US Supreme Court rules to end Donald Trump’s hardline Mexican immigration policy
A bid to dissolve Donald Trump’s hardline Remain in Mexico policy has been granted, just days after migrants perished in a truck. WARNING: GRAPHIC
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The US Supreme Court on Thursday gave President Joe Biden’s administration the green light to end the so-called Remain in Mexico policy instituted by Donald Trump as part of his hardline approach to immigration.
Under the policy, some non-Mexicans who entered the United States illegally across the southern border were sent back to Mexico to wait while their immigration cases played out in court, rather than being detained or provisionally released.
Since the beginning of his term, President Biden has been trying to wind down the policy as part of what he claims is a more humane take on immigration.
Advocates for migrants said the policy exposed asylum seekers to dangerous conditions in Mexico as overwhelmed US courts slowly work through a backlog of cases.
Thursday’s ruling in favour of the Biden administration was split 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices in the majority.
Roberts, who authored the majority opinion, argued that federal immigration law allows the executive branch to return asylum seekers to Mexico, but does not force it to do so.
“Congress conferred contiguous-territory return authority in expressly discretionary terms,” the opinion states.
Biden’s attempt to terminate the policy, instituted by Trump in 2019, was challenged by a group of Republican-governed states led by Texas.
These states argued that his move violated US immigration law by forcing authorities to release migrants they had detained onto US territory. They also said that Biden officials had not followed proper administrative procedure.
A lower court in August 2021 ruled against the Biden administration and the case eventually ended up before the nation’s highest court.
At first, the Supreme Court simply refused to freeze the lower court ruling, forcing the administration to restart the policy, formally called Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), while it pressed ahead with its appeal.
From the start of the policy in January 2019 until its suspension under Biden, nearly 70,000 people were sent back to Mexico, according to the American Immigration Council.
During Biden’s tenure as president, more than 200,000 people attempting to enter the country illegally have been interdicted at the border each month and sent back, under MPP or a separate Covid-related policy blocking people at the border.
Illegal border crossings are often dangerous, both for the physical conditions in the region and mistreatment by human traffickers. This week 53 people died after being packed inside a tractor-trailer truck without air conditioning that was later abandoned in San Antonio, Texas.
The American Civil Liberties Union praised the court’s ruling on Thursday.
“The Supreme Court was right to reject the spurious argument that this cruel policy is statutorily required,” said Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.
In the Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez, which is just across the border from Texas, asylum seekers who had been returned from the United States as part of the Remain in Mexico policy cheered Thursday’s decision.
Nicaraguan Pedro Antonio Rizo, 41, who was staying at a local migrant shelter said the ruling gave him hope for his future and added that only extraordinary circumstances would force one to abandon his home and flee.
“One does not leave one’s house because one wants to leave,” he told AFP.
SMILING TEXAS TRUCK DRIVER CHARGED, FACES DEATH PENALTY
A man accused of driving the truck carrying multiple illegal migrants in a sweltering trailer could face execution after he was formally charged with human smuggling.
Hector Zamorano Jr., 45, is charged with a single count of transportation of illegal aliens resulting in death.
The charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison or death. Texas, which is one of 27 states to still use capital punishment, leads the nation in executions.
Zamorano was arrested after running from locals, who found him hiding in brush near the truck in San Antonio, and pointed him out to police, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday.
He was “very high on meth” and Mexican authorities have said he tried to pass himself off as a migrant to avoid arrest, the New York Post reported.
A total of 53 migrants packed into the sweltering trailer died, and more are recovering in critical conditions in hospital.
Zamorano was identified through a distinctive black shirt with stripes and a hat that matched surveillance footage from an immigration checkpoint, according to the complaint.
A photo from the footage showed Zamorano smiling just hours before the bodies were found dead, reports the New York Post.
Cameras at a US Border Patrol checkpoint in Encinal Texas captured the suspected driver smiling behind the wheel of a red truck and sticking his thumb up.
That was 3pm local time on Monday, just three hours before emergency services were notified of the tragic find.
An alleged accomplice, Christian Martinez, 28, was arrested Tuesday and charged with conspiracy to transport illegal aliens resulting in death, which also carries the possibility of capital punishment.
He was arrested based on evidence uncovered on Zamorano’s cell phone that showed they discussed the smuggling scheme, according to prosecutors.
A spokesman for Western Texas US Attorney Ashley Hoff didn’t immediately respond Thursday when asked when Hoff would decide whether to seek capital punishment in the case.
Two Mexican citizens — Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez, 23, and Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao, 48 — were also arrested Monday after they left the San Antonio house used as the address to register the truck.
The trailer carried 64 migrants and at least 53 people died in the sweltering temperatures estimated to have reached 65C degrees.
When Zamorano was found in a nearby field, “he was very high on meth … and had to be take to the hospital,” a law enforcement official told local media.
He was later busted pretending to be one of the migrants, o revealed at a press conference.
“The driver was identified as Homero, who tried to pass himself off as one of the survivors, for which he was arrested with two other alleged perpetrators,” Mexico’s National Immigration Institute chief Francisco Garduñ said, according to Mexico’s Vanguardia newspaper.
“The driver posed as a regular migrant to avoid arrest.”
Zamorano is a US Citizen, according to the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio.
The victims are thought to have boarded the truck around Laredo, Texas, with the truck going through a border checkpoint northeast for the town on Interstate 35.
Encinal, where the alleged driver was captured on camera smiling, is about a 40-minutes drive north of Laredo on that same road.
TEXAS TRUCK REACHED ‘65C DEGREES’; 53 NOW DEAD
The death toll of undocumented migrants who were abandoned in a scorching-hot trailer in Texas has risen to 53, as experts estimated temperatures reached 65 C in the sweltering trailer.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office said 40 of the dead are male and 13 are female, with 37 of the victims potentially identified from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to confirm.
At least 27 of the dead were Mexicans, along with three of the survivors, according to Francisco Garduno, head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute.
The increased death toll comes as experts estimated the temperature in the back of the sweltering trailer reached 65C degrees.
With the temperature outside being 39.4C degrees, a truck without ventilation could reach temperatures no human body could survive, according to Texas Vista Medical Center emergency department, which received two of the migrants from the truck.
Both remain in a critical condition.
Medial director Dr John Hamilton said the truck could have reached 65C degrees, a full 15C above the point the body starts to feel the effects of heat stroke. Once temperatures hit 43C, a person is on track to organ failure.
“As the heat outside the trailer builds, the heat inside the trailer builds too, but there’s nowhere for the heat to escape,” Mr Hamilton told the San Antonio Express News. “It’s just going to continue to cook and get hotter and hotter and hotter.”
DRIVER ON ‘HIGH ON METH’
The Department of Homeland Security announced it had opened a criminal investigation, as Mr Biden took aim at human smuggling gangs.
“The tragic loss of life in San Antonio, Texas that took place yesterday is horrifying and heartbreaking,” he said in a statement.
“This incident underscores the need to go after the multi-billion dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths,” he said.
Federal law enforcement agents on Tuesday arrested two men at the address linked to the tractor-trailer’s registration, court documents showed.
Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez, both Mexican nationals whose US tourist visas had expired, were illegally in possession of multiple firearms, the documents alleged.
A third person, suspected of being the driver of the tractor-trailer, was arrested nearby while “very high on meth,” reported the local daily San Antonio Express-News, citing a law enforcement officer.
According to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the dead whose identities are known, 22 were from Mexico, seven from Guatemala and two from Honduras.
“It’s a tremendous misfortune,” he told reporters.
It was the deadliest single incident involving migrants along the southern border in memory, and drew more attention to the risks that hundreds of thousands of people face seeking to enter the United States from Mexico without permission.
On Monday, the high temperature in San Antonio was 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4C), and the temperature in the unvented trailer would have been much higher.
By Tuesday afternoon, authorities had removed the trailer from where it had been abandoned with its human cargo, on a narrow road sandwiched between train tracks and auto junkyards.
Replacing it were makeshift crosses adorned with artificial flowers. “I feel that if these people walk hundreds of miles to get over here, it wouldn’t hurt us to walk maybe one mile to put the crosses and candles,” said Angelita Olvera, who lives nearby.
“Hopefully, whoever had them in the trailer will pay the consequences,” she said.
The tragedy came five years after 10 migrants were found dead in a trailer with broken airconditioning and clogged ventilation holes near San Antonio.
In recent weeks Border Patrol officers have discovered other attempts to bring undocumented travellers into the country in large trucks.
On June 14, 80 people from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were discovered inside a tractor-trailer when it was inspected by agents at a highway checkpoint north of Laredo, a border hub in south Texas.
Three weeks earlier, agents intercepted a trailer with 48 people inside near Sierra Blanca in western Texas.
Jesus Thompson, 60, lives just across the train track from where the people in the trailer were found.
“People from Mexico and Guatemala come here to seek the American dream,” he said.
“I would tell the people who are there and who are fleeing to think about it before coming here, because there is a tremendous risk, and especially now that the weather is very hot.”
The case immediately became a focus of politics when Republicans attacked Democratic President Biden for allegedly being soft on immigration.
“These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Under Biden, more than 200,000 people attempting to enter the country illegally have been interdicted at the border each month and sent back.
But there is no good estimate of the thousands more that succeed in staying inside the country.
Biden said he had already launched an anti-smuggling campaign that focused on the networks and arrested 2,400 people in recent months.
“Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful, as is political grandstanding around tragedy,” he said.
The migration issue will be a key agenda item when Biden hosts his Mexican counterpart Lopez Obrador for talks on July 12.
SPICE USED TO COVER ODOUR OF DYING BODIES
Shocking new details have emerged about the Texas truck disaster, including how victims were allegedly sprinkled with steak seasoning to mask their odour.
Survivors suffering heat stroke and heat exhaustion were found among the corpses of 51 dead migrants, without water or airconditioning, as temperatures in San Antonio reached 40C amid an ongoing heatwave.
The death toll was initially reported at 20 people. The new count makes the tragedy one of the deadliest incidents of migrant trafficking in recent years.
A law-enforcement official revealed that many of the people jammed into the tractor-trailer in San Antonio appeared to have been covered in spices to cover up the smell during the human-smuggling tragedy, according to the Texas Tribune.
US police investigating the grim discovery in and around the abandoned trailer truck in sweltering heat said the truck was made to look like a properly registered vehicle in an effort to evade detection.
The owner of a local Alamo-based trucking company told the Express-News the truck was “cloned” and painted to match one of his own, right down to copying his legal vehicle’s Department of Transportation registration number.
“Our reefer [refrigerated trailer] is sitting right in the yard,” Felipe Betancourt Jr., who owns Betancourt Trucking with his father, said.
“That one in San Antonio is not our trailer.”
The victims have been identified as from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.
Local police have taken three people into custody and have turned the investigation over to Federal counterparts.
SURVIVORS ‘UNABLE TO SPEAK’
A number of survivors from the human-smuggling disaster are unable to speak while hooked up to hospital tubes, a local Catholic leader told The New York Post.
“At this point, we are trying to hold on to any little sign of hope regarding any of them,’’ said the Archbishop of San Antonio, Gustavo Garcia-Siller, said after visiting six victims.
“I only was with one that was able to speak. She was the youngest … 16 years old. The other ones are sedated,” he said Tuesday local time.
“Her name was Sebastiana. And I said, ‘Where are you from? Guatemala?’ She smiled.
“There was another girl. She was 20, and they told me that she hadn’t opened her eyes at all,” Garcia-Siller added.
“Before I left, she opened her eyes. … She tried to speak, but she couldn’t.”
Archbishop Garcia-Siller also revealed that one of the victim’s heart “had already stopped three times” and that he did not know if the person survived the night.
“It’s so hard for us here to think that people are people, that we are part of a larger reality, humanity,” he said.
“Since I came here in the 1980s, my work has been with immigrants. Ever since then, we were insisting on immigration reform, and nothing has been done since then. Truly nothing substantial and even the opposite.
“They’re people. They have families. They have suffered enough to make that kind of a trip to the United States with hope to connect with family and to live a more dignified life,” he added. “These are the poor, the neglected.’’
BIDEN BLAMED FOR TRAGEDY
The shocking finding was one of the worst disasters involving migrants in the United States in recent years — and came five years after a similar deadly incident in the same Texas city, a few hours from the Mexican border.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the deaths were on US president Joe Biden.
“They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law,” Abbott said.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz called the discovery “horrific” and “wrong.”
“How many more people have to die before Dems give a da--?” he asked, before making a reference to Biden’s border crisis.
The White House — facing intense pressure over its immigration policies — called the tragedy “absolutely horrific and heartbreaking,” and said President Joe Biden, flying to a NATO summit in Madrid, has been briefed on the incident.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the victims were mostly from Latin American nations including Mexico.
“It’s a tremendous misfortune … so far there are 50 dead: 22 from Mexico, seven from Guatemala, two from Honduras and 19 still without information about their nationality,” the Mexican leader said at a morning press conference.
San Antonio Police chief William McManus said they had three people in custody.
“We don’t know if they are absolutely connected to this or not. This investigation has been turned over to HSI,” he said.
“A [nearby] worker … heard a cry for help and came out to investigate, found a trailer with the doors partially opened. Opened them up to take a look a found a number of diseased individuals inside,” Mr McManus said, explaining how it was first reported and that it was preliminary information which could change.
San Antonio Fire Department chief Charles Hood said there was no signs of water in the truck and survivors had heat stroke and exhaustion.
“It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer but there was no visible working A/C unit on that rig,” Hood said.
The bodies were discovered inside an 18-wheeler on Quintana Road in San Antonio.
Tractor-trailers are known to be a common means of transportation for undocumented migrants entering the US.
Local journalists near the scene reported spotting yellow tarps near the back of the open truck, as well as a large “mass casualty – evacuation” ambulance rushing by and dozens of officers from the San Antonio Police Department, Homeland Security and Border Patrol on the scene.
The tractor-trailer was abandoned in a remote area near railroad tracks and the driver remains at large, according to the New York Times.
Officers and first responders were walking the train tracks with thermal imaging cameras to find any possible survivors and the driver, KSAT reported.
The deceased are believed to all have been undocumented migrants who crossed into the US illegally, according to the Times. Officers are investigating how the deaths occurred.
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