18 Migrants Already Added to Migrant Protection Protocols In October

According to immigration court data that we updated yesterday on the TRAC website, 18 people were added to the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) in October.

As you may recall, MPP was a Trump-era program that forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico. The Biden administration suspended the program in January, then formally ended the program on June 1. But a federal judge has (rather absurdly) ordered the administration to restart the program. The program could go back into effect as soon as next week.

Click here to read my academic analysis of MPP and its broader political context.

But according to TRAC’s MPP tool, it appears that the Biden administration has already added at least a few people to the MPP docket.

Let me explain what this means.

After MPP was implemented, TRAC was able to identify MPP cases that were (1) assigned to individual MPP courts or (2) cases with an MPP ‘flag’ in the data. The EOIR is disappointingly inconsistent with its flagging protocols, so we needed to rely on both to get the full picture (much like the dedicated docket cases). Our analysis for the MPP tool is set up to incorporate both of these types of cases.

The 18 cases listed here were identified because they include an MPP flag on the case. Since there were no active MPP courts in October, the 18 cases are currently assigned to other immigration courts in Texas.

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The number of cases may not seem like a lot, and it’s not within the total scope of the number of cases that have been enrolled in MPP since the beginning—more than 70,000. But it at least serves as an early sign that MPP has not gone away and may, indeed, be preparing to ramp up in November even before a formal announcement.

I also hesitate to make too much of this at the moment because we are in the process of improving our MPP tools to keep up with the changing policy landscape around MPP.