#lifts #policy #requiring #asylum #seekers #wait #Mexico
The US Department of Homeland Security announced Monday night that it will end a Trump-era policy that has required asylum seekers in Mexico to wait while their applications are processed in court.
The DHS announcement comes hours after a judge lifted an injunction that had prevented US President Joe Biden’s administration from ending the so-called “remain in Mexico” policy.
Under the policy, introduced in 2019 under former President Donald Trump, tens of thousands of asylum-seekers were sent across the border until they were due to appear in the United States for their immigration hearings.
Critics called the program cruel and dangerous because vulnerable people were sometimes forced to wait in border towns. The United States had discouraged its own citizens from visiting due to violence.
The policy will be reversed “swiftly and orderly,” the department wrote in a statement.
No one else will be enrolled and those who cross the border for their court dates will not be sent back to Mexico afterwards, DHS added.
The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), as the policy is officially known, “have endemic shortcomings, incur unjustified human costs, and divert resources and personnel from other priority efforts to secure our border,” DHS said.
Shortly after taking office, Biden attempted to make good on a campaign promise to end the border measure as part of what he called a more humane approach to immigration.
But a group of Republican-ruled states, led by Texas, sued the government, and a US district court ordered the policy reinstated.
The case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled on June 30 that Biden had the authority to end the program.
From the policy’s inception in January 2019 until its initial suspension under Biden, at least 70,000 people were sent to Mexico, according to the American Immigration Council.
According to Human Rights First, between January 2019 and 2021, there were 1,544 publicly documented cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, or other assaults on people sent across the border as part of the Remain in Mexico, involving multiple people, including at least one child , died.
The Trump administration has argued that a “zero tolerance” approach is needed to curb illegal immigration into the United States.
Under the revived policy, 9,563 people were enrolled in the policy from December 2021 to June 2022, most of whom were not from Mexico but from Nicaragua.
Each month during Biden’s tenure, more than 200,000 people attempting to enter the country illegally have been stopped at the border and turned back, either as part of remaining in Mexico or a separate, Covid-related policy blocking people at the border.
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