Children Were 30% of Those Affected by U.S. 'Remain in Mexico' Rule

(Bloomberg) -- The “Remain in Mexico” migration policy enacted by the Trump administration has affected more than 71,000 people since it began in 2019. Of those caught in the fray, 30% are children, a new report shows.

More than 21,000 of those affected by the policy, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, are under the age of 18, according to data from U.S. immigration courts. The data was analyzed by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The majority of the children are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, and just under half are between the ages of 5 and 11.

In January 2021, President Joe Biden ordered an end to the Remain in Mexico program and began a “wind down” plan with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. But efforts to terminate the Trump-era policy, which required non-Mexican migrants to stay in Mexico until their U.S. immigration court dates, ended in December with a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling ordering the current administration to re-start the program.

The Biden administration has amended the migrant protocols after a lengthy analysis by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that the program failed to preserve “humanitarian protections that individuals deserve under the law.”

“Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas has repeatedly said MPP has endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and failed to address the root causes of irregular migration,” DHS spokesperson Eduardo Maia Silva said in a statement. He noted that DHS remains under court order to revive the Trump-era program but that the U.S. continues to fight it in the courts, including by asking for an expedited Supreme Court review.

Kevin Keen, a communications officer with the UNHCR, said the refugee agency from the start expressed serious concerns with the Migrant Protection Protocols and their effect on asylum seekers' safety and due process rights. "Our concern about the humanitarian conditions and protection risks that arise from the policy, including its recent reinstatement, especially applies to vulnerable people including children."

Many of the asylum seekers affected by MPP fled their home countries due to political violence, while others are climate refugees. An estimated 3,000 people entered a makeshift camp in Matamoros, Mexico. When that was shut down, 2,000 or so people waiting for their asylum case established a camp in Reynosa. Others may be scattered throughout the Mexican interior, said Ari Sawyer, a U.S. border analyst with Human Rights Watch, who added that the lack of transparency is yet another problem. Just over 15,000 children have not yet had their cases transferred out of the Migrant Protection Protocols court system, TRAC data show.

“The United States has not accounted for many thousands of the people that it sent to Mexico,” Sawyer said. The children “are experiencing trauma that is going to seriously impact their development forever, or for many years," Sawyer added, asking if the U.S. is prepared to provide them with the mental health resources they're going to need.