Trump Launches 'Remain In Mexico' Program Sending Asylum Seekers Back Across The Border To Await Their U.S. Hearings, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That People Fleeing Danger Were Doing So Successfully

WASHINGTON. The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday the creation of the Migrant Protection Protocols, a policy requiring asylum seekers who arrive at the southern border to wait inside Mexico while their cases proceed through United States immigration courts, resolving a long-standing concern that people fleeing danger had been permitted to do so successfully.

Under the program, which the administration has titled "Remain in Mexico," a migrant who presents at a U.S. port of entry and requests protection will be interviewed, handed a notice to appear at a hearing scheduled months or sometimes more than a year in the future, and then walked back across the border to await that date in Mexican cities that the State Department's own travel advisories place among the most dangerous in the Western Hemisphere. Officials characterized the change as a routine procedural adjustment, noting that the asylum process would continue exactly as before, with the sole modification being the physical location of the human being requesting it.

"The previous system had a flaw, which is that a person who said they feared for their life was then allowed to be somewhere their life was not in danger," said one official familiar with the rollout. "Migrant Protection Protocols correct that. The protection is the hearing. The hearing is in eleven months. Until then, the applicant is protected by the date printed on their paperwork."

The same official confirmed that the program's name had been chosen deliberately, and that the protection it referenced was understood internally to be conditional, future tense, and unrelated to the months the applicant would spend in the interim. Roughly 70,000 people would ultimately be enrolled, a population that included large numbers of families with small children, and the government would construct tent courthouses in Brownsville and Laredo, Texas, so that judges could hear the cases of people the United States had declined to let stand on the same side of the river as the courthouse.

By the program's conclusion, the advocacy organization Human Rights First would document more than 1,500 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, and violent assault against migrants returned to Mexico under the policy, a figure the administration noted did not appear anywhere in the text of the Migrant Protection Protocols and was therefore outside the program's stated scope. The overwhelming majority of enrollees would attend their hearings without a lawyer, and the overwhelming majority would lose.

At press time, DHS had clarified that any applicant kidnapped, assaulted, or killed while waiting in Mexico would remain fully eligible to appear at their originally scheduled hearing.