
Trump administration hit with second lawsuit over restrictions on asylum access
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Immigration advocates filed a class action lawsuit on Wednesday over the Trump administration 's use of a proclamation that effectively put an end to being able to seek asylum at ports of entry to the United States.The civil lawsuit was filed in a Southern California federal court by the Centre for Gender & Refugee Studies, the American Immigration Council Democracy Forward , and the Centre for Constitutional Rights.The lawsuit is asking the court to find the proclamation unlawful, set aside the policy ending asylum at ports of entry and restore access to the asylum process at ports of entry, including for those who had appointments that were cancelled when President Donald Trump took office.Unlike a similar lawsuit filed in February in a Washington, D.C., federal court representing people who had already reached US soil and sought asylum after crossing between ports of entry, Wednesday's lawsuit focuses on people who are not on US soil and are seeking asylum at ports of entry.No response was immediately issued by the Department of Homeland Security or Customs and Border Protection, which were both among the defendants listed.Trump's sweeping proclamation issued on his first day in office changed asylum policies, effectively ending asylum at the border. The proclamation said the screening process created by Congress under the Immigration and Nationality Act "can be wholly ineffective in the border environment" and was "leading to the unauthorised entry of innumerable illegal aliens into the United States."Immigrant advocates said that under the proclamation non-citizens seeking asylum at a port of entry are asked to present medical and criminal histories, a requirement for the visa process but not for migrants who are often fleeing from immediate danger."Nothing in the INA or any other source of law permits Defendants' actions," the immigrant advocates wrote in their complaint.Thousands of people who sought asylum through the CBP One app, a system developed under President Joe Biden, had their appointments at ports of entry cancelled on Trump's first day in office as part of the proclamation that declared an invasion at the border."The Trump administration has taken drastic steps to block access to the asylum process, in flagrant violation of US law," the Centre for Gender & Refugee Studies stated in a news release on Wednesday.
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Indian Express
16 minutes ago
- Indian Express
The chatbot culture wars are here
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This time around, the critics cite examples of AI chatbots that seemingly refuse to praise Trump, even when prompted to do so, or Chinese-made chatbots that refuse to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They believe developers are deliberately baking a left-wing worldview into their models, one that will be dangerously amplified as AI is integrated into fields such as education and health care. There are a few problems with this argument, according to legal and tech policy experts I spoke to. The first, and most glaring, is that pressuring AI companies to change their chatbots' outputs may violate the First Amendment. In recent cases like Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court has upheld the rights of social media companies to enforce their own content moderation policies. And courts may reject the Trump administration's argument that it is trying to enforce a neutral standard for government contractors, rather than interfering with protected speech. 'What it seems like they're doing is saying, 'If you're producing outputs we don't like, that we call biased, we're not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,'' Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. 'That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.' There is also the problem of defining what, exactly, a 'neutral' or 'unbiased' AI system is. Today's AI chatbots are complex, probability-based systems that are trained to make predictions, not give hard-coded answers. Two ChatGPT users may see wildly different responses to the same prompts, depending on variables like their chat histories and which versions of the model they're using. And testing an AI system for bias isn't as simple as feeding it a list of questions about politics and seeing how it responds. Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the Trump administration's executive order would set 'a really vague standard that's going to be impossible for providers to meet.' There is also a technical problem with telling AI systems how to behave. Namely, they don't always listen. Just ask Elon Musk. For years, Musk has been trying to create an AI chatbot, Grok, that embodies his vision of a rebellious, 'anti-woke' truth seeker. But Grok's behavior has been erratic and unpredictable. At times, it adopts an edgy, far-right personality, or spouts antisemitic language in response to user prompts. (For a brief period last week, it referred to itself as 'Mecha-Hitler.') At other times, it acts like a liberal — telling users, for example, that human-made climate change is real, or that the right is responsible for more political violence than the left. Recently, Musk has lamented that AI systems have a liberal bias that is 'tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.' Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that 'controlling the many subtle answers that an AI will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.' It's not, in other words, as straightforward as telling an AI chatbot to be less woke. And while there are relatively simple tweaks that developers could make to their chatbots — such as changing the 'model spec,' a set of instructions given to AI models about how they should act — there's no guarantee that these changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want. But asking whether the Trump administration's new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether AI developers can actually build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point. These campaigns are designed to intimidate. And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, AI companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight. 'Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,' Lakier said. 'I'm surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.'


Indian Express
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Indian Express
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