The Trump administration has gladly used the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to postpone immigration court hearings for thousands of asylum-seeking adults and children it has forced to wait in Mexico under the dangerous and inhumane Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy, but you wouldn’t really know that by a quick glance at the outside.
Even though asylum-seekers subject to the MPP policy, better known as Remain in Mexico, have been unable to try to make their cases in front of an immigration judge, two empty “tent courts” are still up in Texas, at massive cost to taxpayers and massive benefit to a private contractor: “the federal government has spent nearly $70 million during the pandemic to maintain these structures,” Deniz Çam reports in Forbes.
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“Since the beginning of the pandemic in March, the government has spent more than $67 million under a federal contract with Deployed Resources, the New York-based contractor that built these facilities in 2019 and has provided tents, office containers, urinals and sinks to festivals such as Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza,” the report continues. “The $67 million expense includes a 6-month extension of the existing contract for tent courts, which was signed in July for over $40 million.”
But the administration has cancelled immigration hearings at the Brownsville and Laredo, Texas, tent courts throughout the pandemic, indefinitely extending immigration court dates for many of the tens of thousands of asylum-seekers who had already been waiting for lengthy periods in Mexico at great risk to their lives. But that’s not to say a chance to appear at one of the courts has been any guarantee of safety either, advocacy group Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights said.
“Even when hearings were being held at these sham tent courts, #asylum-seekers were denied due process & their lives were endangered every day when they had to travel through unsafe areas in the dark for a hearing,” the organization tweeted. And the thugs in the administration may have stopped paying attention to these families but thugs elsewhere haven’t: The Los Angeles Times reports that the Honduras asylum-seeker who was recently separated from her infant just hours after giving birth had been targeted by kidnappers while waiting in Mexico under the policy.
Asylum-seekers living at an encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, told former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro during his visit last year that children there were sick and running high fevers. At the end of that visit, Castro escorted a group of a dozen LGBTQ and disabled asylum-seekers who should have been excluded from Remain in Mexico back to the U.S. They remained there for only a short time, after border officials again forced them to return to Mexico. One year later, many who were at the camp that day could still be waiting there, with no end in sight.
Remain in Mexico, Castro told a group of reporters at the time, “is a disaster. People should not live like this. What has happened here is that these people have come to the door of the United States, and President Trump has told them, ‘no, you go over there to this neighborhood that is unsafe, and unsanitary.” The human costs are incalculable, and the administration doesn’t care. The fiscal costs are calculable, and the administration doesn't care about that either.
In just one more example of a contractor making out like a bandit by doing the bare minimum, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said earlier this year that the administration wasted nearly $70 million over a period of five months to jail fewer than 70 people at a tent city in Tornillo, Texas, last year, including shelling out over $5 million for hundreds of thousands of meals that were never actually ordered because there were no detainees. Just an absolute waste in every single sense.