The Biden administration has begun striking a cornerstone of former President Trump’s immigration policy, as on Friday they allowed the first asylum seekers to enter the country.
President Biden’s new rules allow 25 asylum seekers to stay in the United States on Friday, while awaiting his hearing, instead of staying in Mexico, as they had to do under the previous government.
Migrants tested negative for COVID-19 and were taken to hotels in San Diego for quarantine before traveling by plane or bus to their final destinations, according to Michael Hopkins, executive director of the San Diego Jewish Family Service, which is helping in the effort.
The United States is expected to release 25 asylum seekers a day in California. Migrants are also expected to enter Brownsville and El Paso, Texas, starting next week.
There are about 25,000 people with active cases in the program; several hundred of them are appealing decisions.
Authorities warned migrants not to flood the border, as the Trump-era program is slowly being phased out and, instead, register online through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees early next week.
“This latest action is another step in our commitment to reforming immigration policies that do not align with our nation’s values,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement last week.
Friday’s developments at the border are the beginning of the fulfillment of President Biden’s campaign pledge to end the policy known as “Migrant Protection Protocols”, which Trump has implemented to reverse the rise in asylum seekers.
On January 9, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s asylum rules.
Proponents of the MPP program said it reduced the flow of migrants heading to the border and eliminated false asylum applications. Critics said the program was cruel to refugees in need of protection and aimed to close the border.
Some 70,000 asylum seekers have been part of the program since it started in January 2019.
Anyone entering the United States has the legal right to apply for asylum, which is granted to people fleeing persecution, in accordance with US asylum law and international treaty obligations.
The White House said last week that migrants with active cases would be released in the United States with notifications to appear before immigration courts.
As the asylum system returns to its old method of operation, many questions remain. It is unclear how the Central Americans who were rejected in Mexico will return to the border after returning home, and there is no set timetable for resolving all accumulated cases.
Mexico’s National Guard said on Saturday it had detained 108 Central American migrants who were going to the United States without documentation to be in Mexico.
In recent weeks, thousands of Central American migrants have moved north after consecutive hurricanes at the end of last year displaced more than half a million people in the region.
In California, the Jewish Family Service – a coalition of non-governmental groups called the San Diego Rapid Response Network – is providing hotel rooms, health checks and providing and paying for transportation and food for migrants, if necessary, according to Hopkins.
“We are going to make sure they are healthy and in good shape to travel,” Hopkins said in an interview.
Edwin Gomez, who said his wife and son were killed by gangs in El Salvador after he was unable to pay his extortion demands, was eager to join his 15-year-old daughter in Texas.
“Who thought that day would come?” Gomez, 36, said Wednesday at a Tijuana border crossing. “I never thought this would happen.”
Enda Marisol Rivera, from El Salvador, and her 10-year-old son face sub-zero temperatures in northern Mexico, trying to keep warm in a makeshift tent city made of tarps. Despite the explosion in the Arctic, Rivera was excited by the news.
Rivera was hopeful that she would be allowed to move in with her sister in Los Angeles and wait for the trial date there.
“We have faith in God that we will be allowed to enter,” she said on Wednesday. “We have spent a lot of time here.”
In the tent city in Matamoros, where Rivera and about 1,000 other migrants were waiting, doctors were cautiously optimistic.
“People are incredibly hopeful that this is their chance to get through, but there is also a lot of anxiety and fear that somehow, if they do the wrong thing and are not in the right place at the right time, they can lose,” said Andrea Leiner, spokesperson for Global Response Management.
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