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A Texas judge orders the White House to restore the “Stay in Mexico” program

2021-08-14T21:46:05.036Z


The Biden government has seven days to appeal the decision to resume the controversial MPP, which forces asylum seekers to wait south of the border.


Asylum seekers are escorted by US agents after crossing the Rio Grande, on the border with Mexico.GO NAKAMURA / Reuters

The controversial program known as "Stay in Mexico" can be seen again.

A Texas State judge has issued an order for the White House to restore the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP), an initiative launched during the Donald Trump administration that required asylum seekers to wait south of the border until have their cases resolved in the US courts.

The Administration of Democrat Joe Biden, which began dismantling it earlier this year, has seven days to appeal the ruling.

More information

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Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, nominated by Trump, has backed his decision that the Biden Administration did not consider "the benefits of the program," especially to deter the arrival of undocumented migrants to the border with Mexico. The ruling, released late on Friday, reads like a victory for Texas and Missouri prosecutors, who had appealed Washington's instruction to back down from the program in April, in an act that Kacsmaryk called " arbitrary and capricious, "according to

Reuters

.

Last June, the White House issued a bulletin announcing the “formal” end of the MPP, which has sparked complaints among civil organizations and academic circles for exposing applicants to precarious and unsafe conditions in the Mexican border strip, which has been a decade plagued by the violence of the war on drug trafficking. Since Trump announced the launch, an estimated 60,000 people have processed their applications outside of the United States. Biden promised that he would end the program as soon as he came to power, and currently asylum seekers can no longer register.

Proponents of the MPP, a symbol of Trump-era immigration policies, argue that the requirement to bar entry of undocumented asylum seekers is an escape valve from the saturated US immigration system. The program, however, turned the process is a huge bottleneck, often referred to as deliberately slow. The people, mostly in exodus from Central America, fled from conditions of violence and poverty to find themselves trapped a few meters from US soil and were prey to intermediaries who offered them expedited processing. The processes even slowed down with the outbreak of the pandemic, which further reduced the institutional capacities of the US government.

Kacsmaryk assured that states such as Texas and Missouri were violated because applicants who carry out their process in the country would make use of health and educational services. He also said that the dismantling of the MPP was not done in accordance with the law and ordered the Biden government to reestablish it until it found a "legal" alternative. If the ruling is appealed, a long process is foreseen and will foreseeably lead to the Supreme Court.

In July, border crossings broke a new record, with more than 212,000 encounters reported by US authorities. It is the highest figure in 20 years. This same week, the Biden Administration announced that it will expand an electronic registration system for asylum seekers to initiate the process remotely. The Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, spoke of an “unprecedented” arrival phenomenon and said that giving applicants an alternative, either with their phones or online, can be a way to lower migratory flows.

Mayorkas, who visited Mexico last Tuesday, once again put the migration issue at the center of the bilateral agenda, one of the most questioned points at the start of Biden's term. After a meeting with the Foreign Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, both countries pledged to control the irregular transit of migrants. The United States has registered 1.2 million arrests of irregular immigrants since last October, while the Mexican government revealed last week that in the first seven months of the year it received a record number of 64,378 asylum applications. The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the vice president, Kamala Harris, also held a phone call in which the migration crisis was among the main issues.Mayorkas added that the border between the two countries will most likely remain partially closed to non-essential traffic for another couple of months.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-14

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