A year after presidential candidate Joe Biden attacked then-President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy, President Joe Biden will be putting it back into action.
“This is the first president in the United States of America that said anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before in America,” Biden said last October in the second debate between him and Trump, according to U.S. News and World Report.
“They’re shaking in squalor on the other side of the river,” he said.
Now, however, Biden, who tried to end the policy but has been stymied by the courts over the way he went about it, is going to embrace it beginning next month, according to CNN.
The action comes amid waves of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States.
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In August, 208,887 illegal immigrants were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection agents, according to ABC News. It said that was more than three times the August 2020 level of 62,707.
The “Remain in Mexico” policy, known formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, required migrants seeking asylum to await their hearings in Mexico.
The order came in response to the reality that many illegal immigrants who claimed asylum and were given court dates would never appear, instead drifting into the United States never to be found and deported.
Biden tried to end the policy, but in August, in response to a lawsuit from Texas and Missouri, a U.S. district judge ruled the administration did not lay sufficient administrative groundwork to end the program, according to The Washington Post.
The Biden administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court but lost.
Ah, it appears the Biden Admin is realizing that telling migrants to come to the US then having no plan to screen them, process them, house them, covid test them, etc doesn’t work. Governing is hard. https://t.co/6hP0F8UGPT
— Alyssa Farah (@Alyssafarah) October 15, 2021
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement late Thursday that it is “taking necessary steps to comply with the court order, which requires us to reimplement MPP in good faith,” the Post reported.
The statement blamed any delays in implementation on Mexico.
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“Mexico is a sovereign nation that must make an independent decision to accept the return of individuals without status in Mexico as part of any reimplementation of MPP,” DHS said. “Discussions with the Government of Mexico concerning when and how MPP will be reimplemented are ongoing.”
The “Remain in Mexico” policy faded after the COVID-19 pandemic began as the Trump administration used Title 42 of the public health law to send illegal immigrants back without an asylum hearing.
The Biden administration has continued to use Title 42 to expel those illegal immigrants it does not admit.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 938,000 illegal immigrants were expelled under the policy from October 2020 through August 2021.
As the Biden administration works to comply with the courts and restore the Migrant Protection Protocols, other parts of the president’s team are laying the administrative groundwork so that he can ax the policy.
A DHS memo outlining the basis for ending the policy will be “finalized shortly,” CBS News reported Friday.
However, for now, the administration is still bound to implement the policy under terms of the court ruling.