The U.S. Supreme Court moved this week to shut down a challenge to one of former President Donald Trump’s most controversial immigration policies concerning migrant asylum-seekers, ruling that the issue is now “moot,” according to the Washington Examiner.
According to the report, the matter involved Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, a rule under which migrants seeking asylum in the United States were required to wait it out in Mexico while their requests were evaluated by U.S. immigration courts.
The policy, known officially as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), had its fair share of roadblocks during Trump’s tenure in the White House, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling last spring that the policy could not be enforced in California and Arizona, according to NPR.
While the Supreme Court placed the ruling on hold until the case could be heard, it noted on Monday that the Biden administration has since ended the Trump-era policy in question, thus rendering it a non-issue.
DHS already terminated ‘Remain in Mexico’
A June memo from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas instructed “DHS personnel to take all appropriate actions to terminate MPP, including taking all steps necessary to rescind implementing guidance and other directives or policy guidance issued to implement the program.”
The DHS directive was released following an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in February, which called for DHS to begin winding down the “Remain In Mexico” policy.
“I’m not making new law, I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said at the time, according to Fox News. “This is about how America is safer, stronger, more prosperous when we have a fair, orderly, and humane legal immigration system.”
Republicans blame Biden’s policies
However, critics allege that his decision has had the opposite effect by incentivizing migrants to pour across the border, which has led to a crisis-level situation at the southern U.S. border since Biden took office in January.
A group of 56 Republican House lawmakers sent a letter to Biden last week in which they urged him to replace Vice President Kamala Harris as the primary leader on the current immigration crisis.
Included in their letter of concern was their insistence that the vice president’s exclusive focus on conditions in the “Northern Triangle” Central American countries “ignores the role of policy decisions made in the first four months of your administration play in enticing migrants to illegally cross our southern border.”
In addition to upending the “Remain in Mexico” policy, Biden also recently halted the construction of his predecessor’s border wall, which was a cornerstone promise of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Daily Caller reported earlier this month that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has already re-allocated over $2 billion in border wall construction funds to fund other projects.
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