The Biden administration announced this week that it will again attempt to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy, an agreement brokered by former President Donald Trump that allowed the United States to send immigrants seeking asylum back to Mexico until an immigration court could hear their claims.
The last time President Joe Biden tried to end the policy, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling ordering the administration to restart the program.
Given the severity of the immigration crisis, one would think Biden would want to keep any policy that makes the immigration system more efficient and deters large swathes of migrants from crowding the southern border.
The Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the Remain in Mexico policy, did just that. Indeed, the policy was a key reason the Trump administration was able to get hold of its own border crisis. When Trump’s immigration officials began sending migrants back over the southern border to await their court hearings, migrant detention facilities stopped being overrun and Mexican officials began taking immigration across their own border much more seriously.
Biden’s continued efforts to roll back the program make no sense. The U.S. is dealing with an unprecedented crisis that just last week culminated in tens of thousands of Haitian migrants flooding Texas’s border. Another 40,000 Haitian migrants are heading this way, according to Panamanian officials, and our border officials are no better equipped to process them now than they were last week.
What would help is if Biden reached an agreement with Mexico to stop the caravan of migrants before it reaches the border by pushing Mexico to enforce its own southern border and threatening to send every single one of the migrants back. Trump, through his Remain in Mexico plan, did exactly that, and it worked.
Biden’s unwillingness to do the same suggests he’s not actually interested in an immigration policy that works or a border that’s secure. It’s almost as if he’s trying to make the border crisis worse.
