The United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of President Joe Biden ending the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while they wait for their case to be heard, rather than being allowed to enter the United States and wait for their hearings.
Conservative Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the three liberal justices, with the court ruling 5-4.
The program is officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), and according to Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said the policy resulted in a 75 percent drop in illegal border crossings during former President Donald Trump’s term in office and called it “the most significant game-changer” in immigration policy.
Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies said “That’s on the outer limits of the estimates, [which] are coming from the American intelligence community. … This is what they’re expecting,” Bensman said. “they’re saying it could be as low as 12,000 a day. But to give you some context, we’re at [6,000] and 7,000 a day right now, which is just too big to handle at present.”
The very first thing that Biden did when he took office was suspending the MPP and it was officially terminated by the Department of Homeland Security in June 2021, the administration restarted the policy, however, in early December 2021 after a lower court in El Paso, Texas ordered it.
The ruling came after Texas and Missouri sued the Biden administration for ending the MPP, arguing that the administration’s actions had made the situation at the southern border far worse, and U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk agreed and ruled on Aug. 14, 2021, that the Biden administration had to revive the program.
Initially, the Supreme Court declined to get involved when the Biden administration filed an emergency motion requesting a stay of the lower court judge’s order on August 24, 2021 – only to change their mind after the Department of Justice asked the court to hear the case on the grounds that the lower court’s ruling was made in error.
A federal judge had ruled in May that Biden must abandon his plans to end Title 42, also a Trump-era policy that requires US Border agents to expel noncitizens who are stopped at the border and do not possess the correct travel documents.
The policy resulted in an estimated 1.8 million people being kept outside of the United States while waiting for their asylum claims to be heard in court.
During the Trump presidency, “everybody [who] gets caught crossing the border goes back immediately to Mexico. That drove the numbers down to kind of historic low levels,” Bensman said.
According to Bensman, although Biden was forced to keep Title 42, “huge exemptions in it for family groups and unaccompanied minors, that … created the mass migration crisis that we have today.”
Since Biden took office, the southern border has been awash with illegal crossing into the US and some are simply disappearing once they get here – between 12,000 and 18,000 illegal migrants cross the southern border every day.
The single biggest problem with asylum seekers and immigrants having to wait for their court hearings is that they have to wait far too long. If we took the money now being used to feed and house these immigrants and hired a lot more immigration judges, we could process them through or tell them to leave in a matter of days after they arrive. Depending on who’s numbers are used, acceptance rate for asylum is somewhere between 10% and 31%, so the majority of asylum seekers do not have valid cause to come here. Perhaps we need to post our requirements internationally, so those unhappy with their homelands would know beforehand whether or not they would be welcome here.