The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted an emergency request from the Trump administration to continue imposing a coverage that makes asylum seekers wait in Mexico for U.S. courtroom hearings, regardless of decrease courtroom rulings that the coverage in all probability is illegitimate.
The justices’ order, over a dissenting vote by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, overturns a decrease courtroom order that will have blocked the coverage, a minimum of for individuals arriving on the border crossings in Arizona and California.
The excessive courtroom motion got here a day earlier than the decrease courtroom order was to have taken impact. Instead, the so-called Remain in Mexico coverage will stay in power whereas a lawsuit difficult it performs out in the courts.
The ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has dominated that the coverage, identified formally as Migrant Protection Protocols, in all probability is illegitimate underneath U.S. regulation to stop sending individuals to international locations the place their lives or freedom could be threatened due to their race, faith, nationality, political opinions or membership in a specific social group.
About 60,000 asylum-seekers have been returned to Mexico to wait for his or her instances to wind by clogged U.S. immigration courts because the coverage was launched in January 2019 in San Diego and later expanded throughout the border.
Human Rights First, an advocacy group that opposes the coverage, stated it discovered greater than 1,000 public experiences of kidnappings, torture, rape and assaults of asylum-seekers returned to Mexico.
The administration stated in courtroom papers that greater than 36,000 of the 60,000 instances had been resolved in immigration courts.
