A court cleared the last legal hurdle for the administration to end the policy, which denies U.S. entry to migrants seeking asylum while their claims are pending
The Biden administration said it would wind down use of a controversial immigration policy known as Remain in Mexico after a federal court removed a final procedural hurdle preventing it from doing so on Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday evening it wouldn’t place anyone new into the program, which requires migrants seeking asylum to live in northern Mexican border cities during their U.S. court proceedings. Migrants currently living in Mexico under the program will be allowed to enter the U.S. at their next court date, when they can choose where to live and finish pursuing their asylum claims in local immigration courts around the country.
“DHS is committed to ending the court-ordered implementation of MPP in a quick, and orderly, manner,” the department said.
The latest development for the program comes as the Biden administration faces pressure over border crossings ahead of the midterm elections. U.S. Border Patrol agents made 191,898 arrests at the southwest border in June. Since the start of the budget year in October, agents have made roughly 1.6 million arrests.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Capital Journal
Scoops, analysis and insights driving Washington from the WSJ's D.C. bureau.
About 5,000 migrants were enrolled in the Remain in Mexico program between December and the end of May, according to government data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
First created in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump, the program was intended as a deterrence measure against migrants crossing the border illegally into the U.S. to seek asylum. It forced them to live in Mexico rather than the U.S. for the duration of their claims, which can frequently take more than five years to complete.
Republicans have argued for the Biden administration to keep the policy in place, with Texas and Missouri suing to prevent the lifting of Remain in Mexico. The Supreme Court ruled June 30 in the administration’s favor in that lawsuit, allowing the federal government to end the program as Mr. Biden had intended early on.
Administration lawyers privately felt that they couldn’t immediately end the program despite the high court win because of a procedural technicality, according to people familiar with their thinking. The lower court in Texas hadn’t yet lifted its injunction blocking them from doing so. The lawyers argued internally that even sending no more new migrants back to Mexico could still technically be a violation of that court’s injunction.
On Monday, the lower court lifted its injunction, freeing the administration’s hands.
Later on Monday, Texas and Missouri filed an amended complaint and asked the judge in Texas to bar the government from ending the program for now. While the initial lawsuit was ongoing, the Biden administration scrapped its original policy memo ending the program and replaced it with a new one. The second memo, issued late last October, is what the states are now challenging.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that ending the policy altogether was a matter of debate inside the administration. Some White House officials felt that dropping it could harm continuing immigration negotiations with Mexico, whose government preferred to see it stay in place, the people familiar with the matter said. Most other immigration-policy officials, including at the Department of Homeland Security, favored ending the policy altogether.
Meanwhile, immigration advocates grew vocally angry with the administration as weeks passed after the Supreme Court’s ruling and the administration appeared not to be planning for a wind-down of the program.
Refugees International, one of several groups that had been pressing the Biden administration to end the program again, applauded the late Monday announcement.
“We hope this marks the beginning of the end of dangerous externalization policies…and to fulfilling a promise to rebuild a fair asylum system,” said Yael Schacher, the group’s deputy director for the Americas and Europe.