Less than two months after U.S. border patrol agents were caught on video flogging Haitian asylum seekers with riding crops, the Biden administration is continuing its pursuit of deportation of Black asylum seekers with a seemingly banal but still devastating instrument: boilerplate form letters.

Truthout recently gained access to two of these letters via the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. On their face, they don’t seem noteworthy — they are identical, standard-issue form letters informing two asylum seekers from Mauritania that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied their asylum claims on the basis that they have not demonstrated a “credible fear” of returning to Mauritania if deported back there by the U.S., despite the fact that they are fleeing enslavement and brutality.

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