The Reality of Current US Immigration Policy 45 countries, however able, will be denied access to US universities, and patients seeking advanced medical care will have to turn elsewhere. Another, lessremarked-upon, consequence of the Supreme Court’s judgment is its devastating impact on the LGBTI community. A significant minority of asylum applicants from the excluded countries have turned to the United States for safety in the face of barbarous anti-gay policies in their home countries – homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, Syria, and Yemen.39 This door is now closed. To further its externalization strategy, the administration has developed several other policies designed to block, deter, or return humanitarian migrants, policies that have a disproportionate impact on Central American children and their families. In January 2019, months after the family separation policy was halted, but with the same deterrent intent, the US government introduced the mis-named “Migration Protection Protocols” (MPP), more accurately known as the “Remain in Mexico Policy.”40 For the first time, border officials are forcing child refugees and their families, who present themselves at the United States’ southern border to apply for asylum, to return to Mexico. There, in a no-man’s-land known to be riddled with drug traffickers and criminal cartels, certified as a “Do Not Travel” area by the US State Department, the asylum seekers have to spend months waiting for their hearings to be listed. US asylum officials, protesting the new policy, described it in a court petition they lodged: “Prior to the MPP, our country’s processing of asylum applications ensured that people fleeing persecution would not be . . . returned to a territory where they may face persecution or threat of torture.”41 This externalization practice recalls the infamous Haitian maritime interdiction policies of the 1980s and 1990s. According to October 2019 estimates, more than 66,000 Central American humanitarian migrants have been affected, of whom approximately 5,000 are under five years old.42 According to firsthand reports, 50 percent of those returned report being kidnapped in Mexico; systematic sexual violence has also been reliably documented.43 These reports and other confirmed cases of shootings and ransoms have not, to date, forced a revision of US border practice. “#Outlawed: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Human Rights Watch, http://internap .hrw.org/features/features/lgbt_laws/. 40 “Migration Protection Protocols,” Department of Homeland Security, January 24, 2019, www .dhs.gov/news/2019/01/24/migrant-protection-protocols. 41 Local 1924, Amici Brief 2, Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan, No. 19-15716 (9th Cir. June 26, 2019). 42 “US Move Puts More Asylum Seekers at Risk: Expanded ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program Undermines Due Process,” Human Rights Watch, September 25, 2019, www.hrw.org/news/ 2019/09/25/us-move-puts-more-asylum-seekers-risk#; R. Mishor and K. Hampton, “The Worst Immigration Policy You’ve Never Heard of,” The Hill, January 8, 2020, https://thehill.com/ opinion/immigration/477329-migrant-protection-protocols-the-worst-immigration-policy-youvenever. 43 “Delivered to Danger: Illegal Remain in Mexico Policy Imperils Asylum Seekers’ Lives and Denies Due Process,” Human Rights First, August 2019, www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/ default/files/Delivered-to-Danger-August-2019%20.pdf. 39 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press