Biden considers reinstating Trump-era asylum program he once condemned as 'inhumane'

The Biden administration is considering resuming a modified version of a controversial Trump-era program requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico to deter migration, according to a report.

The new proposal would require asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed in the United States, a cornerstone of former President Donald Trump’s harsh immigration agenda that his successor, Joe Biden, condemned as “inhumane” and suspended on his first day in office.

However, the Biden administration is looking to slightly soften the policy by providing asylum seekers with better living conditions and access to lawyers, Politico reported, citing three people familiar with the discussions.

“The administration is starting talks with Mexico in a bid to strike a balance between abiding by a federal court order and making good on the president’s campaign promises,” the report said.

A federal judge in Texas ruled last month that President Biden’s attempt to end the program — a pledge he made on the campaign trail — violated the law. The Supreme Court later also effectively revived the policy, known as Migrant Protection Protocols or MPP, when it refused to block that ruling requiring the administration to reinstate the program.

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At the time, the court’s decision appeared to have dealt a blow to President Biden’s efforts to dismantle the most contentious aspects of Trump’s immigration agenda. However, the ruling was quietly greeted by administration officials with some measure of relief.

Before that ruling, Biden’s steps to embrace migration reforms had been quickly followed by a surge of people at the southwest border of the United States. Apprehensions of migrants hit a two-decade high in July and have continued apace.

Biden’s campaign promise to overturn Trump’s restrictive immigration policies had been thwarted by a reluctant Congress and numerous legal challenges.

In 2019, Trump said he enacted the MPP as an effort to deter migrants from coming to the US and prevent them from failing to show up at immigration hearings after being released from detention.

Critics said the program endangered migrants’ lives by requiring them to wait in border cities plagued by criminal gangs, drugs and violence.

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Now the White House is saying that the administration will abide by the court’s ruling.

“Our point of view continues to be that this program was not implemented in a moral way,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week. “It is fundamentally a program we have opposed, but we are also abiding by a court order.”

Erin Thorn Vela, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which filed suit over the policy on behalf of asylum seekers with disabilities living in Mexico, said the Biden administration is misguided if it believes it can make the program “humane” or “just.”

“The incredible damage that waiting in northern Mexico does to people, the insecurity, the access to lawyers, the abysmal inhumane conditions that people live in,” she told Politico. “There’s no way that that can be delivered on. And I think they know that.”

Rights advocates are also lobbying the Mexican government not to allow the US to restart the controversial program.

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