Supreme Court hears case to repeal ‘Remain in Mexico’

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a case that could have major implications for President Joe Biden’s approach to immigration enforcement at the border, with justices deciding the legality of a Trump-era policy known as “Remain in Mexico”.

Officially called “Migrant Protection Protocols,” or MPPs, the policy was created to send unauthorized immigrants, including asylum seekers, back to Mexico while their cases are processed in immigration court. Human rights monitors and immigrant advocacy organizations have documented high rates of kidnapping, extortion, and violence in the areas that immigrants were forced to wait.

a university of california san diego report of more than 600 asylum seekers subject to the MPP program, about a quarter of them reported receiving violent threats, about half of which resulted in physical violence, beatings, and robbery.

After Biden tried to formally end “Remain in Mexico” last year, a federal court ordered the government to reinstate it, siding with Texas and Missouri, which sued the government for allegedly violating the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

While the INA says the Department of Homeland Security “shall” detain unauthorized noncitizens pending immigration proceedings, it also allows their release on a case-by-case basis. Congress has never given any administration enough resources to stop everyone who has tried to cross the border without legal documentation.

But Texas and Missouri argue that the Biden administration has been indiscriminately releasing immigrants without applying proper evaluation on a case-by-case basis.

As a result, “Remain in Mexico” has continued under court order even though just over 3,000 migrants have been subjected to it since December, according to DHS.

The number of encounters on the southwest border recently topped 1 million since the start of budget year 2022, a 20-year record, though that doesn’t mean there is a record number of unauthorized immigrants.

The same week the end of Title 42 was announced, administration officials said they were bracing for an influx of migrants at the border that could top a record 18,000 apprehensions a day. But it’s not clear whether those estimates account for repeat offenders.

Under Title 42, migrants can make repeated attempts to cross the border to present a full asylum case.

The recidivism rate for illegal border crossings continues to remain at a high level as it has during the implementation of Title 42 restrictions. Last month, 28% of those who attempted to cross made at least one previous attempt in a year. . That means many of those migrants’ attempts were considered multiple “encounters” by Border Patrol.

The year before Title 42 was implemented, the recidivism rate was a fraction of the current trend. Only 7% had attempted to cross more than once.

If the administration stops using the MPP and Title 42, which it plans to end next month, Republicans and career border enforcement officials say the country will lose vital tools to deter illegal entries.

Republicans and critics of Biden have attributed the attempt to reduce and repeal “Remain in Mexico” to the migratory increases seen at the border in recent years. However, MPP enrollments dropped significantly at the start of the global pandemic in early 2020 and its use was essentially superseded by the Trump administration’s implementation of Title 42, which has been used more than 1.8 million times to quickly return migrants to Mexico.

The Biden administration plans to end expedited Title 42 removals on May 23 and instead process all migrants under pre-pandemic rules that allow greater access for migrants to file humanitarian protection claims. . That move, a return to the same policy employed by the Trump administration before the pandemic, is expected to result in more immigrants being released into the US with orders to appear at a future court date. GPS ankle monitors and parole-like checks are often required as conditions of release.

The return to pre-pandemic immigration processing has immigration hardliners worried that more immigrants will attempt an invalid claim, flooding the administrative adjudication system and stretching federal law enforcement resources beyond capacity.

Devin Dwyer of ABC News contributed to this report.