A federal court of appeal suspended the return to Mexico of migrants seeking asylum on American soil on Friday while examining their file, one of the pillars of the policy of the government of Donald Trump to close its border to the south.
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Announced in December 2018 and implemented a month later, the President's plan "Staying in Mexico" was strongly criticized on both sides of the border. This policy, officially known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols”, applied to all those applying for asylum from Mexico but did not concern the Mexicans themselves. Some 59,000 migrants, the vast majority fleeing poverty and violence in Central America, have been returned to Mexico as part of the scheme, according to official figures released Thursday.
A court of appeal in San Francisco ruled Friday this practice " invalid in its entirety " under US law, ordering that it be stopped throughout the territory. At first instance last year, a court also ruled on these illegal measures, expressing concern at the lack of adequate reception facilities in border areas on the Mexican side, as well as the discrimination and physical and sexual violence to which migrants returned were exposed. The San Francisco Court of Appeal had, however, authorized the continuation of this plan while it rendered its decision.
The powerful American civil rights organization ACLU, a party to the legal proceedings, welcomed the suspension. " It is time for the government to obey the law and stop endangering asylum seekers, " said Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer for the ACLU. In a separate judgment, the same San Francisco Court of Appeal rejected another government measure preventing anyone who entered the United States illegally from seeking asylum there.
" These two decisions are a significant setback for the Trump government's attempts to restrict asylum conditions ," Stephen Yale-Loehr, a law professor at Cornell University, said in a statement. He believes that the Supreme Court will certainly be seized of these questions. Donald Trump had placed the fight against immigration at the heart of his 2016 electoral campaign, notably promising to build a wall along the Mexican border.