The U.S. Supreme Court refused to block a Texas federal court’s ruling (WaPo) that ordered the revival of an immigration program implemented under President Donald Trump. The program, formally called Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) and known as Remain in Mexico, required many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases were decided.
The Joe Biden administration officially ended the program in June. Although the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pledged to appeal the lower court’s order, it said that it would move to reinstate the program (BuzzFeed News) in good faith and that it had begun to engage with the Mexican government on reimplementing MPP. Some 71,000 immigrants and asylum seekers were returned to Mexico under the program. Of those, at least 1,544 faced murder, sexual violence, or other attacks, according to the nonprofit Human Rights First. The Supreme Court said the Biden administration had appeared to act arbitrarily and capriciously (NYT) in ending MPP and cited its own decision last year to refuse to allow Trump to end protections for young immigrants known as Dreamers.
Analysis
“By far the most important question regarding implementation, [as far as I can tell], is how far the US is going to go in asking/pressuring Mexico to take MPPed migrants again. No Mexican cooperation, no MPP,” ProPublica’s Dara Lind tweets.
“If Biden decides to exchange cooperation on immigration for silence on other troublesome issues, he will be repeating the Trump playbook and allowing problems to fester,” the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico’s Denise Dresser writes for Foreign Affairs.
This In Brief explains MPP and other abbreviations in U.S. immigration policy.
