The Biden administration has requested that the Supreme Court review – and potentially reverse – their decision to uphold a Trump-era anti-immigration policy colloquially known as “Remain in Mexico.”
This policy, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols or MPP, forces asylum seekers to remain on the Mexican side border while they wait for court decisions on their immigration status. Advocates for immigrants have The policy was described by some as cruelIt forces people to live in dangerous, even life-threatening conditions while trying to exercise their right of safe harbor in America
This was earlier in the month Republican-appointed judgesThe U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request by the Biden administration to terminate the policy.
The ruling upheld a lower court’s “outrageous holding that a law from 1996 *requires* MPP — which didn’t exist until 2019,” pointed out Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for American Immigration Council. The judge who wrote the decision expressed “sheer contempt for the Biden administration [that] oozes off of the page at nearly every juncture,” Reichlin-Melnick went on.
Human Rights First was established earlier this year. found thatThe policy has resulted in at least 1,544 public reports about murder, rape and torture against people who were forced to return to Mexico. This includes at most 341 reports of children kidnapped, or almost kidnapped, upon their return to Mexico.
In the administration’s court filing on Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas panned the 5th Circuit’s decision, saying that the agency has “been forced to reinstate and continue implementing indefinitely a controversial policy that the Secretary has twice determined is not in the interests of the United States.”
Mayorkas said that the policy creates dangerous conditions for asylum seekers and that it does not advance its presumed purpose of detering illegal immigration – a goal that immigration advocates have pointed out is inhumane in itself.
The lower courts have mandated enforcement of MPP “despite determinations by the politically accountable Executive Branch that MPP is not the best tool for deterring unlawful migration; that MPP exposes migrants to unacceptable risks; and that MPP detracts from the Executive’s foreign-relations efforts to manage regional migration,” the filing went on.
President Joe Biden is on the campaign trail Trump’s policy was criticisedThey vowed that they would end its enforcement. When the Biden administration reinstated the policy in December, they blamed the decision on the court’s orders.
However, the administration Also expanded the policy in its reinstatement – a decision made by the administration and not ordered by the courts. This expansion means that people from any country in Western Hemisphere can now be sent away while they await court arrangements.
Biden administration expansion of policy was criticized by immigration advocates. Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, called it a “shameful regression” which “flies in the face of its own determination that no number of changes could render this deadly policy more humane or provide the access to the asylum system that the law requires.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case could have serious consequences. Reichlin-Melnik said. According to the legal counsel, a ruling upholding the 5th Circuit’s decision could end up cementing the policy forever, although it’s unclear how the justices will rule.
The overturning of the policy would be a win for immigration advocates, who have repeatedly called on the Biden administration to keep its promise to break from Trump’s oppressive immigration policies.
The Biden administration has also Continued enforcementTitle 42, a Trump-era antiimmigration rule similar to Title 42, allows the government turn away asylum seekers. dubiouspublic health grounds. Biden’s administration has used Title 42 to Deport thousands Haitian asylum seekers back to a country that is reeling from environmental devastation and the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
