Undocumented Migrants Offered Another Chance to Seek Asylum
The Biden administration will allow over 30,000 people to reopen their asylum cases.
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The Joe Biden administration said on Tuesday it will give asylum-seeking migrants sent to Mexico by the Trump administration under the Remain in Mexico program another chance to apply to enter the U.S. and reopen their asylum cases, reports the Wall Street Journal. The population of people eligible to reopen their cases could exceed 30,000, according to government data. Migrants would need to apply to re-enter the U.S. through a website maintained by the U.N. refugee agency. The Remain in Mexico program, Trump administration officials said, was designed to eliminate the incentive to seek work in the U.S. while migrants waited for their immigration cases to be heard — a process that can take several years. Instead, asylum seekers were asked to wait in Mexican border cities and appear at the border several times over a span of months for their immigration hearings.
The program exposed migrants to widespread violence, extortion, and kidnapping, according to internal government reports and human-rights advocates. Immigrant advocates also said the Remain in Mexico program deprived migrants of their due process rights, as most American lawyers weren’t willing to go to Mexico to meet and represent them, and they couldn’t reasonably find help to fill out their asylum applications, which are required to be filed in English. Of the nearly 42,000 immigration cases decided under the Remain in Mexico program since 2019, 1.6 percent of migrants won asylum, according to government data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Of the migrants ordered deported, 86 percent weren’t present when a judge issued the order.
