The big headline out of Sunday’s 60 Minutes CBS News interview with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was his demands for helping President Joe Biden stem the flow of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border.
In addition to wanting $20 billion a year in foreign aid for Latin America and the Caribbean, Lopez Obrador also called for an end to the embargo on Cuba, the lifting of sanctions on Venezuela, and amnesty for all Mexicans who live illegally in the United States.
As amazing as those demands are (and we will have more about them in tomorrow’s editorial), 60 Minutes did fumble in its reporting on the Migration Protection Protocols, more commonly known as “Remain in Mexico.”
In an article about the Lopez Obrador interview, CBS News says: “The program mandated that U.S. border officials return non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico, where they would wait for months — or even years — for their immigration cases to clear U.S. immigration courts. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 ruled 5-4 to rescind the policy.”
This is completely false. The Supreme Court did not rescind the “Remain in Mexico” program in 2022 or any other year.
It was Biden who chose to rescind the program on his first day in office. Then Texas and Missouri sued the Biden administration on the claim that Section 1225 of the Immigration and Nationality Act prevented Biden from ending “Remain in Mexico.” The court decided against the states and held that Biden did have the authority to end the program.
This is an important distinction. The court did not hold that “Remain in Mexico” was illegal. In fact, as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was forced to admit in court, there was a “significant decrease in border encounters following the determination to implement MPP across the southern border.”
But as president, the court held that Biden had the power to consider other policy priorities. Specifically, Mayorkas found that the “benefits do not justify the costs, particularly given the way in which MPP detracts from other regional and domestic goals, foreign-policy objectives, and domestic policy initiatives that better align with this Administration’s values.”
The decision that the costs of “Remain in Mexico” outweighed the benefits was not the court’s. It was Biden’s.
Open borders activists tried on multiple occasions to get a liberal 9th Circuit judge to enjoin the program, but the Supreme Court stayed each of those injunctions, allowing the program to continue up until Biden canceled.
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Even then, the 9th Circuit itself was divided on the question, issuing separate decisions on the program’s legality. The one decision that did find the program to be technically illegal was based on a tendentious reading of Section 1225 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a reading in complete contradiction with the congressional intent of the statute and one that had been rejected by the 9th Circuit before.
Open borders activists always file suit against any executive action or law that makes it harder for an infinite number of illegal immigrants to enter the country. “Remain in Mexico” was tested in court, and it survived.