President Joe Biden’s plan to fix a broken border just got the green light in Canada.
For months, Biden and his Canadian counterpart Prime Minister Justin Trudeau relied on their recently-hatched plan to restrict asylum seekers entering either country. But in Canada, the plan, a renegotiated Safe Third Country Agreement, faced a court challenge on the basis of whether the U.S. was in fact a safe country to return people due to its dysfunctional immigration system.
On Friday, Canada’s highest court unanimously upheld in part that the agreement was safe to send asylum seekers back to the U.S., but the unanimous decision kicked back the issue of gender-based persecution, which the U.S. has not recognized in asylum claims, to a lower court.
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The decision comes as liberal governments in both countries have sought to limit migrants amid mounting pressure from conservatives, while Biden has tried to walk a fine line on immigration – between opening legal pathways and border enforcement – in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
The agreement with Canada better aligns the northern border with the asylum process at the southern border after Biden ended the pandemic-era Title 42 policy, once invoked by former President Donald Trump, in May. At the same time, Biden implemented new measures to stem the flow of migrants. Now, for people seeking to enter the U.S. from Canada or Mexico, they must seek asylum in the first country they set foot in, either in Canada or Mexico.
“We now have consistency between our policies at the northern and southern borders,” Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a U.S. think-tank, told USA TODAY.
Chishti called the agreement a “Biden-Trudeau success,” with negotiations occurring in 2022 that now largely survived Supreme Court of Canada scrutiny with Friday’s ruling. Biden and Trudeau…
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