Remain in Mexico policy needlessly exposed migrants to harm, report says
Related: “Like I’m Drowning” Children and Families Sent to Harm by the US ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program (Human Rights Watch)
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Source: The Guardian
Remain in Mexico policy needlessly exposed migrants to harm, report says
Human Rights Watch describes crimes including rape, kidnapping, extortion but Biden team warns change may not be immediate
Tom Phillips Latin America correspondent
Wed 6 Jan 2021 05.01 GMT
The incoming US president, Joe Biden, has been urged to scrap a “devastating” migration program that activists say has exposed tens of thousands of asylum seekers – many of them children – to violence, abduction and rape in some of the world’s most dangerous cities.
The Trump administration created the “Remain in Mexico” program in January 2019 in an effort to deter asylum seekers trying to enter the US through is southern border.
The initiative – which is officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) - stipulated that asylum seekers would have to await their court hearings in Mexican border towns such as Ciudad Juárez, Mexicali and Matamoros, and not in the US as before.
But activists claimed that exposed highly vulnerable migrants, mostly from Central and South America, to physical harm and illness in unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings with some of the highest murder rates on Earth.
In a report published on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch described how Trump’s policy “needlessly and foreseeably exposed (asylum seekers) to considerable risk of serious harm”.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/06/remain-in-mexico-migrants-trump-biden-human-rights-watch