An official in President Joe Biden’s administration told CBS News on Thursday the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will comply with a court order to revive President Donald Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” program.
The claimed policy shift comes after federal judges in Texas and the U.S. Supreme Court directed DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas to comply with federal law. The law requires that all migrants be detained until their asylum claims are decided by immigration courts, but DHS has not enforced it since 2009.
The DHS decision also comes after Mayorkas and his aides allowed roughly 500,000 wage-cutting economic migrants into the U.S. workplaces and communities — and while Mayorkas works to import at least 100,000 poor and often illiterate Afghans into Americans’ society.
CBS reported September 9:
The Biden administration is restarting a Trump-era border program that requires migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum requests are reviewed … a top U.S. official told CBS News.
Due to a federal court order that the Supreme Court refused to suspend, the Biden administration is required to reinstate the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which 70,000 non-Mexican asylum-seekers were instructed to wait outside the U.S.
The Trump program was also called the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), and it blocked the flow of migrants from late 2019 into the United States.
The Remain in Mexico program works by cutting the supply of U.S. dollars to the coyotes, cartels, and their pro-migration allies in the United States.
People from Haiti who seeking U.S. asylum wait for flyers explaining new asylum policies outside the El Chaparral border crossing on February 19, 2021 in Tijuana, Mexico. A small group out of an estimated 25,000 asylum seekers with active cases were allowed into the U.S., a Biden move to end the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ immigration policy. (Mario Tama/Getty)
The money supply was opened in 2009 by President Barack Obama allowed asylum seekers to avoid detention and get U.S. jobs and wages while they waited for their asylum hearing. Once people in Central American recognized they could get jobs while waiting for their asylum hearing, roughly three million migrants promised some of their families’ future U.S. wages to the coyotes and cartels in exchange for being smuggled through Mexico and into Americans’ jobs.
The CBS report continued:
DHS has yet to return asylum-seekers to Mexico under the rule, the department confirmed on Thursday. But the department’s policy office has been working on logistical plans to facilitate its “expeditious reimplementation,” including cost estimates, according to an internal memo obtained by CBS News.
The DHS official’s promise to restart the program cannot be trusted.
Mayorkas and his top deputies have long pushed pro-migration policies, regardless of the lethal damage done to many American families and their communities by the flood of cheap migrant labor.
For example, Mayorkas told an audience in June that he would put the “dignity” of foreign migrants “foremost in our efforts,” and has declared his “highest priority” to be the reunification of legally deported illegal migrants with families members who are still pursuing asylum claims in the United States. “Our highest priority is to reunite these families … it’s about restoring the conscience of our government,” Mayorkas said in a May 4 appearance on MSNBC.
Migrants and human rights activists protest against U.S. and Mexican migration policies at the San Ysidro crossing port, in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on the border with the U.S., on October 21, 2020, amid the new coronavirus pandemic. ( GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty)
Mayorkas frequently repeats the 1960s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative that easy immigration is part of “the value[s] of this nation.”
On September 9, for example, Mayorkas told suggested to attendees at a National Press Club meeting that the current record-breaking migrant inflow is similar to prior years:
We have experienced surges many times before in our nation’s history. And in fact in the 21st century, 2005, 2009, 2014, 2019, and so on. We have experienced over the last four years prior to this administration a very different approach to irregular migration that defined the approach of the administration that preceded it.
The CBS report included some of that criticism. For example, the unidentified official told CBS the policy kept wage-seeking migrants in “inhumane” conditions. In reality, the policy prevented reduced the flow of migrants through the deadly trek to American jobs dangled by Mayorkas’ pro-migration allies.
Mayorkas arrived in the United States as a Cuban child refugee, and he has repeatedly slammed Trump’s lower-migration policies. But Trump’s policies raised Americans’ wages and also reduced the crime and traumas inflicted on poor migrants — and the damage done to their home countries.
Mayorkas frequently repeats the myth that easy immigration is part of “the value of this nation” — despite the huge cost to migrants on their “Hunger Games” trek to Mayorkas’s border. For example, he told his press club audience that “we are very focused in the Department of Homeland Security to restoring the values of this nation and … [on] the individuals who seek refuge in the United States.”
The MPP program is bad for migrants, Mayorkas told CBS September 7, without mentioning if it is good for Americans:
The Matamoros camp [in Mexico] where we saw individuals living in squalor who don’t have the ability to work, where the conditions are inhumane. We just saw the camp in Reynosa similarly situated. It is not in the best interests of individuals who are seeking humanitarian relief under United States law.
The MPP program is also hated by U.S. immigration lawyers and by the pro-migration progressives who try to extract migrants from poor countries to serve investors and employers in the U.S. economy. For example, the CBS report cited opposition from many pro-migration advocates, including DHS officials who judge the migrants’ demands for asylum:
“The reinstatement of MPP will place thousands of asylum seekers in harm’s way and deny them the right to a fair hearing of their claims,” Michael Knowles, president of AFGE Local 1924, which represents U.S. asylum and refugee officers, told CBS News.
Another U.S. asylum officer who interviewed migrants returned to Mexico during the Trump administration said he would speak out if instructed to participate in the policy again. The asylum officer said he interviewed migrants who recounted stories of being kidnapped, raped, mugged and extorted in Mexico.
“It’s not a process. It is an out and out deterrent. It is a brick in the wall,” the asylum officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, told CBS News.
The CBS article did not quote any supporters of the popular program.
Some GOP legislators have pushed Biden to comply with the judges’ orders:
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce. They are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and against the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
Labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
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