44 Jacqueline Bhabha Guatemala (#16).34 The region is particularly dangerous for women and children. According to the UNHCR, 82 percent of Central American women asylum seekers reported that they would face torture or persecution if returned to the region.35 In the face of life-threatening circumstances, migration deterrence simply does not work. Children and their families are continuing to flee and to seek protection in the United States. More than 76,020 unaccompanied children and more than 473,000 adults and children traveling in family units were apprehended at the Unites States’ southern border in 2019, the highest numbers ever recorded.36 Having failed with family separation, the administration has turned to other strategies. In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a proposal to radically curtail the scope of asylum by excluding from protection survivors of persecution by private actors, including murderous spouses and brutal gangs.37 The bar for gaining asylum in those cases was already high – applicants had to demonstrate that they could not get protection from their governments, that they could not secure safety by traveling to distant sites within their own countries, and that the harm they feared rose to the very high threshold of “persecution.” So only a small proportion of the most extreme cases of domestic and gang-related violence were successful – no open door or “flood” of asylum grants had ever existed. But this new policy bars access completely. In so doing it signals a reversal of decades of American refugee practice. The attack on asylum access has been further accelerated by three other momentous developments. The first is the June 26, 2018, majority Supreme Court judgment in Hawaii v. Trump that upheld the administration’s ban on all access to the United States for nationals from several majority-Muslim countries. As Stephen Legomsky, a widely revered legal scholar, has noted, the Supreme Court has, time and again, “declared itself powerless to review even those immigration provisions that explicitly classify on such disfavored bases as race, gender, and legitimacy.”38 American citizen children will no longer be able to be joined in their country by parents, grandparents, or siblings who are, for example, Iranian or Syrian. People fleeing the devastating (US-supported) conflict in Yemen that has left 12,000 civilians dead and spread famine and disease to millions will no longer be able to join their relatives long settled in the United States. Young people from the marked “Intentional Homicides (per 100,000 people),” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, International Homicide Statistics, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?mo st_recent_value_desc=true. 35 “UNHCR Warns of ‘Looming Refugee Crisis’ in the Americas,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees. October 28, 2015, www.unhcr.org/5630fc6a9.html. 36 “Southwest Border Migration FY 2019,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, November 14, 2019, www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration/fy-2019. 37 Matter of AB-, 27 I&N Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018), Interim Decision #3929, www.justice.gov/eoir/ page/file/1070866/download. 38 S. H. Legomsky, “Immigration Law and the Principle of Plenary Congressional Power” (1984) 1984 Supreme Court Review 255–307 at 255. 34 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press