The Supreme Court issued an order declining to stop the revival of a prior Administriation’s border policy that requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are reviewed by U.S. immigration judges. The high court’s conservative supermajority denied the current Administration’s emergency request to continue the suspension of a federal judge’s order that requires U.S. border officials to reinstate the program.
U.S. officials have now been instructed to stop processing and admitting asylum-seekers who were previously subjected to the Remain-in-Mexico rules. As of earlier this summer, the Biden administration had allowed 13,000 of these asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. and continue their cases there.
The order was placed against the current U.S. Administration, in a case filed by Texas and Louisiana against the Department of Homeland Security, in an attempt to force the Administration to comply with the mandatory detention provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act, specifically sections applying to criminal aliens and aliens subject to final deportation orders.
The challenged program, known commonly as Remain in Mexico and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. After the policy was put in place at the beginning of 2019, tens of thousands of people waited for immigration hearings in tent encampments, often exposed to the elements and other forms of life-threatening situations.
Immigration advocates criticized MPP, saying the policy subjected migrants, primarily from Central America to these dangerous conditions in Mexican border cities.
The previous U.S. Administration cited a “security and humanitarian crisis” along the U.S.-Mexican border in refusing to allow migrants seeking asylum, because of a fear of persecution in their home countries, to enter the United States ahead of hearings before immigration judges.
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Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash
