Latest in Mexico
The move would allow the president to implement several criminal and financial penalties against those groups and their members—but the measures will not necessarily help the federal government combat the cartels.
The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program has faced a great deal of criticism since the Trump administration unveiled the policy, colloquially known as Remain in Mexico, in January 2019. Now, the policy is facing public condemnation from within the Department of Homeland Security itself. A union representing asylum officers, the front-line adjudicators of humanitarian claims, filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday criticizing the MPP program.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released memos roughly outlining its plan to make asylum seekers wait in Mexico for immigration court hearings, which it calls the Migrant Protection Protocols. On Jan.
In the months since Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (often called “AMLO”), announced the creation of a “national guard” as a core component of his public security strategy, the proposal has received significant criticism.
Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—nicknamed AMLO among the public and in the media—took the oath of office on Dec. 1. As the first representative of the political left to be elected president in Mexico’s post-2000 democratic era, AMLO embodies a public that yearns for a dramatic change of direction.
The sun was setting over the southern Mexican highway that hugs the Guatemala-Mexico border. Any tourists sitting along the road might have taken a photo or commented to one another on the picturesque rural backdrop. Yet it barely registered for the four Hondurans with whom I was traveling. “You pass through so many beautiful places as you move through Mexico,” José said to me as he waved toward the sunset, “but you are usually too tired or miserable to enjoy it.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to establish a “zero tolerance policy” prosecuting all irregular border-crossers ended in high-profile disarray but the fallout continues. Months after the president signed an executive order halting the family separations that his administration had implemented, more than 500 children still wait to be reunited with their parents.
Last Thursday and Friday, the United States and Mexico co-hosted top officials from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and other countries for the "Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America." As the name suggests, the gathering aimed to spur a wide-ranging conversation for improving the region’s economic conditions, tackling gangs and organized crime, and slowing U.S.-bound migration.
Over the past two weeks, U.S.-Mexico relations deteriorated to their lowest point since perhaps the era of Pancho Villa.