How bad has the Biden border crisis gotten? So bad that President Joe Biden is reportedly considering embracing President Donald Trump’s signature immigration policy.
Vice is reporting that “according to three sources with knowledge of the discussions … senior officials in the Biden administration” are discussing reviving Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, more commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Vice describes MPP as “one of Trump’s hallmark immigration policies” and says the program “almost single-handedly stopped the wave of migrants at the border” in 2019. This is absolutely true.
Before 2009, all families and unaccompanied minors apprehended on the southern border were treated equally: They were all returned to their country of origin. But in 2008, Congress passed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which mandated that migrants from noncontiguous countries were to be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which would release them into the United States before they could be given a hearing in front of an immigration judge.
It took a couple of years, but migrants from countries other than Mexico eventually learned that if they were caught at the border, they would be released into the U.S. to stay as long as they wanted.
A March 2014 University of Texas at El Paso study identified this “catch and release” loophole as the reason why apprehensions of unaccompanied minors had surged between 2011 and 2013. The report further predicted the surge would turn into a flood that would overwhelm our Customs and Border Protection in the summer of 2014. And that is exactly what happened.
Using the threat of tariffs, Trump closed this loophole by getting Mexico to agree to house migrants in Mexico until their asylum cases could be heard. With their entry into the U.S. shut off, the migrant crisis ended.
But Biden ended MPP on his first day in office, and migrant apprehensions at the southern border have skyrocketed every month since then, including a 21-year high this July. Thanks to this historic surge, there are now more child migrants in custody now than there ever were under Trump.
Then, last week, a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration failed to follow the proper administrative procedures when it ended MPP. According to Vice, the Biden administration’s appeal of that judge’s ruling hinted at what a “gentler” MPP might look like under Biden: “the same legal framework but with reliable food and housing for migrants in the program, improved tracking and communication with them, and more access to attorneys who can help them prepare their claims.”
This would be a great development. Contrary to what some have claimed, the purpose of “Remain in Mexico” was never pain. The purpose was to close the “catch and release” loophole so migrants were not drawn to the southern border to make bogus asylum claims. A “gentler” MPP would do exactly that.
The Biden administration is going to face tremendous pressure from the open-borders lobby not to revive MPP. The open-borders lobby desperately wants to keep the “catch and release” loophole open. They want record numbers of migrants released into the country every month.
But as Biden’s approval numbers keep falling on immigration, crime, the economy, and now on foreign policy, he is also beginning to feel pressure in the other direction to bring order back to the border.
It is a long shot, but it is possible Biden could be forced to bring back MPP.
