The Biden administration began to take a hammer to the cornerstone of former President Trump’s immigration policy, as on Friday he allowed the first asylum seekers in the country.
President Biden’s new rules allowed 25 refugees to remain in the US on Friday as they awaited their hearing instead of remaining in Mexico, as they had to do under the previous administration.
The migrants tested negative for COVID-19 and were taken to quarantine before traveling by plane or bus to hotels in San Diego, according to Michael Hopkins, CEO of Jewish Family Services, San Diego, which helped the effort Has been doing.
The US hopes to release 25 asylum seekers per day in California. Migrants are also expected to move to Brownsville and El Paso, Texas from next week.
The program has an estimated 25,000 people with active cases; Several hundred of them are appealing the verdict.
Authorities have warned not to flood the border as the Trump-era program gradually ended and instead register online through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees early next week.
“This latest action is another step in our commitment to reform immigration policies that do not align with our nation’s values,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement last week.
Friday’s developments at the border are the beginning of the fulfillment of a campaign promise by President Biden to end a policy known as the “Migrant Security Protocol,” which Trump implemented to spark a surge of asylum-seekers Was.
On January 9, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s asylum rules.
Advocates of the MPP program said that it reduced the flood of migrants going to the border, and dismissed false asylum claims. Critics said the program was brutal for the protection of refugees and was intended to close the border.
Around 70,000 refugees were part of the program since it began in January 2019.
Anyone who enters the US has the legal right to apply for asylum, which is granted to those fleeing persecution in accordance with US asylum law and international treaty obligations.
The White House said last week that migrants with active cases in the US would be issued notices to appear in immigration courts.
As the asylum system returns to its former mode of operation, many questions remain. It is unclear how the Central Americans who had been swept away in Mexico would return to the border after returning home, and there is no timeline for working through all the backlog cases.
Mexico’s National Guard said on Saturday that it had detained 108 Central American immigrants who live in the US without documentation.
In recent weeks, thousands of American-American migrants have been moving north-east late last year, displacing more than half a million people in the region last year.
In California, Jewish Family Services – a coalition of non-governmental groups called the San Diego Rapid Response Network, offers and arranges for hotel rooms, health screenings and transportation and meals for migrants, according to Hopkins.
“We will make sure they are healthy and good to travel,” Hopkins said in an interview.
Edwin Gomez, who said his wife and son were killed by gangs in El Salvador when he could not pay their forcible demands, was eager to join his 15-year-old daughter in Texas.
“Who thought this day would come?” Gomez, 36, said Wednesday at the Tijuana border crossing. “I never thought that would happen.”
El Salvador’s Enda Marisol Rivera and his 10-year-old son are lowering temperatures below northern Mexico, trying to stay warm in a velvet tent city made of tarpon. Despite the Artic Blast, Rivera was encouraged by the news.
Rivera hoped that she would be allowed to live with her sister in Los Angeles, and would wait for her court date there.
“We believe in God that we will be allowed in this,” she said on Wednesday. “We’ve already spent enough time here.”
In Tent City in Matamoros, where Rivera and about 1,000 other migrants waited, medical staff were cautiously optimistic.
“People have an unbelievable hope that this is their chance to go beyond, but there is also a lot of worry and fear that somehow they may miss out if they do the wrong thing and they are not in the right place at the right time, “Said Andrea Leiner, Global Response Management spokesperson.
With post wires
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