The Department of Homeland Security announced it is preparing to quickly halt the “Remain in Mexico” program and won’t send asylum seekers back across the border to await a ruling on their applications for U.S. protection, The Washington Post has reported.
DHS officials said asylum seekers waiting in Mexico for their U.S. immigration court hearing would be permitted to cross the border on the day of their case and remain in the United States pending a decision, a process which can often take a long time.
The DHS statement said that the program, formally known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) and enacted during the Trump administration, has “endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border.”
The announcement was made possible by a court order on Monday issued by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who set aside a ruling he had issued last year that required the Biden administration to reinstate MPP, which had been suspended on President Joe Biden's first day in office in January 2021, CBS News reported.
Justice Department lawyers had asked Kacsmaryk to void his August 2021 ruling, citing the Supreme Court decision on June 30 to reject the legal arguments by Texas and Missouri Republican officials that Kacsmaryk upheld in his order last year.
The Supreme Court ruling did not become legally binding until Aug. 1 and there was a further legal process to take care of before the Biden administration could ask Kacsmaryk to annul his order, according to CBS News.
Although the halting of MPP is a legal victory for asylum-seeker advocates, who have called the policy inhumane and draconian, it will have a limited impact, CBS News pointed out, since the Biden administration had been placing a very small percentage of migrants in the program.
Only 5,764 migrants have been returned to Mexico under the policy, since MPP was reinstated in December 2021, while during the same time period, U.S. border officials have reported record levels of unlawful migration, processing migrants over 1.4 million times.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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