to the races and leading with a bill that targets asylum-seekers.

The bill will be titled Refugees Using Legal Entry Safely — or “RULES” — Act.

It would:

• Require asylum seekers to file their application at legal ports of entry, refusing access to those who illegally cross the border.

• Stops the release of asylum seekers into the U.S. before their cases are decided.

• Prevents someone from applying for asylum again if they have already been denied once.

• Restrict anyone who is caught by law enforcement out of legal immigration status from claiming asylum.

As ever, the devil is in the details, and we’ll see what the bill actually would do when the full legislative language is filed. As for what we know right now, it’s worth pointing out that the last bullet point cited by Axios is basically gibberish– so there is a big lack of clarity here on that point alone.

The first component of the bill– “Require asylum seekers to file their application at legal ports of entry, refusing access to those who illegally cross the border”– seems generally sensible. But it will be contentious because this will continue to put pressure on Mexico by causing a backup of people seeking to cross the border from there, but stuck in Mexican territory, likely forming a big, fat target for organized criminals to engage in all manner of extortion, sexual assault, drug-pushing, and goodness knows what else.

One can say this is Mexico’s problem, not the US’, and that’s mostly right.

But it’s worth remembering most of the people seeking to get across the border now are not Mexicans; they’re from other parts of Latin America (Venezuela’s communist regime has seen millions of people flee, and a fair chunk of these people will probably be Venezuelans). So this is sort of the US making our problem Mexico’s problem.

That may fly, but it will be interesting to see whether this forces any concessions from Trump on things like tariffs hitting Mexican goods– which he is promising to introduce at a 25 percent level in a matter of days.

MAGA: A political philosophy that sounds easy, but sometimes turns out to be awfully tough to implement when you start going through the list of trade-offs.