The huge unanswered question about the GOP’s favorite border policy

The News

House Republicans have a clear No. 1 demand these days when it comes to the border: President Biden, they say, should bring back “Remain in Mexico.”

The controversial Trump-era program required some asylum-seekers to stay south of the border while awaiting their immigration court dates, instead of allowing them to enter the U.S. Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in a letter last week that the administration could prove it was “serious” about tackling the migrant crisis by reviving the policy, which he had previously called the “best” legal tool available to slow arrivals at the border.

But even if Biden wanted to revive the program, it’s not clear Mexico’s government would play along. Last year, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it would reject any effort to resurrect the policy. That resistance could potentially make the entire idea a policy dead-end, some immigration experts argue.

Mexico’s leaders are reluctant to reestablish the program because they don’t believe its first iteration effectively deterred migration and worry that a new version could spark fresh legal battles with human rights groups, said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

“It will be hard for Mexico to quickly apply a new protocol that has the rigor to pass a legal standard under Mexico’s Supreme Court to allow the practice to start up again in big numbers,” Ruiz Soto told Semafor.

Step Back

Conservatives widely credit Remain in Mexico — formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols — for helping quell the massive surge of migrants that overwhelmed the southern border in 2019. Though only a sliver of the new arrivals were sent back across the border to await their court date, proponents say it created a deterrent by shutting asylum-seekers out of the U.S.

The Biden administration ended Remain in Mexico after a lengthy legal battle against states that sued to keep the program in place. The program drew criticism from human rights groups for returning asylum-seekers to border towns where many were subjected to kidnapping, extortion, and other violence.

Still, Remain in Mexico has become a rallying point for Republicans. The House GOP’s party-line border reform bill, H.R. 2, would have restored a stringent version of the program. More recently, House moderates proposed a bipartisan bill on Ukraine aid and the border that would compel the White House to restore a version of the policy for one year.

Joseph’s view

Republican aides I spoke with mostly didn’t have clear answers when I asked them what the Biden administration was supposed to do if Mexico refused to cooperate with a new version of the program. One of the recent bipartisan House bill’s architects wasn’t able to explain it either.

“That’s something we’ll have to work out,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said earlier this month. “I’m not an ambassador, so I have no idea how they’re going to respond. Our guys want something that makes a difference on the border.”

Simply ignoring Mexico’s wishes doesn’t seem like a workable plan: After all, the U.S. relies on cooperation from its neighbor on other aspects of border enforcement, which could be put at risk if Washington angered its leaders.

Room for Disagreement

Conservative experts outside Capitol Hill suggested that the answer was simple: Biden would just have to play hardball.

That was Donald Trump’s strategy: He used the threat of tariffs to secure the Mexican government’s cooperation on border enforcement issues, including a major expansion of Remain in Mexico.

Lora Ries, the director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Semafor the U.S. could threaten to tax remittance payments sent from undocumented immigrants to their families in Mexico or put up additional trade barriers with Mexico, now the U.S.’ largest trading partner. For example, Oklahoma imposes a 1% fee on all remittance transfer payments larger than $500.

“Mexico’s gonna say it doesn’t want to do it because they know they can get away with that with Joe Biden in the White House. Joe Biden doesn’t want to do it either,” Ries said. “So you need a U.S. president that knows what levers to push or pull to get Mexico to cooperate.”