A federal judge ordered Homeland Security to restart President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, ruling Friday that the Biden administration cut too many corners when it scrapped the get-tough approach to illegal border crossers.
Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas rushed to scrap the policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, without considering the benefits of pushing border jumpers back across the boundary to Mexico to await their immigration court dates.
Particularly at a time when the government is defying U.S. law by catching and releasing illegal immigrants that are supposed to be detained, the judge said the MPP was a viable alternative, and the Biden team needed to give more than a cursory explanation for ending it.
“Defendants are ordered to enforce and implement MPP in good faith until such time as it has been lawfully rescinded in compliance with the [Administrative Procedures Act] and until such a time as the federal government has sufficient detention capacity to detain all aliens subject to mandatory detention,” the judge wrote.
The decision is a severe blow to the Biden team’s efforts to roll back Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.
MPP, which was announced in late 2018 but really kicked into gear in the summer of 2019, helped solve the 2019 border surge by discouraging people who’d been jumping the border and lodging bogus immigration claims. Forcing them to wait in Mexico denied them the foothold in the U.S. that they had previously enjoyed while waiting years for their court dates.
Indeed, nearly half of MPP migrants didn’t bother to show for their first court dates.
But immigrant-rights activists argued the policy was cruel to the migrants, sending them back to rough conditions in Mexico, where some of them were kidnapped, raped or faced other hardships at the hands of smuggling cartels.
Mr. Mayorkas officially ended MPP in June, though the Biden administration had ordered a stop to new enrollments in January, and has attempted to bring in tens of thousands of people who’d still been waiting in Mexico.
Judge Kacsmaryk linked the unprecedented surge in illegal immigration in the ensuing months to the end of MPP. But Mr. Mayorkas ignored that connection in his memo canceling MPP.
The judge repeatedly spanked Mr. Mayorkas for sloppy language in his June memo.
At one point Mr. Mayorkas said he had “questions” about how often people shunted into the MPP were discouraged from pursuing valid immigration cases, versus giving up on bogus claims. The judge, though, said it was Mr. Mayorkas’s “job to answer such questions,” rather than use the ambiguity as a reason for decision-making.
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