AGENCY RELEASES STRATEGY TO END ‘REMAIN IN MEXICO’

Advocates for refugees want Biden to move quickly

A refugee resettlement agency published a logistical outline this morning for the Biden administration to end President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program.

The heavily criticized program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, requires asylum seekers from Latin American countries other than Mexico to wait in Mexico while their immigration court cases progress in the United States. There have been more than 1,300 documented attacks against asylum seekers waiting in the program, whose circumstances have grown even more precarious under the pandemic.

Incoming president Joe Biden said during his campaign that he would end the program quickly once taking office, and the logistical report from the resettlement agency HIAS is the latest in a growing push from immigration and human rights advocates to try to hold him to his promise.

“There is an urgency to these recommendations,” the report says. “While measures must be in place to ensure an orderly process, every day that MPP remains is another day that thousands are subjected to danger and violence.”

The Remain in Mexico program began nearly two years ago with a single Honduran man sent back through the San Ysidro Port of Entry to Tijuana. It was the first major asylum policy from the Trump administration that was allowed to proceed despite court challenges, and it fundamentally changed the asylum screening experience for people fleeing from persecution and human rights abuses in Latin American countries.

“The Remain in Mexico program has been an unmitigated disaster for asylum seekers,” said Andrew Geibel, the HIAS report’s author.

The goal of the report, Geibel said, was to propose humane ways to end the program and allow those harmed by it a “fair shot” at protection.

More than 68,000 asylum seekers have been placed in the program since its inception.

The report, which was created through months of conversations with organizations supporting MPP returnees along the border, calls on the Biden administration to do much more than simply stop adding new asylum seekers to the program. It lays out specific recommendations based on the current status of cases.

There were more than 25,500 MPP cases still pending on the special dockets set aside for the program at immigration courts along the border as of December 2020, according to government data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University.

Just 638 people in the program have been granted asylum.

More than 32,600 were ordered deported — nearly 28,000 because they did not show up for their hearings. Another roughly 7,000 have had their cases closed because judges felt the government had not followed due process in its handling of the case.

The HIAS report calls for those with pending cases to be processed for entry to the United States in a streamlined way through a mechanism known as parole, which would allow these asylum seekers to live in the United States while their cases continue.

That is the most important recommendation in the report, said Luis Gonzalez, an attorney with Jewish Family Service, which represents asylum seekers returned to Mexico. He believes that the federal government should be able to process MPP returnees into the United States quickly because he’s seen how fast border officials have worked to parole a few of his clients who were in especially vulnerable circumstances.

“They have the authority to do that,” Gonzalez said. “That should be a very simple process for them to go through.”

The report calls for asylum seekers who were ordered deported to be allowed to reopen their cases with a chance to be inside the United States and find attorneys to represent them.

It says U.S. consulates should also allow for people affected by MPP, along with a couple of other restrictive Trump asylum policies, to apply for parole, allowing them to enter the United States with documents in hand at land borders or airports. It also suggests that a limited number could be processed as refugees by the U.S. State Department while still in Mexico and admitted with full refugee status to begin their lives in the United States.

Getting the consulates involved, said Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization that supports asylum seekers in Tijuana, would lower the numbers that have to be processed for parole at ports of entry themselves.

The report is a shorter version of a more in-depth set of recommendations that is still to come, Geibel said.