AGO halts deportation of potential asylum seekers

The Attorney General’s Office has postponed the deportation proceedings of at least 10 people while regulations for asylum seekers are being processed.

Assistant Attorney General Eric O’Malley said between 10 and 20 people have so far indicated that they intend to avail themselves of refugee protection.

O’Malley said most of them are Chinese. There are also one or two from Myanmar.

The government, however, is putting off any action on their request pending the adoption of permanent regulations that would establish a procedural mechanism for asylum seekers.

“There are people that have indicated that they are going to seek this protection. Some of them have already been entered into deportation proceedings. But the standards, procedures, and limitations of our authority have to be set first. So basically we’ve just been kind of putting everything on time-out until we know what we have to do,” O’Malley said.

He added that the deportation actions will continue, and the process for granting asylum will begin, once the procedure is “up and running.”

The proposed regulations were published in the Commonwealth Register’s May 24 issue. A revised version was printed in last month’s issue to include recommendations made by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

O’Malley said the revisions were mostly technical or clarificatory.

For instance, the wording of “country of origin” has been changed to “designated place of return.”

“[This will apply, for instance, to an asylum seeker who] was coming from China but was a national of North Korea. If they could show that they would be harmed by returning to China, then they would still be eligible for that protection. That was just a clarification to be consistent with international treaties. It was a kind of a language issue more than anything,” O’Malley said.

He added that the regulations may be adopted as early as the end of this month, if the AGO receives no major comments on them.

But he noted that it may take a little more time to work out the logistics of how the asylum system is actually going to work.

A group of attorneys will be leaving in the latter half of this month for training. When they come back in middle of August, the attorneys should be able to serve as de facto judges who will hear and decide deportation cases of asylum seekers, O’Malley said.

The regulations on asylum seekers aim to implement the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The United States is a signatory to both international conventions and treaties. Pursuant to Section 102 of the Covenant, the CNMI is required to conform to such forms of treaties.