Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, millions of Americans have commiserated with the plight of Ukrainian refugees who are being forced to flee their country. But many of these same Americans remain oblivious or unsympathetic to the continuing horrors faced by the refugees arriving at their own shores. In December 2021, the Biden administration announced that it would be relaunching the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), best known as the Remain in Mexico policy. This policy, which began in 2019 under the Trump administration, allowed U.S. authorities to send asylum seekers to wait out the duration of their U.S. immigration proceedings on the Mexican side of the border.
The Biden administration explained the policy’s reinstatement by citing a Texas district court decision that ordered the government to “reinstate MPP in good faith.” But the Biden administration went beyond reinstating the existing policy: it expanded the program to include migrants from Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean, as well as the Mexican and Central American asylum seekers to whom it initially applied. The Biden administration has also continued to enforce Title 42, an obscure public health law that the Trump administration used to allow U.S. officials to summarily expel migrants without providing them the opportunity to seek asylum in the United States. Although Biden’s rhetoric on immigrants is unquestionably different than Trump’s, his policy is similar to that of his predecessor, and is based on a strategy with roots in a deeper history of U.S. immigration policy.
The Trump administration designed the MPP to offshore U.S. immigration enforcement practices south of the border. During its two years in operation, the program forced nearly 70,000 asylum seekers to wait out their claims to U.S. asylum in Mexico, where they were subjected to terrible human rights violations including physical and sexual abuse, extortion, and murder. The MPP thus made Mexico responsible for U.S. immigration interests. But Washington’s practice of exporting immigration control policies is nothing new, nor is Trump much of an outlier: U.S officials have been forcing Mexico to do its dirty immigration work for decades, and the Biden administration is no different.
Although Trump was especially flagrant in his assaults on immigrants and in his indifference toward their welfare, his policies were merely a continuation of a long tradition of Washington outsourcing immigration enforcement to Mexico. The American public’s willingness to overlook what happens outside of the United States makes it efficient for the U.S. government to export its immigration control policies—and the concomitant abuses that result from them—in order to avoid domestic backlash.