The Biden Administration began taking a hammer to a cornerstone of former President Trump’s immigration policy as it allowed the first asylum seekers in the country on Friday.
President Biden’s new rules allow 25 asylum seekers to stay in the United States on Friday while awaiting their hearing, instead of staying in Mexico, as they had to do under the previous administration.
The migrants tested negative for COVID-19 and were taken to San Diego hotels to be quarantined before traveling by plane or bus to their final destinations, according to Michael Hopkins, executive director of the Jewish Family Service in San Diego. Diego, who is helping with the effort.
The U.S. is expected to release 25 asylum seekers a day in California. Migrants are also expected to enter Brownsville and El Paso, Texas, starting next week.
It is estimated that there are 25,000 people with active cases in the program; several hundred of them are attractive decisions.
Officials have warned migrants not to flood the border, as the Trump-era program is slowly being phased out and instead registered online through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the early days. from next week.
“This latest action is a further step in our commitment to reforming immigration policies that do not conform to our nation’s values,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement last week.
Friday’s events at the border are the beginning of the fulfillment of a campaign promise by President Biden to end the policy known as the “Protocols for the Protection of Migrants,” which Trump implemented to reverse a wave of applicants. of asylum.
On January 9, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s asylum rules.
Proponents of the MPP program said it reduced the influx of migrants heading to the border and eliminated false asylum claims. Critics said the program was cruel to refugees in need of protection and intended to close the border.
Some 70,000 asylum seekers have been part of the program since it began in January 2019.
Anyone entering the U.S. has a legal right to seek asylum, which is granted to people fleeing persecution, in accordance with U.S. asylum law and the obligations of international treaties.
The White House said last week that immigrants with active cases would be released in the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration courts.
As the asylum system returns to its previous method of operation, many questions remain. It is unclear how the Central Americans who were deported to Mexico will return to the border after returning home, and there is no schedule in place to work out all the backlog cases.
The Mexican National Guard said Saturday it arrested 108 Central American migrants heading to the U.S. without documentation to stay in Mexico.
In recent weeks, thousands of Central American immigrants have headed north after consecutive hurricanes late last year displaced more than half a million people in the region.
In California, Jewish Family Service – a coalition of non-governmental groups called the San Diego Rapid Response Network – provides hotel rooms, health tests and organizes and pays for transportation and food for migrants if needed, according to Hopkins.
“We will make sure they are healthy and in good shape to travel,” Hopkins said in an interview.
Edwin Gomez, who said his wife and son were gang-murdered in El Salvador after he could not pay his extortion lawsuits, was eager to join his 15-year-old daughter in Texas.
“Who thought that day would come?” Gomez, 36, said Wednesday at a border crossing in Tijuana. “I never thought it would happen.”
Enda Marisol Rivera of El Salvador and her ten-year-old son have been facing temperatures below the cold snaps in northern Mexico, trying to stay warm in a makeshift tent city made of tarpaulins. Despite the Artic explosion, Rivera cheered with the news.
Rivera hoped he would be allowed to come live with his sister in Los Angeles and wait for his court date.
“We have faith in God that we will be allowed to enter,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve been here long enough.”
In the tent city of Matamoros, where Rivera and about 1,000 other migrants were waiting, medical workers were cautious with optimism.
“People have an incredible hope that this is their chance to get around, but there’s also a lot of anxiety and fear that somehow if they do things wrong and they’re not in the right place at the right time, they can be lost, ”said Andrea Leiner, a spokeswoman for Global Response Management.
With publishing cables