The Mexican foreign secretariat announced on Thursday that the ¨Remain in Mexico¨ program, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), would restart on December 6 and that once it is again fully operational, people would be returned to Mexico via seven border crossings in the US states of California, Arizona and Texas.
Mexico, on the other hand, called for a series of conditions to accept such an implementation, including guarantees asylum seekers will have access to legal advice and their cases will be processed within 180 days, a US official was quoted as saying by The Washington Post.
¨Remain in Mexico¨ program was adopted in 2019 under former President Donald Trump and forces undocumented immigrants to remain on the other side of the US border while awaiting for the immigration hearing results.
Trump´s administration used this rule to deport over 60,000 asylum seekers across the border to Mexico, where they were often targeted by criminal gangs, extortionists and kidnappers.
When President Joe Biden took the office in January 2021, one of his first executive orders was to reverse that program as considered “inhumane”, although deportations continued to be covered by Title 42 of the immigration law.
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