The Biden administration began hitting a hammer on a cornerstone of former President Trump’s immigration policy as they let the first asylum seekers into the country on Friday.
Under President Biden’s new rules, 25 asylum seekers will remain in the US on Friday pending their hearing, instead of staying in Mexico, as they had to 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 destination, according to Michael Hopkins, chief executive officer of San Diego’s Jewish Family Service, who announced the effort helps.
The US is expected to release 25 asylum seekers per day in California. Migrants are also expected to be admitted into Brownsville and El Paso, Texas starting next week.
There are an estimated 25,000 people with active cases in the program; hundreds of them are professional decisions.
Officials have warned migrants not to flood the border as the Trump-era program is slowly being phased out and instead registering online early next week through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“This latest move is another step in our commitment to reform immigration policies that are inconsistent with our country’s values,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement last week.
Friday’s developments at the border are the start of the fulfillment of a campaign promise by President Biden to end policies known as “Migrant Protection Protocols,” which Trump has implemented to a wave of asylum seekers. to turn.
On January 9, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s asylum rules.
Proponents of the MPP program said it has reduced the flow of migrants heading to the border and abolished false asylum claims. Critics said the program was cruel to refugees in need of protection and intended to close the border.
Since the start in January 2019, approximately 70,000 asylum seekers have been part of the program.
Anyone entering the US has a legal right to apply for asylum, which is granted to people fleeing persecution, under US asylum law and international treaty obligations.
The White House said last week that migrants with active cases in the US would be released with announcements to appear before immigration courts.
Now that the asylum system is returning to its former way of working, many questions remain. It is unclear how Central Americans rejected in Mexico will make it back to the border after returning home, and there is no timeline to address all backlogs.
Mexico’s National Guard said on Saturday that it had detained 108 Central American migrants who went to the US without papers to be in Mexico.
In recent weeks, thousands of Central American migrants have been heading north after successive hurricanes displaced more than half a million people in the region late last year.
According to Hopkins, Jewish Family Service in California, a coalition of nongovernmental groups called the San Diego Rapid Response Network, provides hotel rooms, health screenings, and arranging and paying for transportation and food for the migrants.
“We will make sure they are healthy and can travel well,” Hopkins said in an interview.
Edwin Gomez, who said his wife and son were murdered by gangs in El Salvador after failing to pay their extortion demands, was eager to join his 15-year-old daughter in Texas.
“Who thought this 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 10-year-old son braved freezing temperatures in northern Mexico and tried to stay warm in a makeshift tent town made of tarpaulin. Despite Artic’s explosion, Rivera was encouraged by the news.
Rivera was hopeful that she would live with her sister in Los Angeles and wait for her court date there.
“We have faith in God that we can enter,” she said Wednesday. “We’ve already spent enough time here.”
In the tent town of Matamoros, where Rivera and about 1,000 other migrants waited, medical workers were cautiously optimistic.
“People are incredibly hopeful that this is their chance to come across, but there is also a lot of fear and fear that they could somehow miss something if they do the wrong thing and aren’t in the right place at the right time ., ”Said Andrea Leiner, spokeswoman for Global Response Management.
With pole wires