Human Rights Fiasco: The Trump Administration’s Dangerous Asylum Returns Continue

A cartel member threatened to kill the woman if she reported the kidnapping to the police and bragged “the man from migration gave you to us.” In late July, a woman with a baby girl in her arms, who DHS had just returned to Mexico under MPP, were abducted from the parking lot behind the INM building in Nuevo Laredo. [...] Mexican immigration officers were either directly participating in or permitting the men to kidnap asylum seekers from the INM building because the kidnappers showed the woman a photo of her family crying inside the building to pressure her to convince them to come out. [...] The MPP screening process is a sham that lacks the basic safeguards Congress created to prevent the deportation of asylum seekers to persecution through the credible fear screening process and other safeguards to assure access to asylum hearings. [...] However, in mid-November, a federal district court hearing a challenge to the government’s practice of metering asylum seekers at the southern border entered a preliminary injunction, prohibiting the government from applying the asylum ban to those who tried to seek asylum at ports of entry before the rule went into effect. [...] Although the family had gone to request asylum at the Laredo port of entry in late June and had been told by an official to register on the metering list, the immigration judge found the family ineligible for asylum under the mistaken understanding that the third-country transit asylum ban depends on the date an asylum seeker files their asylum application in court.