Early in the morning on Thursday, October 10, migrants began blocking the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville in protest of the Administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocol” (MPP), also known as Remain in Mexico, which requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their asylum claim is processed. The bridge was closed at 1:30AM on Thursday and was still closed as of Thursday mid-afternoon.
Brownsville Congressman Filemon Vela issued a statement that said in part: “[The] illegal and inhumane ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy has forced asylum seekers to live in horrendous squalor. Today’s events are the predictable result of this policy. Forcing asylum seekers to live in miserable refugee camps has only made a bad situation worse and has now negatively impacted the flow of trade and travel at our border.”
Congress should enact legislation to end MPP immediately. It is not responsible for our nation’s leaders to delay action on this crisis until after the 2020 election, as some suggest, nor is it reasonable to expect the Administration to reverse course and end the chaos, as many would wish.
According to The Guardian, the United States has sent more than 51,000 asylum-seekers to wait in dangerous border towns in Mexico as it advises its own citizens not to travel to those regions because of the severe threat of kidnapping, murder and violent crime.
Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, two of the cities in the Tamaulipas state people are being returned to, are among the most dangerous in the world. The US State department issued a level 4 travel warning for the region because “violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion and sexual assault is common”.
At the end of August, only 34 out of 9,702 people placed into the Remain in Mexico program had legal representation – just 0.4%, according to researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac).
There is also little accountability for the government’s claim that vulnerable people are exempt from the program on a case-by-case basis. Human Rights First said the screening process is a “farce” and advocacy groups have seen vulnerable groups, including pregnant women and LGBT people, returned.
In September, a Salvadoran woman who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant and experiencing contractions was apprehended by US border patrol, given medicine to stop contractions in a hospital, then returned to Mexico.