Asylum seekers sit in the back of a Mexican police vehicle after being returned to Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, after making their claims in the United States. Photo: Josh Galemore/AP

In a strongly worded letter, the New York City Bar Association is calling on the Trump administration to restore humanitarian and due process protections to asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders who've allegedly been stripped of their legal rights by an administration misusing COVID-19 as a reason.

In a detailed, five-page letter addressed to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the bar association says that since mid-March some 40,000 people, including asylum seekers and unaccompanied children, have been expelled at border processing centers under new administration policies that flout U.S. and international law.

"We are deeply concerned by the expulsion of more than 40,000 people, including unaccompanied children and asylum seekers, under new policies during the COVID-19 pandemic," writes the bar association, noting that it has 24,000 members hailing "from all parts of our nation."

"Other nations have ensured that migration restrictions related to the coronavirus contain humanitarian exceptions for protected groups while protecting public health with alternatives such as medical tests or quarantines," states the letter, which was issued on Wednesday to the Trump administration.

"However," the letter says, "the United States has failed to implement such measures and, instead, is turning virtually all migrants away at the northern and southern U.S. borders in the name of protecting the U.S. against the further spread of COVID-19."

On average, people who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border have been expelled in just 96 minutes, the bar association adds in the letter, which contains 21 footnotes and made arguments about how applicable law and policy should be handled.

At the same time, the U.S. Border Patrol has been turning away migrants at the nation's southern border without an individualized assessment of the person's possible asylum claims, despite CDC regulations that include a "humanitarian exception" to the agency's March 20 "limitation" order that, according to the bar association's letter, prohibited "certain non-citizens" from entering the U.S. from Mexico and Canada "purportedly" to restrict COVID-19 spread.

The letter explains that "the CDC [applicable] regulations include an exception to the entry limitation on 'humanitarian' grounds," but DHS "has interpreted the CDC's orders as permitting it to turn migrants away without an individualized assessment—and, as a result, it has admitted only two asylum seekers in the two months following the first [March-issued] order."

The letter also states that "in March and April alone, the U.S. expelled 899 unaccompanied children" at the borders.

Specifically, the letter, which was forwarded to numerous U.S. senators and representatives, urges that the CDC March order be withdrawn and that the administration restore "critical humanitarian protections" for asylum seekers and unaccompanied children "in compliance with U.S. and international law."

It also says that two months after the CDC's March 20 order, "as much of the U.S. began to reopen, the CDC nonetheless extended the order indefinitely."

"Both orders state that they draw their authority from 42 U.S.C. § 265, which permits limiting persons or property from entering the U.S. where there is 'serious danger of the introduction' of a disease into the United States from another country," says the letter, which is signed by the chairs of the bar association's Immigration & Nationality Law Committee, International Human Rights Committee and Task Force on the Rule of Law. "However," it says, "the virus already has been introduced into the U.S., which has seen more deaths caused by COVID-19 than any other country in the world."