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By Sept. 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it would end the practice of releasing Central American families into the custody of relatives in the interior of the U.S., with limited exceptions for humanitarian or medical reasons.
“This means that for family units, the largest demographic by volume arriving at the border this year, the court-mandated practice of catch and release, due to the inability of DHS to complete immigration proceedings with families detained together in custody, will have been mitigated,” then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said. “This is a vital step in restoring the rule of law and integrity to our immigration system.”
By then, the Trump administration had rolled out a controversial program to send asylum seekers to Mexican border cities for the duration of their proceedings, with the cooperation of the Mexican government. DHS expanded the program, called the Migrant Protection Protocols and known informally as “Remain in Mexico,” to the entire U.S.-Mexico border by the start of 2020. Since then, the U.S. has returned more than 68,000 migrants to Mexico, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
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