U.S. court deals serious blow to Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ immigration policy
(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court yesterday blocked one of President Donald Trump’s signature immigration policies that has helped to sharply curb a migration surge on the southern border and forced tens of thousands of migrants to wait in Mexico.
The decision is a major blow to Trump who has declared the policy a success in reducing the flow of hundreds of thousands of people from Central America into the United States as he campaigns for a second term in office.
A three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their argument that the programme, called the Migrant Protection Protocols
(MPP), violated U.S. immigration law and international obligations on the treatment of asylum seekers.
Some 59,000 people have been sent back to Mexico to await the outcome of their cases in often dangerous border towns where they are vulnerable to kidnapping, rape, robbery and other crimes while living in sometimes unsanitary conditions.
Immigration attorneys rushed to ports of entry on the border after the ruling to ensure Customs and Border Protection officers were aware that the programme had been blocked, said Taylor Levy, an El Paso-based immigration attorney. In El Paso immigration court, meanwhile,
Judge Nathan Herbert adjourned proceedings for the day, saying he was not sure how the ruling would affect individual migrants’ cases.
Asylum officers, who screen migrants placed in the MPP programme for fear of persecution in Mexico, were told to immediately stop working on such cases, according to an internal email shared with Reuters.
The ruling means the United States can no longer send people back to Mexico under the program, said Michael Tan, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. It is not clear how it affects people already in the program in Mexico.
A spokesman for the
U.S. Department of Justice said the decision “once again highlights the consequences and impropriety of nationwide injunctions.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment but the administration is likely to quickly appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, as it has done with other rulings.
Trump, who has made cracking down on immigration a central theme of his more than three years in the White House, has sought through a series of new policies and rule changes to reduce asylum claims filed mostly by Central Americans arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Trump administration’s policies on curbing asylum applications have led to a significant decline in the number of illegal crossings reported by border agents, and have been more successful than the president’s efforts to construct a physical barrier on the southern border.