Over a month ago, the Biden administration restarted Remain in Mexico, or MPP. Since then, DHS has returned 217 asylum seekers to Mexico under the program. The majority—62%—came from Nicaragua, with another 22% from Venezuela, 7% from Cuba, 6% from Ecuador, and 3% from Colombia.
At the end of last December, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to review its case to end MPP. Earlier that month, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration's appeal, upholding a lower court's ruling that DHS improperly terminated the policy.
There are a few surface-level changes in an attempt to make the program more humane: officials have stated that migrants will now have access to transportation at ports of entry to take them directly to Mexican shelters, offering some level of protection against targeted crime. There are also protections for individuals with physical and mental conditions and members of the LGBTQ community.
However, the Biden Administration has already broken many of its own rules, leading to the abuses that immigration advocates have been warning about since the beginning. Immigration attorneys have identified at least 24 immigrants, such as those with serious medical conditions, who should never have been placed into the “Remain in Mexico” program according to its own guidelines. At least 9 were taken out of MPP after being flagged to CBP, but 1 was mistakenly returned to Mexico.
As Refugee International’s Yael Schacher observed in El Paso, among the 82 MPP enrollees who had hearings last Monday and Tuesday, only five had legal counsel. Asylum seekers with legal counsel are three times more likely to have their cases approved. It is notable that, according to their nationalities, the migrants currently enrolled in MPP would typically have had the strongest cases for asylum had they been allowed to enter the U.S. By being returned to Mexico, they face a much greater chance of being deported.
At its core, MPP cuts asylum seekers off from accessing legal representation in the U.S. and leaves them stranded in a country with little to no resources or protection from danger. Under the previous administration’s iteration of MPP, there were over 1,544 reported cases of violent attacks—including murder, assault, torture, and kidnapping—driving many to abandon their asylum claims. Biden’s MPP 2.0 only continues to place migrants back into the very dangers they are fleeing.
Unless the Biden administration takes real action to defend migrants, this cycle of violence—criminal and system—against migrants is only likely to continue. Join us in calling on the Biden administration to end MPP and Title 42 by signing our petition HERE.