PHOENIX • The U.S. government on Thursday began sending asylum seekers back to Nogales, Mexico, to await court hearings that will be scheduled roughly 350 miles away in Juarez, Mexico.

Authorities are expanding a program known as Remain in Mexico that requires tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait out their immigration court hearings in Mexico. Until this week, the government was driving some asylum seekers from Nogales, Arizona, to El Paso, Texas, so they could be returned to Juarez.

Now, asylum seekers will have to find their own way through dangerous Mexican border roads.

About 30 asylum seekers were sent to Nogales, Mexico, on Thursday, said Gilda Loureiro, director of the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora.

Loureiro said the migrants hadn’t made it to the shelter yet but that it was prepared and has a capacity of about 400.

“We’re going to take up to the capacity we have,” she said.

Critics say the Remain in Mexico program, one of several Trump administration policies that have all but ended asylum in the U.S., puts migrants who fled their home countries back into dangerous Mexican border towns where they are often kidnapped, robbed or extorted.

A Human Rights First report released in December documented at least 636 public reports of violence against asylum-seekers returned to Mexico including rape, kidnapping and torture.

Human Rights First said that was a steep increase over October, when the group had identified 343 attacks, and noted the latest figure is surely an undercount because most crime victims don’t report.

Migrants who are applying for asylum in the United States go through a processing area at a new tent courtroom in Laredo, Texas, in September.

the associated press