Statement for the Record | Remain in Mexico
Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee
Hearing on Remain in Mexico
January 16, 2025
Refugees International is an independent non-governmental organization that advocates for lifesaving assistance and protection for forcibly displaced people worldwide, including asylum seekers at the United States border.
Refugees International conducted fifteen research trips to the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor the previous implementation of the Remain in Mexico program (the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP). Our team spoke to dozens of asylum seekers in the program with extremely strong refugee claims, visited insufficient and dangerous shelters and makeshift encampments lacking services on the Mexican side of the border where they were waiting, and attended master calendar and individual asylum hearings at each of the courts handling the Remain in Mexico docket. Refugees International documented the way the program made it impossible to get a fair hearing, and in practice returned asylum seekers – including women1 and children – to precarity, danger, and grave harm (in reports,2 statements,3 articles,4 and testimony5). Refugees International also wrote an amicus brief6 about why Remain in Mexico violated U.S. refugee law.
A restart of this program would be a disastrous decision that will drive insecurity at the border, waste U.S. resources, undermine the U.S. asylum system, empower traffickers, strain diplomatic relations, and further a humanitarian crisis on our border.
An Arbitrary and Wasteful Program
Administration of the Remain in Mexico program was not only cruel, but arbitrary and wasteful of DHS resources. It never applied to the vast majority of people arriving at the border, members of the same family with the same asylum claim were separated (with some placed in MPP and others pursuing their cases in the United States), and required constant coordination with the Mexican government on returns. This meant DHS sometimes flew asylum seekers laterally to other sectors to return them to Mexico or detained them for weeks until Mexico agreed to their return.
Placement in the program had nothing to do with the merits of a person’s claim, but made it extremely difficult for meritorious claimants to be granted asylum. Each person’s Remain in Mexico case required anywhere from one to five immigration court hearings to resolve. Proceedings were prolonged or cut short because of the difficulties arising from respondents being homeless in Mexico – so unable to get notice of hearings, access counsel, gather evidence and translate documents, or travel safely to ports for court hearings. More yet were delayed and complicated by overwhelmed dockets in El Paso and San Diego immigration court and mechanical problems in expensive high-tech port tent courts in Laredo and Brownsville.
Each time that asylum seekers in MPP entered the United States for a court hearing, they could assert a fear of return to Mexico and be given a “non-refoulement interview” with an asylum officer. Many people who expressed fear were never referred for a non-refoulement interview, thousands of people in the program had repeated interviews, and still many of the interviews proved ineffective – since those returned to Mexico after the interviews were frequently kidnapped and ransomed, robbed, extorted, raped, or subject to other violence. Immigration judges and asylum officers handling MPP cases were diverted from handling asylum cases already in the backlog.
Endangering People Seeking Safety and Driving Insecurity
If Remain in Mexico were reinstituted, the result would likely be increased insecurity at the border and more unauthorized crossings. At least a third of the people placed in the original program ended up crossing the border unauthorized rather than wait in Mexico, including at least 700 children sent over the border alone by their parents.7 It also included a Guatemalan asylum seeker Refugees International interviewed after he was returned to Mexico. Soon after that interview, he was attacked on the streets of Ciudad Juarez. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic made it even more difficult for him to find food and shelter while he waited for his hearing, which was then indefinitely postponed. Desperate, he hired a smuggler to take him across the border through the desert and died en route.
Currently, there are hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers waiting in Mexico for CBP One appointments, including many in the south, where there has been a dramatic increase in kidnapping, extortion, and violent attacks by criminal organizations.8 Should the CBP One application be canceled and Remain in Mexico restarted, increasing numbers of asylum seekers will move northward and be made to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities, empowering criminal organizations, cartels, and traffickers near the border. Negotiations between the United States and Mexico over the program would, just as it did previously, divert significant U.S. resources and diplomacy, to the continued detriment of negotiations on trade and security collaboration.9
A Better Way Ahead
Rather than promote reimplementation of a failed policy that was harmful, wasteful, and dangerous, the committee should hold hearings on how Congress can increase capacity at ports of entry to process asylum seekers in an orderly way, authorize and fund a fair and efficient asylum adjudication process, and pass legislation that would coordinate reception and support interior communities receiving asylum seekers and allow asylum seekers to work to fill workforce needs.
Endnotes
[1] Yael Schacher and Savi Arvey, “Women in the Remain in Mexico Program,” Ms. Magazine, July 1, 2022.
[2] Yael Schacher, “MPP as a Microcosm: What’s Wrong with Asylum at the Border and How to Fix It,” February 11, 2022.
[3] Yael Schacher, “Examining the Human Rights and Legal Implications of DHS’ Remain in Mexico Policy,” November 19, 2019.
[4] Yael Schacher, “Remain in Mexico: A Year of Deliberate Endangerment and Evasion,” January 29, 2020.
[5] Yael Schacher, “Remain in Mexico Policy is Undermining Asylum and Ensangering Asylum Seekers,” August 22, 2019.
[6] BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL, Immigration Law Center et. al. v. Chad Wolf et. al. (Dec 2020)
[7] Camilo Mantoya Galvez, “700 children crossed the U.S. border alone after being required to wait in Mexico with their families,” CBS News, Jan 15, 2021.
[8] Emily Green, ““Held for Ransom in Animal Pens, Migrants Face Mass Kidnappings as U.S. and Mexico Ramp Up Enforcement,” Propublica, November. 1, 2024.
[9] H.R. 1325 Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act; S. 4861, Destination Reception Assistance Act