The United States and Mexico are scheduled to announce this Thursday the terms of the agreement reached on Wednesday to shortly restart the migration program
Stay in Mexico
, promoted by former President Donald Trump to return asylum seekers to the neighboring country while their cases are resolved. according to The Washington Post.
After weeks of negotiations, both governments finally agreed to
presumably resume
this policy next
week
in the border cities of San Diego, in California, and Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso, in Texas.
This new version of the program "will be quite similar to the previous version," said another official familiar with the talks, although one of the main novelties will be that the US Administration
will offer adults to be vaccinated against COVID-19
.
A group of Mexican women seeking asylum wait with their children near the Matamoros International Bridge, in Mexico, on August 30, 2019. Veronica G. Cardenas / AP
One of the main demands of Mexico to reach an agreement was to obtain a guarantee from the United States that asylum cases will be processed quickly, in order to
reduce the time that migrants must spend in their territory
waiting for a resolution .
Another of the concessions that the government of President Joe Biden has allegedly made to achieve the Mexico agreement is to support the creation of the
Sembrando Oportunidades
program
, announced on Wednesday by the authorities of both countries.
[The 'Stay in Mexico' program forced more than 70,000 migrants to return to that country]
It is an initiative to offer scholarships and training to young people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador so that they can
find employment in their country of origin
and thus try to stop the migratory flow to the north.
An awkward position
The reinstatement of this policy, formally known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) puts the Biden Administration in an awkward position, as they
intend to end it
.
The Guatemalan migrant who arrived in the United States on the landing gear of an airplane is in custody
Nov. 29, 202102: 49
Biden ceased the program when he arrived at the White House in January, deeming it
inhumane due to the violence that migrants faced in Mexico
.
The states of Texas and Missouri sued the government in April for suspending it, and in August a federal judge in Texas ordered the Administration to reinstate the policy pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
"The MPP had endemic failures, imposed unjustifiable human costs, detracted resources and personnel from other priority efforts and
did not address the root causes of irregular migration
," Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in this regard in October.
"The MPP not only undermines the Administration's ability to make fundamental and much-needed changes to the immigration system, it
fails to provide the fair process
and humanitarian protections that people deserve under the law," he added.
[The Government asks the justice again to allow it to end Stay in Mexico]
The immigration program, which was launched by Trump in January 2019, led thousands of people to subsist in makeshift camps along the border, in dire conditions and subject to violence and extortion by criminals.
However, the Biden government has continued to implement - and defend in another court case - the public health policy created under the umbrella of restrictions by COVID-19 and known as Title 42, which allows it to return the majority of applicants for asylum who arrive at the border
without even hearing their cases
.
