Maria, a Honduran asylum seeker who was hiding from a group of men who brutally raped her in Mexico, expected U.S. immigration officials to pull her out of a Trump-era program that forced thousands of immigrants to wait in dangerous cities frontier.
More than a year after her rape, it sometimes still hurt for Maria to sit. Still, the 54-year-old took shelter inside the cold United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility in El Paso, Texas, on Friday, January 22, and told her story to an asylum officer. by phone.
Maria told how she and her son were kidnapped in Mexico on the way to the border with the United States. Like a group of men raped her in a gang when she refused to give her daughter’s phone number to ask for ransom. How her child was forced to watch the attack and how she now has an abnormal connection between the rectum and the vagina that causes feces to leak into the vagina. And finally, Maria told the asylum officer how she filed a police report against her attackers and feared that they would find her in the shelter where she is hiding in Mexico.
Hours after the call, the asylum officer denied Maria’s request to continue her immigration case in the United States.
“My mind went blank,” Maria told BuzzFeed News. “It was like my life ended there. I had this great hope of finally being able to breathe better and feel better.”
Once again, Maria withdrew to the shelter in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez in fear. The lawyers representing Maria asked BuzzFeed News not to disclose her full name for fear of retaliation for speaking out against organized crime.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which employ asylum officers who oversee non-refoulement interviews, did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the USCIS and CBP, said asylum records, including those relating to credible fear interviews like Maria’s, are confidential under regulation.
Friday was the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), informally known as the Stay in Mexico policy. The policy has forced more than 70,000 immigrants and asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for months and even years while their cases are tried by a U.S. immigration judge, according to an analysis by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Despite the word “protection” in their name and the Mexican government’s promise to protect those sent back to Mexico, hundreds of immigrants have been easy targets for cartels and corrupt officials who kidnap and torture them for ransom.
A Human Rights First database tracked at least 1,314 public reports of rape, torture, kidnapping and other forms of violence against people sent to some of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere.
During the campaign, President Biden had promised to end the policy of staying in Mexico. Last week, his government stopped adding new people to the program, but did not clarify how the government will prosecute immigrants who are already in the MPP. On Friday, Reuters reported that the Biden government was looking at how it can prosecute immigrants who are already part of the program and prioritize the most vulnerable.
When the policy was implemented, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that immigrants would not be involuntarily returned to Mexico if they were more likely to be persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. Doing so would violate the principle of non-refoulement, the practice of not forcing asylum seekers to return to a place where they can be persecuted.
Brooke Bischoff, a lawyer for the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center who is working with Maria, said Maria faces persecution while in Mexico because she was the target of persecution based on her immigration status when she was kidnapped and raped. Now, Bischoff said, Maria also faces new persecution because most of the men in the group are still at large and may try to retaliate for having filed a criminal complaint against them.
Keeping Maria in the MPP also violates the program’s own standards, said Bischoff. When DHS announced the program, it issued guidelines that immigrants with known physical and mental health problems should not be sent back to Mexico under the MPP. However, CBP still sent back adults and children with health problems.
“It is so clear that she should never have been submitted to MPP in the first place,” Bischoff told BuzzFeed News.
Taking Maria out of MPP would also ensure that she gets the medical care she needs to recover from the rape. The shelter where Maria is overcrowded and there is no regular access to showers or private areas where Maria can clean her wounds, said Bischoff.
“We want to make sure that she is not suffering unnecessarily from this program when she should have been discharged,” said Bischoff.
Maria left Honduras to escape the violence and hoped to reunite with her family in the United States. In September 2019, she and her son, then 9, were on a bus in the Mexican state of Veracruz bound for the border with the United States, but were expelled by members of the cartel and kidnapped for ransom.
The men who kidnapped them demanded that Maria provide the phone number of a relative in the United States. When she refused, the group of men raped her in front of her son. Later, the men aimed a gun at their son’s head and told him that if he did not make his sister in the United States pay the ransom, they would shoot him.
Maria and her son were kept in a hotel for about a month, but managed to escape when one of the housekeepers left their bedroom door unlocked. The mother and son got into a taxi and asked the driver for help. The driver had to stop and buy diapers for Maria, who was still bleeding from the injuries sustained during the attack.
The kidnappers raped Maria to the point of completely obliterating the physical barrier between her vagina and rectum, according to medical records analyzed by BuzzFeed News.
Maria made it to Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, and applied for asylum to US border officials on October 24, 2019. But, like thousands of other immigrants and asylum seekers, Maria was told she would have to fight your immigration case from the USA from Mexico.
“The most difficult thing to put in MPP is your dreams being destroyed,” said Maria. “They send you back to Mexico with no money and nowhere to go, nowhere to run.”
Under the MPP, immigrants were sent back to Mexico with trial dates and instructions to report to an official border crossing on that date.
Thousands of immigrants waited in open-air camps, shelters and hotels as their audiences advanced. At the same time, they lived in fear of being extorted, kidnapped or raped by cartels and, in some cases, by Mexican authorities.
In December, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said his country had “protected migrants”, but first-hand reports and data on immigrants in the MPP being attacked or targeted tell a different story.
Maria worked at a casino in Juarez as a janitor, trying to raise enough money for her medicine to cure her rectovaginal fistula. In June 2020, while working at the casino, Maria saw one of her kidnappers. Terrified, Maria reported him to the police and never went back to work, choosing to hide inside the shelter.
Mexican police did not arrest the man Maria saw, but managed to arrest another man who he believed was involved in her abduction, using information from when his sister paid the ransom.
Bischoff, Maria’s lawyer, said that, according to a 2019 State Department Human Rights Report for Mexico, organized crime in Mexico acts with near impunity. Only 6% of crimes are reported or investigated, according to Mexico’s statistics agency.
“Organized criminal groups have been implicated in several murders, acting with impunity and sometimes in alliance with corrupt federal, state, local and security officials,” said the State Department report.
Although one of the men was arrested, Maria lives in fear that the other men will look for her and find her in Ciudad Juarez, Bischoff said.
“She faces possible retribution because she made a criminal complaint and participated in the criminal case,” said Bischoff. “There is no good way out and the country’s conditions show us that there is great impunity in these situations.”
Maria’s hopes of entering the United States have been dashed, but she still dreams of reuniting with her family and feeling safe.
“I dream, I wish I had someone close to me to help me heal my problems, at least emotionally,” said Maria. “My sadness does not go away.”