Among people worldwide who celebrated Donald Trump’s defeat were asylum-seekers he’s forced out of the U.S. under inhumane and illegal policy. Some of the nearly 70,000 asylum-seekers forced into Mexico under Migrant Protection Protocols have been living in a border camp for over a year now. But even the squalid conditions there couldn’t dampen their spirits on Saturday. They suddenly had hope.
"This is not only a Biden victory,” Mervin Hidalgo told BuzzFeed News. An asylum-seeker from Venezuela, he’s been living at Matomoros since October. “We migrants also won, and we are very happy. Seeing Trump once again sit on his throne would have been fatal for us." The lives of Hidalgo and thousands of others truly hinged on the outcome of this election. If Trump remained in office, Remain in Mexico would have continued indefinitely. President-elect Joe Biden pledged he would end it.
Jose Lopez, an asylum-seeker from Nicaragua, told BuzzFeed News that the mood at the camp was jubilant. “[P]eople shouted and cried,” the report continued. Some had placed balloons along the Rio Grande that featured the words “Bye Trump” and poop emojis. (It’s okay, you can laugh.) “Others, he said, prayed when the race was called on Saturday.” Like Hidalgo, he said Biden’s victory was also theirs.
"We thanked God because he heard our cries," Lopez told BuzzFeed News. "We were victims of a project that was truly harmful to people’s humanity ... We thought we were invisible to the world, but we weren’t to God. We’re overjoyed right now."
The Trump administration knew exactly what it was doing in forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. immigration courts. After despicably and falsely claiming that the policy has “successfully provided protections” to asylum-seekers, the administration then admitted in court that the policy is in fact forcing people into danger, like advocates have said.
A report from a human rights organization at the beginning of the year tracked nearly 820 public reports of violence against returned asylum-seekers, a number that has since grown to over 1,100, BuzzFeed News reported. While the courts blocked the policy in February, the Supreme Court the next month allowed the administration to keep going ahead with enforcing it as litigation continues. But its days are likely numbered.
Then-candidate Biden’s immigration plan indicated that Remain in Mexico would be the first of the Trump administration anti-asylum policies to go. But when exactly that will happen is another question. While a recent report said that reinstating the full Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would be a Day One priority for Biden, BuzzFeed News reports he would address Remain in Mexico within his first 100 days in office.
That it’s a priority is of course important. It means these families are being heard. But because the outgoing administration has forced them to have to wait for so long already, in complete defiance of U.S. asylum law, their hope and the hope of advocates is that a rescission comes sooner rather than later in those 100 days.
"People are just so incredibly happy, so hopeful for the first time," immigration lawyer Taylor Levy said in the report. She urged advocates to continue pushing the incoming Biden administration for urgent relief for these families. "'Desperation' and 'hopelessness' have been the prevailing adjectives I would use to describe the asylum-seekers stuck in Mexico, and now there's just finally hope,” she continued.