After Republicans, NGOs, around the UN to criticize Joe Biden’s new immigration plan, while the United States is facing “the most serious migration crisis in history”, according to the expression of the American president . The US measures would go against the prohibition of collective expulsions and the principle of non-refoulement”, fundamental human rights, warned the new United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, this Wednesday, January 11.
A few days before a summit with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the White House announced last Thursday in Mexico City “new consequences” for migrants who cross the border illegally: the United States will resort more often to immediate deportations , accompanied by a ban on new entry into the territory for five years. A practice deemed illegal and traumatic by many NGOs, but without which many states fear an eruption of the crisis at the borders with Mexico.
“This will expand and accelerate legal pathways for immigration but create new consequences for those who do not use them,” the White House said in a statement. “You are the first president of the United States in some time not to have built a single meter of wall,” said Andrés López Obrador, the president of Mexico.
“In line with Trump”
A point of view that is not shared by the UN. “The right to seek asylum is a human right, regardless of where people come from, their migration status or how they arrived at the border,” Volker Türk recalled in his statement. “The announced program puts the Biden administration in line with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies,” also denounced the ACLU, a powerful civil rights association.
800 people died during the fiscal year, largely drowned in the Rio Grande River, according to a border guard official quoted by American radio NPR. More than 230,000 arrests were still recorded in November at the southern border of the United States, a record level.
Along with tougher rules, up to 30,000 skilled migrants will be allowed to enter the US each month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but they will have to arrive by plane to avoid adding to the burden work of border guards on the ground. Large swaths of the US economy, especially in agriculture, depend on immigrant labor, but the migration system is on the brink of collapse.
Migrants, anxious to escape poverty or violence in their countries of origin, often take enormous risks to enter American soil. Faced with constant criticism from his opposition, but also from associations of defenders of migrants, US President Joe Biden has so far remained rather discreet. His administration has been content to send migrants back to Mexico based on a measure put in place by his Republican predecessor Donald Trump during the pandemic.
A politico-judicial imbroglio
This measure, dubbed “Title 42”, is the subject of an intense judicial guerrilla war whose epilogue will be known in June at the Supreme Court of the United States. This measure, taken in March 2020 during the Covid-19, authorizes the manu militari expulsion of all migrants without a residence permit arrested at the borders. Transferred from the territory, without delay, without legal, and without necessarily the person benefiting from a return to his country of origin.
At the end of December, the Supreme Court of the United States announced the maintenance of Title42, a decision that Biden had regretted, and which marks a little more the American dissensions, around the major contemporary questions, and the now very conservative role of the institution, which under Donald Trump has made a complete right turn.
“Title 42 has already been used by U.S. immigration authorities some 2.5 million times at the southern border to deport people to Mexico or to their home country without their protection have been studied on an individual basis and without a proper procedure having been followed”, argued the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.