On The Eve Of MPP’s Return, Two Reports To Read In Case You Missed Them
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BACKGROUND ON MPP
The “Migrant Protection Program” was started under the Trump administration. Before the policy, migrants who requested asylum for fear of returning to their home countries, could safely remain in the U.S. to await their US immigration court date.
But under MPP, asylum seekers are sent back to Mexico to wait for that court date. In Mexico, these asylum seekers are subject to violence, extortion, and inhumane living conditions.
After ending the policy in February of 2021, the Biden Administration has gone back and forth with the Federal courts, who want it reinstated. In August, a federal judge in Texas ordered the resumption of MPP. An attempt to stop this order has been denied this year by both the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s interesting to note that even Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of The Department of Homeland Security, issued an extensive memo in October detailing why MPP should end.
Yet a federal judge in Texas has brought this back.
THE POLICY IS BACK
So MPP is back starting on Monday after Mexico accepted some new “more humanitarian” terms, such as ruling on asylum cases within 180 days.
Media coverage on the topic today is focusing on the extreme conditions that migrants face in Mexico. I spoke to Nayelly Barrios today, a human rights activist with the border-based Angry Tias and Abuelas, for a Texas Public Radio/NPR report. Their group has done extensive work on the ground to provide relief for migrants on the Mexican side of the border for years now.
“The situation that the refugees are facing when they wait in Mexico — it is not safe,” she told me on a call in response to the newly negotiates terms on MPP. “Even being there a month sometimes can be very dangerous for many different reasons.”
TWO RELATED REPORTS FROM THE PAST FEW WEEKS
Ari Sawyer, a U.S. border researcher from Human Rights Watch, who I had a chance to interview for a different report, published a paper last month from her research on the violence endured by the migrants in the U.S. system before they even return to Mexico.
From the Newsweek piece covering her research report:
“Human Rights Watch received a long-awaited piece of mail from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — the results of a Freedom of Information Act request originally filed six years ago. The contents are consistent with longstanding reports of widespread Customs and Border Protection (CBP) abuse and misconduct — some of which rises to the level of criminal.”
“The documents we received contained more than 160 complaints made internally at DHS by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers, including allegations of sexual assault, physical violence, verbal abuse and other dehumanizing treatment of asylum applicants. The internal reports span parts of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.”
Read the full report on Newsweek Here: Border Agents Can’t Police Themselves
Also last month, Physicians for Human Rights, a U.S.-based nonprofit that investigates human rights violations around the world, released the first qualitative analysis of mental health effects of Trump’s family separation policy in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS ONE.
The study found that the policy of family separations (which ended on paper but continues to this day with thousands of children who have yet to be reunited with their families) met “the legal definition of torture and temporary disappearance.”
Jaco Soboroff (NBC/MSNBC) quoted directly from the PLOS ONE study on Twitter last month:
You can read coverage from The Guardian on this here: Families separated at border under Trump suffering severe trauma — study
You can access the study itself on PLOS ONE here: The psychological effects of forced family separation on asylum-seeking children and parents at the US-Mexico border: A qualitative analysis of medico-legal documents
The violence that asylum seekers and migrants moving through the U.S., immigration system have endured — and continue to endure —is unimaginable.
Legal experts, immigration advocates, and even attorneys inside the state department continue to condemn the government’s handling of the ongoing humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The new humanitarian guidelines are meant to help. But will they be enough? And will they actually be implemented? What we see from the immigration system in the U.S. historically is non-compliance with these types of policies for a variety of reasons.
For a recent example of this, my story last month on Kino Border Initiative who has been documenting non-compliance with policy at points of entry: Asylum-seeking migrants continue to be turned away at the border — even though Biden ended federal ‘metering’ policy
