DHS fumbles restart of Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Agents were shunting more than 1,000 people a day back across the southern border at the height of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.

Now the program is under the management of President Biden, whom a federal judge has forced to restart the Migrant Protection Protocols, the official name of the policy.

Mr. Biden is falling far short.

In January, the program enrolled just 13 people a day and ousted an average of eight people per day. That is out of nearly 5,000 encounters a day.

“No one could call this current effort to reimplement MPP an actual good-faith effort,” Rep. Clay Higgins, Louisiana Republican, told Homeland Security Department officials in a scolding at a congressional hearing this month.

Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, visited an MPP enrollment center in January. He marveled at the massive taxpayer-funded complex of six immigration courtrooms, 120 meeting rooms and other space designed to help process migrants who said they feared going back to their home countries. At the time he visited, officials had evaluated 60 people and let in 57 of them.

MPP started in January 2019 but ramped up that summer as the Trump administration grappled with a border surge.

Mexico, under threat of severe sanctions, agreed to take back more people under the program. Border Patrol arrests plummeted 70% by September, and the number of illegal immigrant families dropped even faster.

The Biden administration suspended the program early last year and in the summer moved to cancel it altogether. That opened the doors to tens of thousands of migrants stuck in Mexico under the program.

A federal judge ruled that the revocation was illegal and ordered Homeland Security to revive the program “in good faith.”

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said MPP was a critical element to solving the 2019 surge.

“Under the Trump administration, we were enrolling per day between 2,000 and 3,000 people in the MPP,” he said. “The reason why it was 2,000 to 3,000 is because that’s what we were apprehending per day. … That’s why the number of crossings dropped.”

Mr. Judd said it’s tough to square the current numbers with the judge’s demand for a good-faith effort to revive the program.

Indeed, the Biden administration has made clear that it detests the Trump-era policy.

“We disapprove of this program, and the president and the secretary have made quite clear that MPP is not aligned with this administration’s values. And actually distracts from some of the important priorities that we have that we believe will have a similar effect on reducing border flow,” said Blas Nunez-Neto, acting assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at Homeland Security.

Mr. Higgins said these types of statements undercut the administration’s claims that it is acting in good faith.

“Why would we expect DHS to legitimately comply with the court order in good faith when it’s clear that DHS leadership opposes MPP as a policy?” he said.

Mr. Lankford and Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week that the government isn’t even keeping track of the vulnerabilities migrants are citing during the interviews.

The senators said that undercuts the department’s claims that it is worried about human rights abuses against those in MPP.

“If DHS is truly concerned about the humanitarian impacts of the re-implemented MPP program, then it seems unconscionable that DHS would not keep records pertaining to the specific types of vulnerabilities exhibited by the individuals it screens under this program. These records would certainly be of interest to the Courts that have mandated DHS re-implement this program in ‘good faith’ and to the Committees in Congress to whom you report,” the senators wrote.

Biden administration officials offer a number of explanations for low enrollment.

Mr. Nunez-Neto said the comparison to the Trump years is iffy because that was before the COVID-19 pandemic and the border emergency order that allows the government to immediately oust illegal immigrants.

About half of those caught on a given day are subject to that immediate ouster.

That still leaves more than 2,500 people a day who aren’t subject to the pandemic order.

Mr. Nunez-Neto suggested that the program will grow. He said it took “a few months” for the Trump administration to ramp up MPP and the Biden team is treating the restart like a clean slate.

The government is also taking more pains to negotiate the arrangements with Mexico.

“It’s a new program. It takes a while for us to get started,” he said. “We are doing this during a pandemic, and Mexico has imposed some restrictions on how we can return people, including when and the kind of testing and quarantine that needs to be available on the Mexican side for them to accept people,” he said.

He said the program has expanded to a location in Laredo, Texas, which is evidence that the administration is acting in good faith to carry out the judge’s order.

The Remain in Mexico policy is one of several moves the Biden team has attempted but met resistance from courts.

In another ruling this month, a judge said the Biden administration broke the law by exempting illegal immigrant children from the pandemic border shutdown, known as Title 42.

Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that Homeland Security must treat unaccompanied juveniles who show up at the border like any other illegal immigrant, meaning many of them should be ousted immediately under pandemic rules.

On Friday, just before the judge’s deadline to comply, the administration issued a policy again carving unaccompanied children out of the border shutdown.

“CDC addresses the court’s concerns and has determined, after considering current public health conditions and recent developments, that expulsion of unaccompanied noncitizen children is not warranted to protect the public health,” the agency said in a statement explaining the move.

On both MPP and Title 42, the Biden administration is under extreme pressure from its political base to end the programs altogether.

Immigrant rights advocates argue that some asylum seekers with real cases are being denied a chance to make claims of protection in the U.S.