The Biden administration has begun to take a hammer at a cornerstone of former President Trump’s immigration policy as they admitted the country’s first asylum seekers on Friday.
President Biden’s new rules allow 25 asylum seekers to stay in the US on Friday while awaiting their trial, instead of staying in Mexico, as they had to do under the previous government.
The migrants tested negative for COVID-19 and were taken to San Diego hotels to be quarantined before traveling by plane or bus to their final destinations, according to Michael Hopkins, chief executive officer of San Diego Jewish Family Service, who the effort helps.
The US is expected to release 25 asylum seekers a day in California. Migrants are also expected to be hired next week in Brownsville and El Paso, Texas.
There are an estimated 25,000 people with active cases in the program; several hundred of them are appealing for decisions.
Officials have warned migrants not to flood the border as the Trump-era program is slowly being phased out and rather registered online next week via the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“This latest action is another step in our commitment to reform immigration policies that are not in line with the values of our country,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement last week.
Friday’s developments at the border mark the beginning of the fulfillment of a campaign promise by President Biden to end the policy known as ‘migrant protection protocols’, which Trump set up to reverse a boom in asylum seekers.
On January 9, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s asylum rules.
Proponents of the MPP program say it reduces the flow of migrants to the border, eliminating false asylum claims. Critics said the program was cruel to refugees in need of protection and intended to close the border.
About 70,000 asylum seekers have been part of the program since it began in January 2019.
Anyone entering the U.S. has a legal right to apply for asylum, which is granted to people fleeing persecution, under U.S. asylum law and international treaty obligations.
The White House said last week that active-duty migrants in the U.S. would be released with notices to appear in immigration courts.
As the asylum system returns to its previous mode of operation, there are still many questions. It is unclear how Central Americans deported to Mexico will return after returning to the border, and there is no timeline to work through all the backward affairs.
The national guard in Mexico on Saturday said it had detained 108 Central American migrants who were on their way to the U.S. without documentation to be in Mexico.
In recent weeks, thousands of migrants in Central America have been heading north after back-to-back hurricanes displaced more than half a million people in the region by the end of last year.
In California, Jewish Family Service – a coalition of non-governmental groups called the San Diego Rapid Response Network – offers hotel rooms, health check-ups and arranges and pays for transportation for the migrants if necessary, according to Hopkins.
“We will make sure they are healthy and well traveled,” Hopkins said in an interview.
Edwin Gomez, who said his wife and son were killed by gangs in El Salvador after failing to pay their extortion claims, was eager to join his 15-year-old daughter in Texas.
“Who would have thought that this day would come?” Gomez, 36, said Wednesday during a border crossing in Tijuana. “I never thought it would happen.”
Enda Marisol Rivera of El Salvador and her ten-year-old son braved stormy conditions in northern Mexico trying to stay warm in a makeshift tent city made of sails. Despite the Artic explosion, Rivera was encouraged by the news.
Rivera was hopeful that she would be allowed to live with her sister in Los Angeles and wait for her court date there.
“We believe in God that we will be allowed,” she said Wednesday. “We’ve spent enough time here.”
In the tent city of Matamoros, where Rivera and about 1,000 other migrants were waiting, medical workers were cautiously optimistic.
‘People are incredibly hopeful that this is their chance to get over it, but there is also a lot of anxiety and fear that they may somehow miss out if they do the wrong thing and not at the right time at the right time. time is not. , ”Said Andrea Leiner, spokesperson for Global Response Management.
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