Since taking office in late January, the Biden Administration has taken a number of steps to reverse the deterring and sometimes outright-repressive immigration and border control policies of the Trump era, including a new path to citizenship for undocumented migrants, protections for DACA recipients, and family reunification. Earlier this month, the Administration announced it is restoring the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which will allow asylum seekers into the country while their requests for asylum are being processed. Together with the effort to ramp up the processing of asylum claims, the announcements mark a clear reversal of the Trump Administration’s policies aimed at preventing asylum seekers’ entry to the US.
One of the major announcements concerns the so-called Remain in Mexico policy, a 2019 program within the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) enacted by the Trump Administration to face the ‘security and humanitarian crisis on the Southern border’. MPPs forced individuals seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings. Human rights organisations have deemed such requirements inhumane and in contravention of American duties under international law, whereby the US is committed not to return asylum seekers to places where they might be at risk. The Administration plans to speed up the processing of up to 300 cases per day; with the number of persons enrolled in the program exceeding 25,000, the timeframe for when these people will be allowed in the US to wait for their asylum hearings is not clear.
The announcement of new policies, albeit leaving room for optimism, should be taken with caution. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security has claimed that although the Government ‘is committed to rebuilding a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system,’ this ‘should not be interpreted as an opening for people to migrate irregularly to the United States.’ Likewise, the Administration is trying to convey the idea that new policies don’t mean the border is open, and ‘now is not the time to come.’ The Mexican Government has joined those calls, in an attempt to combat the rumors, fueled partly by smugglers, that it is possible to enter the US seamlessly now. The Mexican Government is, in turn, struggling to limit the arrival of Central American migrants from its Southern border.
The pandemic has significantly deteriorated the conditions of thousands of asylum seekers that have been waiting in Mexico for months, living in unsafe encampments and at risk of cartel violence and others preying on the vulnerability of migrants trapped indefinitely in Mexico. The change in the American Administration has brought hope to thousands stranded in the borders; however, ending the Migrant Protection Protocols of the Trump era should be the necessary first step in the dismantling of decades-long deterrence policies that have left thousands dead and disappeared and separated families and created dangerous standards in refugee admissions. While there are reasons to be optimistic, it still remains unclear whether the Biden Administration will actively take a more humane approach at the borders, shifting away from ‘death-as-deterrence’ policies that feed into the booming border control industrial complex and centering
Amalia Ordóñez Vahí was previously a Fulbright scholar at New York University, where she graduated with an MA in International Relations. She spent most of 2020 interning at the Open Society Foundations' Justice Initiative working on cases related to COVID-19, human rights, and detention. She has also interned in refugee representation at Human Rights First, and holds an MA in Conference Interpreting from the University of Manchester. She is currently a cultural diplomacy fellow in New York, while she pursues an MA in Human Rights.