Refuge in an Insecure Time: Seeking Asylum in the Post-9/11 United States

The current climate of insecurity has in a sense presented an opportunity for those with restrictive immigration agendas to use a new vocabulary to advance long desired objectives as well as new policies that sacrifice fairness and negatively affect immigrants. The result has been a decline in due process and the undermining of basic protections of international refugee and human rights law, including: the prohibition on arbitrary detention, embodied in Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the prohibition on returning a refugee to persecution, the cornerstone of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol; and the right to asylum, contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task that Arthur Helton flagged–ensuring that the rights of refugees are not violated in the new “securitized” climate–has become a monumental challenge.