Under a blistering noon sun, dozens of migrants from all over Latin America file south along a bridge to the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, carrying nothing but plastic baggies full of documents and the clothes on their backs. Weeks or months before, the migrants had left their home countries for the United States where most hoped to attain asylum. Instead, after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, they spent days in frigidly cold Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facilities, where agents stripped them of their belts, shoelaces, jewelry, and extra clothing. They were then given a date for an immigration hearing, roughly two months out, and sent back across to Mexico to wait for their court dates in the dangerous, unfamiliar city of Nuevo Laredo. The scene, which I witnessed Monday, was the result of President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, known officially by its Orwellian moniker the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
First launched in California in January before expanding to El Paso in March and to Laredo and Brownsville earlier this month, MPP is Trump’s most successful broadside yet on America’s asylum status quo: Under the program, more than 20,000 migrants have been returned to Mexican soil to await hearings in U.S. immigration courts—an unprecedented offloading of responsibility onto our poorer, deadlier neighbor to the south. Unlike many of Trump’s immigration gambits, the courts are letting MPP remain in force as its legality is challenged. (A Ninth Circuit hearing is scheduled for October.) While unaccompanied minors are spared, families and pregnant women are generally subject to MPP. Exceptions for those who fear for their lives in Mexico are limited and hard to obtain. Africans and other non-Spanish speakers, along with Mexicans, are generally excluded from MPP.
On Monday, after the group of rejected migrants left the bridge, they made their way to an encampment of their peers who’d been turned back in previous days. Next to a nearby Mexican migration office, about 100 stood chatting in groups or lounged on a smattering of black foam mattresses laid out on the concrete. Babies slept in their mothers’ arms. A toddler in nothing but a diaper wandered about.
