Noah Feldman, Columnist

Barr’s Reading of Asylum Law Makes It More Cruel

The U.S. attorney general has decided to start sending home people who the government believes will be persecuted.

July 30, 2019 at 7:40 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

A family group at the border.
Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images

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It’s not often that an act of statutory interpretation says something fundamental about who we want to be as a country.

But in the Donald Trump era, the application of immigration law has become a touchstone of our collective identity. And so a decision by Attorney General William Barr that restricts the scope of who can get asylum under the Immigration and Nationality Act has consequences and meaning beyond the people whose lives it will immediately affect.