After months of a growing border crisis capped by an all-time record number of apprehensions in May, what’s another few migrants crossing the border?

Joe Biden’s associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, who also serves as the Justice Department’s civil rights regulation division chief, announced last week that the administration will revive a former Barack Obama-era asylum policy that had been discarded by Donald Trump. The asylum policy expanded the requirement for legitimate asylum request qualifications to include individuals fleeing spousal abuse or local crime.

Clearly, the move is yet another example of the Biden administration’s commitment to a de facto open borders policy. “Root causes,” indeed.

Gene Hamilton, the vice president of America First Legal, warned that this “will lead to tens of thousands of meritless asylum claims — if not hundreds of thousands — in the months and years ahead.” He further explained:

Generalized crime in other countries has never been a legitimate basis for asylum under the laws passed by Congress — despite the best efforts of advocates and radicals during the Obama Administration to provide otherwise. … This, of course, is part of a bigger plan under the Biden Administration that involves the Department of Homeland Security granting asylum en masse along the border to anyone who comes from a country with higher general crime rates than the United States. The Biden Administration will deport roughly zero percent of those who do not qualify for asylum, these new meritless cases will lead to delayed relief for legitimate asylees, and these radical decisions will ensure open borders for as long as they remain in effect. The American people deserve better.

Ah, but that’s just it. Forget the American people. Democrats just think Democrats deserve more votes.

How would this result in votes? The reason this is a bigger deal than the Biden administration’s resurrection of Obama’s catch-and-release policy is that granting asylum puts individuals on a track to U.S. citizenship.

Predictably, the decision was praised by leftists, who ridiculously assert that it rights the horrific moral wrongs of the Trump administration’s narrowing of asylum qualifications. The ACLU asserted that it “will help undo some of the damage caused by the Trump administration’s attacks on asylum.”

While we’re talking about admitting people who are in genuine danger of losing their lives, what of the 18,000 Afghans who risked their lives helping U.S. forces in the fight against the Taliban? With Biden’s decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September, these interpreters and other friends of America now have bullseyes on their backs. Will they be at the front of the line of refugees gaining asylum?

Apparently, the violence they’re facing doesn’t rise to the same level for the Biden administration. They’re not migrants from Central and South America otherwise illegally crossing the southern border.

Update 6/25: It seems there’s a plan to rescue several thousand America-friendly Afghans. Good.