Arrested in Tijuana, a group of asylum seekers from Cameroon, Uganda and Ethiopia met in a shared hotel room. There, they would wait for the policies of the Trump administration that had blocked their ability to seek protection in the United States in the midst of the pandemic.
The group has been pursued, threatened and extorted by Mexican officials since their arrival in the border city, an Ethiopian told human rights researchers.
“Conditions are horrible,” said the man about the hotel. “We have to buy everything, like sheets and everything we need. They give us these rotten mattresses. There are a lot [of] insects and animals. “
Then, in November, a new hotel owner threw the group out onto the streets, saying it doesn’t like Africans, said the asylum seeker.
The group is among the many thousands of asylum seekers arrested in Tijuana and along the US-Mexico border that are struggling to survive, as their temporary housing options and US blockade orders extend indefinitely.
Their situation is just one of the examples presented in a report published by Human Rights First in December, which looked at the ways in which asylum seekers were increasingly harmed by U.S. immigration policies in 2020, especially those put in place after arrival of the pandemic.
“This is both a humanitarian shame and a legal scam,” says the report on a series of orders from the Trump administration.
The group of asylum seekers from African countries, like many others along the U.S.-Mexico border, was waiting before the pandemic for their numbers to be placed on waiting lists that became the de facto process for migrants to apply for asylum at ports of entry. . The policy, known as “metering”, restricted the number of entry doors for asylum seekers processed on a given day.
When the pandemic hit, ports of entry stopped prosecuting asylum seekers.
The Trump administration then issued an order through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to prevent asylum seekers from crossing into the United States illegally – the only other option when doors of entry are closed – to give the first few. steps in the long process of protection in the US asylum system.
According to the order, the border authorities send many asylum seekers back to the country where they were most recently – usually Mexico. The authorities also detain asylum seekers and put them on airplanes back to the countries from which they fled.
Sending asylum seekers back to their countries of origin without tracking them to see if they are entitled to asylum goes against a fundamental part of international agreements on the treatment of refugees.
Several asylum seekers from Nicaragua who fled their country after being arrested and tortured for protesting the Daniel Ortega regime were put on airplanes back to Nicaragua without any screening process to see if they should be protected, the report says. Back in Nicaragua, they were arrested and interrogated and are still being watched by the Ortega network.
Mexican asylum seekers have been expelled to Mexico, the report says, including a young man who was sent back through the Port of Entry to Nogales around midnight in freezing temperatures, and a woman whose 2-day-old baby had been born in the United States United .
Less than 1% of those expelled received any screening related to fear of returning home in the first three months of the pandemic, the report concluded.
The evictions include at least 8,800 unaccompanied children, the report says, and possibly up to 14,000.
In October and November, the Border Patrol conducted 119,500 expulsions, according to Customs and Border Protection data. Authorities said many of these evictions are from people who have crossed the border several times.
The Trump administration said the expulsion policy is aimed at preventing COVID-19 from spreading within the United States and preventing migrants from being held together in cells.
“The government’s preventive measure protected DHS frontline officials, individuals in our custody and the American public – thereby avoiding a potential disaster along the border,” Chad Wolf said in a recent speech. He served as interim secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, although a judge ruled that he was placed illegally in office.
But asylum seekers who are expelled to their home countries are detained – and usually tested for coronavirus – before being placed on airplanes, according to the human rights report. This, says Human Rights First, runs counter to the government’s justification for politics.
Public health experts at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and George Washington University have called for the suspension of the expulsion program, arguing that there are safe ways to quickly prosecute asylum seekers and allow them to house their loved ones in the United States.
Human Rights First found that blocking asylum applications at ports of entry and evicting people caught illegally led more migrants to try to cross more remote parts of the border, where they are less likely to be noticed – and more likely to die. .
Ibrain Wencislao Pérez Suárez, a 30-year-old Cuban political activist who fled the persecution, disappeared across the Texas desert in July, the report notes. His family is still trying to find out what happened to him.
An asylum seeker from Nicaragua was hospitalized for nine days for severe dehydration that caused kidney damage after he tried to cross the desert. Border officials later expelled him to Nogales while he was still wearing his hospital gown, the report says.
Asylum seekers expelled and those arrested for measurement are not the only ones in danger in Mexico.
Migrants forced to wait south of the border during their immigration cases in the United States under the “Stay in Mexico” program – officially known as the Protocol for the Protection of Migrants, or MPP – are being harmed even more because of the pandemic, the report says . . That’s because violence against migrants is increasing in Mexico, migrant shelters are closing and court hearings for the program’s cases have been suspended indefinitely by the federal government.
Human Rights First tracked more than 1,300 reported cases of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping or other violent attacks on asylum seekers who had been waiting on the program since its inception two years ago.
Cartels in the border region of the state of Chihuahua, where many migrants are returned, have focused their efforts on kidnapping and extorting asylum seekers that the United States has returned, according to a local Mexican prosecutor. And many asylum seekers report being targeted by the Mexican police itself.
A Nicaraguan man who returned to Tijuana under the MPP was beaten and robbed by the Mexican police and still faces police harassment, immigration lawyer Margaret Cargioli of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center told researchers.
A Cuban woman waiting on the Remain in Mexico program in Ciudad Juárez was kidnapped, beaten and raped by Mexican police in June, a lawyer representing Human Rights First said. As soon as she was free, she immediately crossed over to the United States, visibly injured, for help, the report says, and US border officials sent her back to Mexico.
There are about 23,000 cases pending in the Remain in Mexico program, the report says, and about 70% of them have been waiting for more than a year in January.
Approximately 3,500 new cases of MPP were opened during the pandemic, the report concluded, meaning that asylum seekers were placed in the program instead of being expelled under the pandemic policy. Most are from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Morrissey writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.