In an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation conducted on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott criticized the Biden administration for rescinding a major order issued by the Trump administration in favor of a more restrictive program that leaves migrants without court dates.
In August 2022, the Remain in Mexico program, which had been in existence during the Trump administration and was formerly known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), was terminated by the Biden administration following court battles to prevent its implementation. According to Scott, who served in the Trump administration, it is dishonest for the Biden administration to condemn the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP), which required certain migrants to await adjudication of their immigration cases in Mexico, while simultaneously expelling certain migrants without court dates to Mexico. Scott was an official in the Trump administration.
After the end of Title 42, a public health expulsion order issued by the Trump administration on May 11 to begin expelling certain migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to Mexico, the Biden administration implemented a new expulsion policy in preparation for an influx of migrants at the southern border. The migrants who were deported back to Mexico are at risk of being denied admission to the United States for five years and prosecuted for illegal entry into the country.
The Border Patrol had more than 2.2 million interactions with migrants in fiscal year 2022, and more than 1.2 million so far in fiscal year 2023, according to federal records.
“One of the things that frustrates me the most out of this entire discussion is just the hypocrisy and the lack of transparency. So now we have an administration that has just advertised they made an agreement with Mexico, so Mexico will accept Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians that are being [returned via] expedited removal or voluntary return, but basically, you’re removing them from the U.S.,” Scott said.
“This is the same administration that said when the last administration wanted to make people simply wait for a hearing in Mexico, that it was inhumane. It was too unsafe,” Scott said.
In June 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the administration of President Joe Biden declared that the Remain in Mexico policy “has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border.”
DHS reports that by agreeing to accept migrants, the Mexican government has signified its willingness to partake in the most recent initiative.
“All we did was ask them to wait until their court date and then come back. What the current administration is effectively doing is deporting them into Mexico, which they said was not safe. So just my thing is, let’s have an adult conversation about this and agree that we need to protect America. I’m not saying the program is bad, I’m just saying the hypocrisy is ridiculous,” Scott said.
The White House and Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s requests for comment.