Court temporarily blocks Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court decided Friday to block a Trump administration policy that requires asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts.

In a 2-1 decision, the panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a preliminary injunction against the so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which has forced nearly 60,000 people to wait in Mexico for their applications to be processed and their cases to be heard.

That policy is one of several the administration has put in place to prevent migrants from coming into the country at the southern border.

In another case Friday, the same panel decided unanimously to uphold an injunction against a Trump rule that denied asylum eligibility for migrants who crossed the southern border between designated ports of entry.

“Today’s decisions make clear they can’t use two of the programs they laid out to try to gut the asylum system,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “But there are still others out there.”

One is a policy in place that requires migrants to apply for asylum in one of the countries they pass through on the way to the U.S. border. The U.S. Supreme Court previously allowed this policy to be enforced.

Jadwat said new asylumseekers will no longer be blocked under the 2019 Remain in Mexico policy, which the government calls the Migrant Protection Protocols. Immigration lawyers Friday were still trying to understand the effect of the decision on migrants who already have applied and are now waiting in Mexico for their cases to be processed.

The U.S. Department of Justice denounced the decision on the migrant protocols but did not reply to questions about whether the government would appeal. Legal analysts expressed certainty that the government would quickly appeal.

“This issue is surely headed to the Supreme Court,” said Cornell University Law School professor Stephen Yale-Loehr.

The high court has yet to consider the policy but has refused in the past to remove an injunction blocking asylum for migrants who do not apply at official border crossings.

In the Remain in Mexico case, the two judges in the majority, both appointed by Democrats, said uncontested evidence shows that migrants face substantial harm, even death, in Mexico while they wait for decisions by U.S. immigration authorities.

The migrants “face targeted discrimination, physical violence, sexual assault, overwhelmed and corrupt law enforcement, lack of food and shelter, and practical obstacles to participation in court proceedings in the United States,” Judge William A. Fletcher, appointed by President Bill Clinton, wrote for the majority. “The hardship and danger to individuals returned to Mexico ... have been repeatedly confirmed by reliable news reports.”