Protesters demand an end to ICE as they march for immigrant rights. Photo by Francely Flores
With President Joe Biden taking office, Dariela Moncada didn’t expect that she’d have to help mount a campaign to keep her brother Javier Castillo Maradiaga off of deportation flights to Honduras.
“It’s really traumatizing to talk to your nine-year-old,” says Christina about their separation. “She keeps telling me she wants to be with me.”
Only after she enlisted Congressional support did the entrenched Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaucracy put a thirty-day hold on deporting her brother.
“It’s a new administration but the same gloomy days,” says Moncada, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who lives in the Bronx.
On the Mexico side of the border, a thirty-seven-year-old Salvadoran woman and three of her children are among the thousands of asylum seekers living in danger while they desperately await a safer day. The woman, who identified herself only by the pseudonym “Christina” to protect her family, discussed her situation in a recent interview with The Progressive from her shelter in Ciudad Juárez.
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Dariela Moncada holding sign in support of her brother at Bronx news conference on January 31, 2021.
“I had no idea what to expect, but I didn’t expect this,” says Christina, who has been stuck in Mexico for the past seventeen months.
Christina’s journey to the border began in August 2019, when she and three of her children fled continued threats of organized crime in El Salvador. But as soon as they crossed the border near El Paso, Texas, a month later, they were detained by Border Patrol and put in the Migrant Protection Protocols program.
Commonly known as “Remain in Mexico,” this program requires asylum seekers to stay on the Mexico side of the border for the duration of their proceedings, except for their appearances in U.S. immigration court. Trump’s closure of borders last March has resulted in a freeze on these hearings and extended waits in Mexico beyond a year.
Christina has been helped by the program, Estamos Unidos, which the Catholic Legal Immigration Network established to provide legal assistance in Juárez. But she seldom ventures outside her shelter because on two occasions, strangers tried to abduct her infant daughter while they waited for a bus.
“I am very scared,” Christina says.
Biden has been off to a fast start on immigration reform. The day he took office, he announced legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for the almost eleven million undocumented immigrants. Another first-day announcement ended Donald Trump’s longstanding attempt to dismantle DACA—a program that protects about 650,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation. Biden also repealed Trump’s “Muslim ban,” which restricted visas for people from thirteen nations, many predominantly Muslim.
But the Migrant Protection Protocols is one of Trump’s draconian measures that has been relegated to review instead of the dustbin of bad immigration history.
“Review of what?” asks Diego Javier Aranda Teixeira, supervising attorney for the immigrant rights group Al Otro Lado.
“These brutal tactics, while amplified under the Trump Administration, are at the core of these agencies’ mission.”
Consider that by December, only 638 of the 42,012 completed Migrant Protection cases had resulted in some form of relief and only 7.5 percent of the participants were able to find legal representation, according to the American Immigration Council.
The Biden Administration has stopped putting asylum seekers into this program and convinced the Supreme Court to cancel oral arguments scheduled for an upcoming Migrant Protection case.
But the administration should allow about 25,000 asylum seekers in Mexico awaiting resolution of their Migrant Protection cases to complete them living in the United States. They could be placed with family members or on some other supervised release.
Christina and her three children could be reunited with the rest of their family. Her husband and nine-year-old daughter, who fled El Salvador in 2018, are living in Texas with relatives as they await resolution of their asylum case.
“It’s really traumatizing to talk to your nine-year-old,” says Christina about their separation. “She keeps telling me she wants to be with me.”
The situation should change in the weeks ahead. On February 11, the Department of Homeland Security announced that on February 19 it will begin to phase in a program to let asylum seekers in this program into the United States.
All along the border, Trump left asylum seekers in dangerous limbo.
Social worker Blanca Navarrete in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Photo provided.
“There is desperation. There is a lot of frustration, but there is also a lot of bad information,” social worker Blanca Navarrete tells The Progressive. “People thought with a new administration coming into place, it would be easier to navigate.”
Based in Juárez, Navarrete recently escorted a Honduran woman and daughter to a bridge connecting Juárez with El Paso. Although they were in the Remain in Mexico program, they hoped a Customs and Border Protection officer would admit them because they had been kidnapped in Juárez. But they were refused entry.
“All the way back, she was crying,” says Navarrete.
The situation is no better in Mexicali, on the Mexico side of the border, more than 600 miles west of El Paso.
“By the time they get here they have nothing,” says Kelly Overton, an activist from the United States who, in late 2018, came to Mexicali with supplies for the growing migrant population. He ended up starting a program, Border Kindness, which provides food, shelter, and other services to migrants.
Overton urges Biden to focus on the border’s humanitarian crisis and says: “They live here, hand to mouth, on a day-to-day basis.”
Francely Flores
Two protesters hold signs, reading "ICE: Just a white supremacy machine #StopTheHate" and "Justice for my son Erick. Justice for Gaspar."
In dismantling Trump’s legacy, Biden must stand firm on his 100-day moratorium on deportations. But in just his first two weeks in office, ICE allowed forty-three removal flights, according to Witness at the Border, a group of activists tracking these flights.
Some of the deportees have been “expelled”—caught at the border and rejected without a court hearing under the Trump border closures directive. Others lost their cases in immigration court. And while a Texas federal judge has issued a temporary injunction stopping Biden’s moratorium, ICE is under no obligation to deport anyone.
The campaign that Dariela Moncada and immigration activists have waged to prevent ICE from deporting her twenty-seven-year-old brother, Javier Castillo Maradiaga, shows the importance of resisting ICE.
Maradiaga came to the United States as an undocumented Honduran child in 2002 and was eventually shielded from deportation by DACA, says Rebecca Press, an immigration lawyer who is representing him. She says he would have qualified for his required DACA renewal in 2019, but he didn’t reapply because he feared ICE.
That December, Maradiaga was stopped by New York City police for jaywalking, and they turned him over to ICE, which has kept him in detention.
Three times since January 18, notes Rebecca Press, Maradiaga has been slated for deportation to Honduras—prompting protests and members of Congress to rally to his side.
“It is very alarming that ICE would spend so many resources rushing to deportation a young man with a likely pathway to lawful status rather than exercise discretion,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and seven other House members said in a January 31 letter to ICE officials.
In early February, ICE headquarters put a thirty-day stay on Maradiaga’s deportation. His future remains in doubt. ICE did not respond to written questions from The Progressive about the case. Press speculates that Maradiaga might be caught in a power struggle between the new administration and the old guard of ICE.
Trump’s horrific legacy can’t be erased by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s recent statement to CNN that the “cruelty of the prior administration has come to an end.”
Cruelty continues with the Biden Administration’s reluctance to repeal the Trump Administration’s border closures of last March.
On February 8, a two-month-old baby and twenty-one other children were among at least seventy-two Haitians put on two deportation flights to Haiti, according to The Guardian.
Even though Haiti is in turmoil, the Biden Administration is continuing to expel newly arrived undocumented immigrants.
“We really don’t think there are reasons why processing at the border can’t just resume,” says Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. Nonprofit organizations, she notes, are ready to help and shelters are available.
A new Mexican law might force a reconsideration of U.S. border policy. The law, which according to The Washington Post is beginning to be enforced, prohibits its immigration detention facilities from holding children and families. Instead, they are being sent to family shelters, causing a shortage of shelter space.
As a result, the U.S. Border Patrol can’t continue its rejection at the border of minors and families seeking asylum in at least South Texas. The Biden Administration is already expanding detention capacity there.
The deportation machine won’t easily change. A new report by the California Immigrant Policy Center and the New York Immigration Coalition aptly describes Border Patrol’s history of “terrorizing border communities” and ICE’s “military style arrests.”
“These brutal tactics, while amplified under the Trump Administration, are at the core of these agencies’ mission,” says the report, “A Blueprint for the Nation: Building Immigrant Power from California to New York.”
The report tells what has been done in these two states to protect immigrants and what more is needed.
Change has been made all the more difficult by agreements that Homeland Security struck with at least seven states during Trump’s last days in office. They require six-months’ notice before major policy changes can be implemented. And a last-minute agreement with the ICE union says that immigration officials must get the union’s approval prior to making policy changes affecting ICE agents.
The Biden Administration has already terminated the agreement with Arizona. But Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, used his state’s agreement with Homeland Security as the basis for the state’s lawsuit challenging the 100-day pause of deportation flights.
As immigration battles heated up, activist Frances Kelley volunteered with Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention.
On several occasions in recent weeks, she has driven more than 100 miles from her home in Shreveport to Alexandria, Louisiana to document deportation flights.
“Undocumented immigrants and their families have fought really hard,” Kelley says. “Everyone else who can needs to get behind them and support actually getting policy changes done through the White House and Congress so people don’t have to live in fear anymore.”