After months of advocating for the end of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), known as the Remain in Mexico program, the Florence Project is pleased by the news that the Biden administration has issued a second termination memo to end this unlawful and immoral program. As the Florence Project and other legal and humanitarian advocates said when they walked out of a meeting with the administration regarding the resumption of the program, there is no way to make MPP humane. We are heartened that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged that reality in today’s memo. This policy has been irredeemable since its inception, and Secretary Mayorkas’ memo states what advocates have been saying for nearly three years: MPP’s impact on human life is intolerable, and there is no version of the program that is not cruel, dangerous, and downright inhumane.
Despite this acknowledgement, the administration still appears to be moving forward full steam with restarting MPP, unless a court injunction calling on them to make good faith efforts to reinstate the program is vacated. The very language that Secretary Mayorkas uses to describe MPP in this memo highlights why standing up even a modified version of the program remains inhumane and unacceptable. There is no safe, lawful, or humane way to carry out this policy.
“This termination memo is welcome news and a step in the right direction,” said Laura St. John, Florence Project Legal Director. “However, the Biden administration still has many steps to go to live up to their promises to restore a safe, orderly asylum system. There is no excuse for the administration allowing this program — and others like the illegal Title 42 policy — to continue for 10 months since they took office. This memo acknowledges the untold harm that the elimination of avenues to asylum has caused, but we need more than acknowledgement; we need people to be protected. We call on the administration to use every avenue available to them to speedily and fully eliminate this program as well as Title 42, vacate court orders requiring MPP’s implementation, and ensure that no similar policies can ever be used in the future.”
Simply put, there is no gentler, fairer, or more just way to send people back to Mexico while they pursue asylum. The Biden administration must act much more expediently to end all Trump-era policies that restrict access to protection in the United States and focus its efforts and considerable resources allocated to immigration enforcement to build a safe, orderly, and just asylum process.