When immigrants from central and south American countries are deported from the United States, they're typically sent back to their respective countries.
Under the new guidelines published by the Department of Homeland Security this morning, immigrants would be deported to Mexico even if they aren't Mexican.
Moreover, the memos call for deporting them to Mexico even before their request for asylum has been reviewed.
If present immigration trends continue, that could mean the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Currently, such people are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum.
President Trump wants them to do so from Mexico, communicating via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities that Mexico would presumably be forced to build.
It's not clear to me if this would even be legal or enforceable, but in any event Mexico certainly isn't going to allow it.
ProPublica has more information on the new DHS memos that, according to a source at the agency, were drafted by Jeff Sessions' office without input from Homeland Security staff.
Officials disclosed that two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers. The ideas aren’t new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a 1996 law that policy makers and law enforcement agents had disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd.
“Most of these provisions of law have been there for decades,” the DHS official said. “We are simply trying to execute what Congress has asked us to do.”
Absurd is one word for it.