Migration advocates have warned that the Biden administration's move to revive Donald Trump's Remain in Mexico policy will cause thousands of people to suffer and be vulnerable to kidnap and rape as they languish in dangerous Mexican border cities.
After reaching a deal with Mexico, the US will start returning asylum seekers from other Latin American countries to Mexico by December 6th, where they will have to wait while their case is assessed.
As a result of the policy, first implemented by Trump, asylum seekers were left stranded in violent Mexican border cities where they were routinely targeted by organized crime groups for rape, robbery, extortion and abduction.
The US government wants to make sure asylum seekers have legal representation and to conclude their claims within six months of an individual return to Mexico Mexico. US officials have expressed concerns about funding for migrant shelters, protection for vulnerable groups and access to medical checkups and Covid-19 vaccines. It promised to take local safety conditions into account before accepting asylum seekers, a pledge that caused disquiet among migrant advocates.
The main shortcomings of the programme are the same, according to advocates.
The violence faced by migrants in Mexico is going to outweigh any promise made by the Mexican government to try to make this better, said Linda Rivas, executive director of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas. There aren't enough shelters. People are still kidnapped in their own shelter and Mexico can try to protect migrants, but the reality is that Mexico doesn't have the means of doing it. The MPP, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, was part of a barrage of Trump policies aimed at undercutting the asylum system. The Trump administration invoked a previously obscure public health law, Title 42, in order to carry out summary expulsions because of the health risk posed by migrants during the Covid epidemic.
Biden campaigned on putting a friendlier face to US immigration policy, but in office he has kept Title 42 in place. In August a federal judge ordered the US government to revive the Remain in Mexico program, a decision that the Biden administration is appealing.
You have two policies Title 42 and Remain in Mexico, which are no longer Trump policies, but Biden policies, Rivas said. Biden has the ability to end Title 42 and he hasn't done it. There is a lot of suffering along the border. Asylum seekers and migrant advocates have been horrified by the violence on people sent to Mexico under the MPP.
Taxi drivers in Ciudad Ju rez have picked up foreigners and sent them to criminal gangs. Children have disappeared from migrant shelters. The women have been raped and murdered.
Human Rights First, a US human rights group that investigated the abuses of Remain in Mexico, has documented more than 1,500 cases of kidnappings and attacks against migrants in the scheme.
Many of the asylum seekers returning to Mexico were not informed by US border officials of where they were headed until the last minute, according to Rivas.
The MPP scheme was encapsulated in a tent camp along the Rio Grande in Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, Texas, where asylum seekers were afflicted with freezing weather and extortion by local gangs.
Father Francisco Gallardo, director of migrant ministries in the Diocese of Matamoros, said it was inevitable that these migrants will form these camps again. All of the border cities are going to fill up with migrants. Reviving the MPP may cause political headaches for Biden, but the issue has received little attention in the Mexican media. President Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador did not address the issue at his morning press conference on Thursday, even though he in effect abandoned his 2018 campaign promises to not do the dirty work of other governments on the immigration issue.
The Mexican government is very aligned with the legacy that Trump left immigration control, said Tonatiuh Guill n L pez, a former immigration commissioner who resigned in 2019 after Mexico caved to Trump's threats to stop migration through the country or face crippling tariffs.
Mexico became an instrument of the U.S. immigration controls.