The Trump administration has announced the reinstatement of the “remain in Mexico” program, resuming an initiative that forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait south of the border while their cases were processed.
The US Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Tuesday that it would restart the program immediately, years after it was ended by Joe Biden.
Donald Trump reclaimed the presidency on Monday vowing to move ahead with aggressive border security measures, including the reinstatement of “remain in Mexico”, formerly known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. Trump launched the program in 2019 during his first term in office.
Trump officials said it would deter what they called fraudulent asylum claims, while advocates said it put vulnerable migrants, including families with young kids, in danger. Biden ended the program in 2021, arguing that migrants were being left in squalid and dangerous conditions on the Mexican side of the border.
Activists said that exposed highly vulnerable migrants, mostly from Central and South America, to physical harm and illness in unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings with some of the highest murder rates on Earth.
The Trump administration on Tuesday said legal wrangling over Biden’s termination of the program left open the opportunity for a quick restart.
When asked earlier in the day about the possibility of a remain in Mexico restart, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum said her government would attend to the needs of migrants in a humanitarian way, even as she also pledged to repatriate foreign migrants to their home nations.
At her regular morning press conference on Tuesday, Sheinbaum noted that while Trump signed an executive order declaring illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border as a national emergency, she will insist on respectful relations and avoid confrontations.
About 70,000 migrants were subject to the policy from when Trump introduced it as president in January 2019 until Biden suspended it on his first day in office in January 2021, fulfilling a campaign promise.
Many were allowed to return to the United States to pursue their cases during the early months of Biden’s presidency, often from squalid, dangerous, ad hoc camps or strained shelter accommodation in towns a short distance over the border into Mexico.
Then it was reinstated and migrants fleeing to the US once again were halted at the border and made to stay out of the US.
This, together with a policy of routine expulsions at the border under a heavily criticized pandemic rule ostensibly to curb Covid, known as title 42, has driven thousands to make unauthorized crossings, often repeatedly, and with deadly results for some – succumbing to botched smuggling businesses, the swirling waters of the Rio Grande in Texas or the desert there and further west.
