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Migrant Protection Protocols and the Death of Asylum

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Austin Kocher at Syracuse University
Austin Kocher
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Abstract

As the MPP program—also known as Remain in Mexico—appears to come to a close, this essay examines key aspects of the program through the perspective of ontological, political, and physical death that Alison Mountz theorizes in her recent book The Death of Asylum (Mountz, 2020). Drawing on Mountz’s work, I view MPP as symptomatic of a concerted though spatially uneven assault across the developed world on both the institutions and operations of asylum as a practice as well as on asylum seekers themselves. By looking more closely at the key mechanisms that MPP used to under- mine the asylum process, this essay adds to the conversation on the death of asylum by showing not just that states are undermining asylum, but how they are doing so. Specifically, I show that MPP led to lower rates of attorney representation, created new barriers to hearing attendance, and all but prohibited asylum for migrants who were forced into the program. Finally, I want to issue a word of caution in the context of the recent slate of policy changes implemented by the Biden administration, which, in contrast to the Trump administration, do provide both symbolic and material relief to migrants, but which also risk normalizing more fundamental inequalities and fissures within the asylum system itself.
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Migrant Protection Protocols
and the Death of Asylum
Austin Kocher
Syracuse University
the death of asylum
From Januar y 2019 to January 2021, a Trump-
era policy known as the Migrant Protec-
tion Protocols (MPP) forced asylum seekers
arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to wait for
their hearings in dangerous parts of northern
Mexico (Department of Homeland Security,
2019). MPP had disastrous consequences:
very few migrants in MPP had a meaning-
ful chance to request asylum compared to
other asylum seekers (Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse, 2019a), and the forced
migrants waiting in Mexico faced pervasive
violence (Human Rights First, 2021b) . Pr es -
ident Biden suspended new enrollments in
the program on his rst day in oce (Depart-
ment of Homeland Security, 2021b) and,
by late February 2021, migrants who were
living in the refugee camp that emerged as a
result of MPP in Matamoros, Mexico, began
to enter the United States to pursue their
asylum claims (Green, 2021).
As the MPP program—also known as
Remain in Mexico—appears to come to a
close, this essay examines key aspects of the
program through the perspective of ontolog-
ical, political, and physical death that Alison
Mountz theorizes in her recent book The
Death of Asylum (Mountz, 2020). Drawing
on Mountz’s work, I view MPP as symptom-
atic of a concerted though spatially uneven
assault across the developed world on both
the institutions and operations of asylum
as a practice as well as on asylum seekers
themselves. By looking more closely at the
key mechanisms that MPP used to under-
mine the asylum process, this essay adds to
the conversation on the death of asylum by
showing not just that states are undermining
asylum, but how they are doing so. Speci-
cally, I show that MPP led to lower rates of
aorney representation, created new barri-
ers to hearing aendance, and all but prohib-
ited asylum for migrants who were forced
into the program. Finally, I want to issue a
word of caution in the context of the recent
slate of policy changes implemented by the
Biden administration, which, in contrast to
the Trump administration, do provide both
symbolic and material relief to migrants, but
which also risk normalizing more fundamen-
tal inequalities and ssures within the asylum
system itself.
the legal topologies of “remain in
mexico”
The Migrant Protection Protocols were
announced in December 2018 by the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security (DHS) Secre-
tary Kirstjen Nielsen as a response to what
the agency called an “illegal immigration
crisis” at the U.S.-Mexico border (Depart-
JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY xx(x), xx–xx 248
... A central question in this literature is whether, and to what extent, technology is capable of substantively improving humanitarian protections for migrants, or whether technology will be subsumed under militant border restrictionism and the proliferation of policies that limit access to asylum [24][25][26][27][28]. Although examples abound of governments developing back-end systems or using off-the-shelf technologies to manage migration, fewer scholarly analyses exist of examples where governments have developed their own smartphone applications to directly regulate migrants' mobility. ...
... MPP was criticized for undermining the asylum process. Few asylum seekers in MPP found legal representation, even fewer were granted asylum [24], and many of the approximately 70,000 migrants waiting in northern Mexico [54] experienced extortion, kidnapping, and other forms of violence that put them in danger at precisely the moment they were seeking protection [55][56][57]. Once in office, the Biden administration suspended new enrollments and later terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols [58,59], although a series of protracted lawsuits kept the program limping along for many months. ...
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... These have increased the obstacles for undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, often banning them outright from the country. Among the chief examples of the policies implemented by the government to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from entering U.S. territory are: the travel ban; the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or Remain in Mexico (Kocher, 2021), particularly around the time of the first migrant 'caravans' (see París Pombo & Montes, 2020); the lowered cap on refugee admissions (Boghani, 2019); and the Asylum Cooperation Agreement (ACA). Other visible deterrence strategies have involved fixing or building new segments of the border wall, reinforcing the detection technology deployed and increasing the number of Border Agents patrolling the border area (Garrett, 2020). ...
The “Zero Tolerance Policy” to Separate Migrant Families: Context and Discursive Strategies to Foster Exclusion
Chapter
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  • Aug 2024
During April and May of 2018, the Trump administration promoted and implemented a family separation approach designed to discourage irregular migration flows along the southern border, also known as the “Zero Tolerance Policy” (ZTP). Prior to its termination on 20th June of that same year, at least 2700 children had been separated from their parents. According to different sources, the parents of over 600 children had been “lost” or were still missing by the end of 2020. In this chapter, we contextualize this “zero tolerance” approach to immigration in the wider setting of the U.S.-Mexico border and the deterrence practices deployed by the Trump administration. We analyze how the Trump administration justified and reacted to reporting of the family separation policy in the media and explore its stated aims. We show how the administration changed the discourse it used and its justification for the policy on an almost daily basis when reacting to protests, the news cycle, and statements from politicians. From a human rights perspective, by analyzing this family separation policy, we identify how elements of racism and the criminalization of immigration seriously undermine not only people’s dignity but also the protection of the right to family life.
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... Furthermore, the MPPs allowed the US Government to release asylum claimants to Mexico in order for them to wait for their hearings in the US. By July 2019, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice announced that those who had not previously applied for asylum in one of the countries that they had to traverse would not be eligible to request asylum in the US; this rule went into effect by September 2019 (Kocher, 2021). ...
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... Rather, opposite outcomes were identified during the pandemic, highlighting how the MPP obligations have been selectively prioritized to deter migration and satisfy the US's migration policy interests. The fulfillment of the remaining obligations could not be identified within the scope of this review; however, it is important to note that the damage done to the asylum process by the Trump administration in the US has not been restored by the Biden administration (Kocher, 2021). Despite the top scientists from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) calling for an end to Title 42 and President Biden declaring the pandemic "over", the current administration continues to deny entry to asylum seekers using Title 42 (Beitsch & Bernal, 2022). ...
COVID-19 and Protracted Displacement: a Scoping Review of Migration Policies in Mexico and Central America
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Full-text available
  • May 2023
By the end of 2020, more than 500,000 migrants from Central America, Haiti, Africa, and Asia sought asylum along the US-Mexico border despite COVID-19-related travel restrictions and public health measures. A scoping review was conducted to understand the role of COVID-19-related policies on irregular migration flows through Central America and Mexico and to examine the experiences of asylum seekers traversing this region. Peer-reviewed literature, policy briefs, and commentaries were screened for inclusion, resulting in 33 documents selected for this review. This review identified three dominant themes: border closures due to multiple national migration policies, delays in asylum procedures, and increased risks to migrant wellbeing. This article argues that border closures were a punitive policy measure to deter irregular migration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications for future research and policy include prioritizing the health needs of asylum seekers and advocating the appropriateness and effectiveness of immigration and public health policy.
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... Immigrant advocates condemned Trump's policy as cruel, unconstitutional, and a violation of international law (Aguilera 2019) and human rights activists denounced the detention of women and children as immoral (Habitat for Humanity 2021). During the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Joseph Biden promised to pursue a more "humane" border policy; but since his inauguration, federal courts have blocked his attempts to do so, and US border policies have proven to be little different from those of his predecessor (Kocher 2021;Shear et al. 2021). Title 42 expulsions continued uninterrupted through 2021, leading to a renewed outcry of indignation in September of that year when a video of horse-mounted Border Patrol agents lassoing running migrants went viral (Rose 2021). ...
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... 3). Under this program, the U.S. government has also expelled migrants without providing any support to these migrant individuals (Kocher, 2021). A representative from Casa Cornelia Law Center spoke about how these Mexican border communities do not have the capacity to absorb these migrant populations, as they often lack adequate healthcare provisions for the migrant populations that are deported to their region. ...
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