The Biden administration is again launching an attempt to end the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires migrants at the southern border to stay in Mexico as they wait to have their asylum cases heard.
On Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released a 39-page memo to rescind the policy. The memo does not take effect immediately.
“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence, and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program, and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” Mayorkas wrote in his Friday memo.
“In reaching this conclusion, I recognize that MPP likely contributed to reduced migratory flows. But it did so by imposing substantial and unjustifiable human costs on the individuals who were exposed to harm while waiting in Mexico,” he wrote, saying the policy “fails to provide the fair process and humanitarian protections that all persons deserve.”
Earlier this month, the administration said it was preparing to reimplement the “Remain in Mexico” policy, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, in November after the administration attempted to revoke it earlier this year and was met with legal challenges.
In August, a U.S. District Court in Texas ordered the Biden administration to resume the policy, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was “taking necessary steps to comply with the court order, which requires us to reimplement MPP in good faith.”
Also in August, the Supreme Court rejected the Biden Justice Department’s request to delay the reimplementation of the policy.
Under the policy, the U.S. has removed 70,000 asylum seekers to Mexico since 2019 to wait for the outcome of their case.
President Donald Trump implemented the policy in 2019 as an influx of Central American families crossed the southern border.
In March, Biden said he did not regret moving quickly to roll back some of Trump’s executive orders. Biden suspended the “Remain in Mexico” policy on his first day in office.
“Rolling back the policies of separating children from their mothers, I make no apology for that. Rolling back the policies of ‘Remain in Mexico,’ sitting on the edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat and — I make no apologies for that,” Biden said, adding that Trump’s immigration programs have “an incredibly negative impact on the law, international law, as well as on human dignity.”
“The benefits of MPP are far outweighed by the costs of continuing to use the program on a programmatic basis, in whatever form,” Mayorkas wrote.
“MPP not only undercuts the Administration’s ability to implement critically needed and foundational changes to the immigration system, but it also fails to provide the fair process and humanitarian protections that all persons deserve,” the Homeland Seurity secretary said.
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Source: Dailywire
