Asylum seekers rarely win bid to stay
MEXICO — Over two hours on June 1, a Honduran teenager named Tania pleaded with a U.S. official not to be returned to Mexico.
Immigration authorities had allowed her mother and younger sisters into the United States two months earlier to pursue claims for asylum in U.S. immigration court. But they sent Tania back to Tijuana on her own, with no money and no place to stay.
The 18-year-old said she told the U.S. official she had seen people on the streets of Tijuana linked to the Honduran gang that had terrorized her family. She explained that she did not feel safe there.
After the interview, meant to assess her fear of return to Mexico, she hoped to be reunited with her family in California, she said. Instead, she was sent back to Mexico under a Trump administration policy called the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), which has forced more than 11,000 asylum seekers to wait on the Mexican side of the border for their U.S. court cases to be completed. That process can take months.
Tania’s is not an unusual case. Once asylum seekers are ordered to wait in Mexico, their chances of getting that decision reversed on safety grounds - allowing them to wait out their proceedings in the United States - are exceedingly small, a Reuters analysis of U.S. immigration court data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) shows.
Many migrants and their advocates say they are vulnerable to violence in Mexican border cities, which have some of the highest homicide rates in the world facing dangers similar to those they fled in their home countries.
Of the 8,718 migrants in the program Reuters identified in the EOIR data, only 106 about 1% had their cases transferred off the MPP court docket, allowing them to wait in the United States while their asylum claims are adjudicated.
The analysis, which provides the first public accounting of who is in the MPP program and how it is being carried out, comes as the program is set to be dramatically expanded. On Friday, Mexico agreed to implement it across the entire southern border to prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from imposing across-the-board tariffs on Mexican goods.
Trump, who ran for office on a platform of cracking down on illegal immigration, has grown increasingly frustrated by the ballooning numbers of mostly Central American families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and asking for asylum in the United States. The administration devised the policy of returning asylum seekers to Mexico to reduce the number of migrants living in the United States while their cases chug through a backlogged court system.
Kathryn Mattingly, an EOIR spokeswoman, referred questions on the policy to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A DHS spokeswoman, who declined to be named, said the department could not comment on Reuters’ findings but said the program allows the United States “to more effectively assist legitimate asylum-seekers and individuals fleeing persecution.”
Many Central American migrants choose to travel through Mexico en route to the United States, so “the great majority” are likely not persecuted there, the U.S. government has said in court filings.
Immigrant rights groups have sued the administration to halt the policy. In April, a federal judge in California ruled it likely violated U.S. immigration law. In May, however, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the program to continue while the legal challenge proceeds.
Asylum seekers like Tania who spoke on condition that only her first name be used because she feared for her safety in Mexico can at any time tell U.S. officials they fear returning to Mexico, according to U.S. guidelines. That triggers an interview intended to ensure they are not returned to danger, in violation of U.S. and international law.
But the bar to pass these interviews is high: Migrants must prove they are “more likely than not” to face torture or persecution in Mexico.