A federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump’s first administration illegally sent asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, where they faced “persecution, torture, and possibly death.”
U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal of the Central District of California issued the 40-page ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit over the Migrant Protection Protocols, the policy better known as “Remain in Mexico.” A redacted version of the ruling was unsealed Friday, Politico reporter Kyle Cheney reported on X.
Two legal aid groups, the Immigrant Defenders Law Center and Jewish Family Service of San Diego, sued in 2020 along with several asylum seekers, according to the ruling.
The Trump administration launched the policy in January 2019, requiring many asylum seekers who arrived from Mexico to wait there while their cases moved through U.S. immigration courts, the ruling said. The Department of Homeland Security placed 66,985 people in that first version.
The government said it created the program to address what it called a migration crisis at the southern border and to stop what officials viewed as abuse of the asylum system. But human rights groups documented more than 1,000 instances of violence against people in the program, including murder, torture, rape and kidnapping.
“DHS concluded that MPP 1.0 enrollees awaiting their court hearings in Mexico ‘were subject to extreme violence and insecurity at the hands of transnational criminal organizations,’” Bernal wrote.
Bernal ruled that the program broke a federal law requiring agencies to reasonably justify their decisions, because officials did not fully consider conditions in Mexico before launching it.
“Yet, there is no evidence that Defendants considered the conditions in Mexico prior to implementing MPP 1.0,” the judge said.
Bernal also ruled that the policy violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of a full and fair hearing for people facing deportation.
“Defendants’ removal of MPP 1.0 enrollees to Mexico where they … ‘face[d] persecution, torture, and possibly death’ deprived them of this right,” Bernal wrote. “Where noncitizens face dangerous conditions, it would be ‘untenable’ to expect them to litigate their immigration case under such conditions."
The policy also violated asylum seekers’ right under federal law to be represented by a lawyer, the judge ruled. Only about 7% of people in the program had attorneys, compared with 80% of asylum seekers in immigration court overall, according to immigration court records cited in the ruling.
The judge further found that the program violated the First Amendment rights of the legal aid groups and asylum seekers at immigration hearing sites, where attorneys got at most one hour with clients before court and could not speak with people who had not hired them.
“The Government fails to point to any evidence in the record, or even make any argument that the restrictions ‘fulfill[] a legitimate need,’” Bernal wrote.
The Trump administration reinstated the policy in January 2025, according to the ruling. Bernal paused the revived version in April, but a federal appeals court later limited the pause to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center’s current and future clients.
Bernal ordered the government to propose within 21 days how it will notify asylum seekers covered by the lawsuit, after formally voiding the original program’s policies and guidance.
