DHS to end Trump-era 'Remain in Mexico' policy after high court decision

Aug. 9 (UPI) -- The Biden administration announced late Monday that it was ending the controversial Trump-era immigration policy that forced some migrants to wait for their asylum hearings outside the country.

In the statement Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said that it has stopped enrolling new migrants into the Migrant Protections Protocols while those who are already under the program will be disenrolled when they return to the United States for their next scheduled court date.

"DHS is committed to ending the court-ordered implementation of MPP in a quick, and orderly, manner," the federal department said. "As Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas has said, MPP has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border."

The move by the Department of Homeland Security is the latest in a protracted fight over the former Trump administration's so-called Remain in Mexico policy that kicked off when President Joe Biden first tried to rescind it on his first day in office in 2021.

What followed was more than a year of litigation that included a judge ordering the policy be put back into place in December before the Supreme Court sided with Biden in late June, stating he had the power to end MPP.

Between January 2019 when the order went into effect and 2021 when Biden originally suspended it, nearly 70,000 migrants were forced to stay in Mexico to await U.S. asylum court dates.

After the Biden administration was ordered to reinstate the policy, few migrants were actually enrolled into the MPP.

According the DHS statistics, between Dec. 6, 2021, and the June 30 Supreme Court decision, fewer than 10,000 people were enrolled under the MPP, of which only 5,765 were returned to Mexico.

The DHS said Monday that it will provide more information about the ending of the MPP in the coming days.