GOP Reps Demand Biden Restore Asylum Pacts, Pinpoint Move as Cause of Border Crisis

Republicans on Capitol Hill are demanding that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Biden administration reimplement the Trump-era migrant-processing agreements between the U.S. and Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries that they canceled at the height of the current crisis on the southern border.

Representative Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and all of the panel’s GOP members panned the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from the Migrant Protection Protocols with Mexico and the Asylum Cooperative Agreements that the U.S. struck with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These agreements established a system for processing the claims of asylum seekers who had arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in those countries, instead of on U.S. soil.