WASHINGTON — Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, says a recent change by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), allowing for officers to refer certain applications to a judge without first conducting an interview, will force people seeking asylum into removal proceedings likely while they are detained.

DHS says the change is necessary to help process a backlog of more than 1.4 million people who applied for asylum.  

In a letter to the agency Friday, McGarvey and other Democrats wrote:

“Since 1990, asylum seekers who affirmatively file for asylum in the U.S. have been granted a non-adversarial interview with an asylum officer. These initial interviews are critical to ensuring a full understanding of an individual’s reasons for seeking asylum … By passing on cases that could have been adjudicated by a USCIS officer conducting an interview, this proposed rule will subject more people to detention and add more cases to an already overburdened Executive Office of Immigration Review.”

In response to a request for comment on the letter, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told Spectrum News in a statement Friday: “We respond to congressional correspondence directly through official channels.”

“The backlog in the courts is worse than the backlog with the asylum case officers,” McGarvey said Friday. “But what happens in the meantime? What happens is that it’s people in our community, our neighbors, who get caught up in this because when it goes to the court system, then ICE is picking them up and they’re putting them in detention centers. These are our neighbors.”

Last month, McGarvey called for the release of and medical care for Sarafinah Bukirwa, a Louisville woman originally from Uganda with sickle cell anemia, whom he said has a valid visa and active asylum application and was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the airport in Louisville.

A DHS spokesperson told Spectrum News in a July 31 statement that Bukirwa, who has since been released, entered the U.S. on a visa and overstayed after it expired in 2024, and that she will receive “full due process.”

McGarvey is also cosponsoring the No TSA Data for ICE Act to ban data sharing between the Transportation Security Administration and ICE.