U.S. Moves to Tighten Rules for Political Asylum Seekers

The Justice Department is moving to tighten the government’s handling of political asylum requests, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said today.

INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson said aliens seeking asylum would have to show a clear probability of persecution in their homelands under new and tougher immigration guidelines now in the works.

“One of the issues in an asylum case is whether the person has been firmly resettled in another country,” he said. “Obviously, if they have been, they no longer are in a situation of fear of persecution from their homeland.

“That sometimes has created a problem where people clearly wanted to get to the United States, but have resettled in another country, and then try to get here and get asylum, and that needs to be clarified,” Nelson added.

He did not say when the new rules would be formally proposed in the Federal Register.

The revised rules come at a time when the Administration is showing increasing frustration over the growth of the sanctuary movement --in which about 200 churches are harboring illegal aliens from El Salvador and Guatemala.

The Administration contends that many of those refugees have failed to prove that they are likely to face political persecution if they are forced to return to the countries they fled. Instead, the Administration claims, the aliens have fled for economic reasons.