U.S. immigration courts will stop hearing cases until further notice for asylum-seekers who applied at the southern border and were returned to Mexico to await a hearing before a judge, the Trump administration announced late Monday.
“Due to circumstances resulting from COVID-19, all Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) master calendar and merit hearings presently scheduled through April 22 will be rescheduled. Neither the MPP program nor any hearings will be cancelled,” the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review said in a joint statement.
As a result of the temporary court suspension, immigrants who are living in Mexican border towns who were scheduled to appear for a hearing between Tuesday and April 22 will receive a new hearing date. At last count, Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said that 25,000 asylum-seekers were living on the border and awaiting court hearings.
The statement said the administration is “deeply committed to ensuring that individuals ‘have their day in court’ while also ensuring the health and safety of aliens, our frontline officers, immigration court professionals, and our citizens.” Immigration lawyers called for the suspension of immigration court dates due to the coronavirus pandemic. But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, said the move put people at the border at continued risk.
“People have been waiting in Mexico for months, in crowded shelters or in squalid refugee camps,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “Some have been waiting longer — through the end of January, more than 150 people had been waiting over 10 months in Mexico. We should be letting them in, not keeping them in limbo.”
The DOJ announced the temporary closure of select immigration courts last week so that people who are not detained in federal custody do not have to go to court. The number of people waiting for cases to go through the courts, including families not detained in jails, is at more than 3 million.
MPP was announced in late 2018 and rolled out across the southern border in 2019. It allows Border Patrol agents who arrest illegal immigrants, as well as Customs and Border Protection officers at ports of entry, to return asylum-seekers to Mexico while they go through legal proceedings rather than releasing them into the United States to await hearings, normally years down the road.
