Gladi Aguilar
Michael Seifert
Michael Siefert
Months before Central American immigrants in dire straits began to gather at the U.S.-Mexico border, Elena, a Guatemalan woman seeking safe haven in the United States, was warned by other asylum seekers that she should expect rejection.
Upon arriving in Juarez, Mexico last May, Elena was told that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stationed at the bridges connecting Juarez with El Paso, Texas, were routinely turning away applicants. So she and her three youngest children made their own crossing several miles away.
“Yes, we entered illegally, but we wanted to get caught,” says Elena, who is thirty-nine. She and her children were separated for about three months but they have since been reunited. Now they await an asylum hearing that would not be possible had they remained stuck on the Mexico side of the border.
Elena says she and her children fled Guatemala after their home was destroyed by an earthquake and she was sexually assaulted. They made it to the southern border in about a week—with no intention other than to start anew.
“What is there to go back to?” asked Elena, in a recent long-distance phone interview. She questioned Trump’s show of military force at the border, saying “We don’t need militarization. We need fair laws. We don’t need to make asylum harder. It’s hard enough.”
“We don’t need militarization. We need fair laws."
President Donald Trump is seeking to require asylum seekers crossing the southern border to get their initial processing only at official ports of entry, denying those entering like Elena a chance at asylum.
But groups including Human Rights First, Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin America, along with immigration rights activists at the border, argue that asylum seekers at official ports of entry are running into countless obstacles and rejections. Trump’s move was blocked on November 20 by a court challenge.
“The turnback practice is horrendous and blatantly illegal,” says Melissa Crow, a senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. She is one of a group of lawyers representing thirteen asylum seekers and a California-based immigrant rights and services group, Al Otro Lado, in a federal lawsuit filed last year challenging the practices of Customs and Border Protection officers at these crossings.
Trump is determined to let in as few asylum seekers as possible, rather than give them a chance in immigration court here. The turnbacks are part of that strategy.
Before he was booted from his post as Attorney General, Jeff Sessions did everything he could to make immigration courts unwelcoming to asylum seekers. The asylum rejection rate has climbed from 44.5 percent six years ago to about 70 percent today. And it will no doubt continue to rise, given how Sessions changed the ground rules for asylum applicants.
“You are not talking to a judge. You are talking to Jeff Sessions,” says Margo Cowan, a public defender in Tucson long involved in immigrant rights struggles. “I realize that he hit the road, but to undo his stuff is going to take a long time.”
Administration officials have cited the low rate of asylum approvals for applicants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—just 17 percent during the most recent fiscal year—as evidence that immigration courts are being jammed with baseless claims. A far fairer assessment would note the ways that the U.S. has made getting asylum more difficult.
To be granted asylum, applicants must currently prove they have a well-founded fear of persecution based on “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
The applicant must be in the United States or at the border, but does not have to go through a designated port of entry, as Trump now wants to require.
The turnback practice at the U.S.-Mexico border actually began before Trump took office, but it has become much more pervasive under him. According to the lawsuit, this policy “comes from high-level U.S. government officials and is having the intended effect of severely restricting—and constructively denying—access to the asylum process.”
Top Department of Homeland Security officials and unidentified agents violated immigration and administrative law, as well Constitutional due process safeguards and international protections for asylum seekers, the lawsuit alleges. And it says Customs and Border Protection officers have engaged in misrepresentations, threats, and abusive behavior, including greeting asylum seekers with such statements as “Guatemalans make us sick” and “Donald Trump just signed new laws saying there is no asylum for anyone.”
The plaintiffs are seeking to have this case designated as a class action, representing all noncitizens who are denied access to the U.S. asylum process at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Individual plaintiffs, identified by pseudonyms, tell of fleeing persecution in their homeland and seeking asylum in the United States—only to be rebuffed at the southern border.
Three of the plaintiffs, including a woman identified as “Abigail,” allege being pressured into withdrawing their applications for admission into the United States. But she and her children have plenty to fear about returning to their home in central Mexico.
They fled, according to the lawsuit, after being threatened by members of a drug cartel, who told Abigail not to continue investigating the disappearance of her husband, in May 2017, after he would not let the cartel use his tractor trailer for smuggling.
As soon as Abigail and her children reached Tijuana, Customs and Border Protection officers at the San Ysidro port of entry repeatedly told her that she didn’t qualify for asylum, says the lawsuit. The document that Abigail says she was forced to sign withdrawing her application was in English, which she did not understand.
Two other plaintiffs, “Ursula” and “Juan,” tell how they have plenty to fear in their homeland but found rejection at the U.S.-Mexico border.
This past August, the couple, with their two children, left Honduras. Ursula witnessed a Honduran gang kill her brother in 2014, and since then gang members have threatened her, says the lawsuit.
As soon as the family arrived at the port of entry to Laredo, Texas, they tried to cross the bridge but were stopped in the middle and told by U.S. officials that the port was closed. They then traveled to the port of entry to Hidalgo, but before they could try to cross a Mexican official grabbed their documents and led them back to Mexico, where another Mexican official warned they could be deported.
Eleven of the thirteen plaintiffs were eventually let into the United States, after attorneys were prepared to seek an injunction requiring the government to help in the processing of the plaintiffs, Crow says. No admission of wrongdoing was made by the government.
But one of the plaintiffs, ”Beatrice,” was allegedly forced to withdraw her application by Customs and Border Protection officers and sign a form saying she has no fear of returning to Mexico. Another plaintiff, “Roberto,” is being deported to Nicaragua by Mexican officials, according to the lawsuit.
“It’s driving people to desperation.”
“The judge denied in large part the government’s first motion to dismiss, finding that we had established a widespread policy and illegal practice of turnbacks at points of entry,” says Crow.
On Thursday, the government filed a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ recent amended complaint. A response by the plaintiffs is due in a few weeks.
But for now, Trump’s crackdown at the southern border has left many asylum seekers without options.
“It’s driving people to desperation,” says Linda Rivas, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso. “It drives people to look at other avenues to enter this country illegally.”
Rivas notes how a woman with her three-year-old daughter were turned back at a border processing point six times before taking an unauthorized route.
In early June, Mike Seifert, a former priest and longtime immigrant rights activist based in Brownsville, Texas, noticed a change in how asylum seekers were handled at two bridges used as ports of entry at this crossing, along Texas’s southeast border.
Three Customs and Border Protection agents were stationed on the pedestrian walkway to the Brownsville side of the border—acting as traffic cops deciding who could set foot on U.S. soil and when and if they could do so.
“Previously asylum seekers went across the bridge into an inspection facility and presented themselves to Customs and Border Patrol,” says Seifert.
He heard of similar changes from other activists at ports of entry. And this slowed down the process and gave these agents a much bigger say in the process.
At one point last summer, Seifert saw a woman with her child sweltering in 100-degree heat on one of the Brownsville bridges. She told him she had been there for two days. Seifert went to the inspection facility near the U.S. end of the bridge and asked the supervisor for an explanation about why the woman had to wait so long.
“He clicked his heels and looked up toward the bridge and said, ‘I don’t see anyone,’ ” Seifert says.