Don’t Let the Republicans Hijack the Border

The public needs to look at the real root causes of migration.

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To Maíra, the Biden Administration’s long overdue plan to reopen U.S. borders to asylum seekers on May 23 is “the light at the end of the tunnel.” She hopes it will provide a pathway for protection from gang violence in her homeland of Guatemala.

“I can’t go back,” Maíra, who asked that her last name not be used, tells The Progressive. In December, she fled Guatemala City with three of her children and headed for the Mexico-U.S. border. Gang members, she says, had tried to rape her sixteen-year-old daughter. And when Maíra reported the incident to police, threats from the gang escalated. Police, she says, did nothing to protect her family.

“Title 42 has not deterred immigration. It has only created more risks for asylum seekers.” 

Maíra, who is thirty-six and a nurse, says she and her daughter were sexually abused by Mexican police when they reached the U.S. border. The family subsequently crossed into the United States, but Border Patrol agents returned them to Mexico within hours, without giving Maíra a chance to explain their need for asylum. 

“Hope is the last thing you lose,” Maíra says. She and her children are now in a shelter on the Mexican side of the border, with Maíra worried that a court challenge to the May 23 reopening—spearheaded by GOP-controlled states—could result in a new roadblock. 

Elket Rodríguez, an immigration advocate with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship who works with about a dozen shelters in Mexico, sees the effect of the waiting on those seeking safe haven. “As time passes, their hope starts to wane,” he says. “It really takes a toll, not just on their physical health but also on their mental and emotional health.”

Title 42, as the Trump-era border closure order for asylum seekers is commonly called, is a section of federal public health law that was put in place, ostensibly, to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But many public health and immigrant rights experts say this is a misuse of public health law, as it singles out asylum seekers, preventing them from entering the United States to pursue their claims.

Trump loyalists, meanwhile, have made Title 42 the centerpiece of their election year fear-mongering. Instead the public needs to be reminded that asylum is very much a part of immigration law.

“The 1980 Refugee Act provides for the right to seek asylum,” says Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies. “To characterize the seeking of asylum as somehow unlawful shows an actual ignorance of what the law says or a willful ignorance—wishing that the people didn’t have that right.”

Under the Biden Administration, some exceptions to Title 42’s immediate expulsion provisions for asylum seekers have already been made, most notably for unaccompanied migrant children. From February 2021 through this past March, Border Patrol apprehended a total of 2.4 million people, expelling 1.3 million of them under Title 42, according to a tally prepared for this article by the American Immigration Council. About a third of those apprehended had tried to cross more than once.

With the border closed to many, some asylum seekers have taken more dangerous routes to the United States, crossing on desert terrain and sometimes trying to scale Trump’s thirty-foot border wall. According to CNN, at least 650 people died attempting to cross the Southern border last year, the highest annual count since the International Organization for Migration started documenting such deaths in 2014.

As Linda Corchado, interim executive director of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, put it at a recent press briefing: “Title 42 has not deterred immigration. It has only created more risks for asylum seekers.” 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s recent appearances at Congressional hearings have made him a target of Republican ire.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, took Mayorkas to task for not walking in lockstep with Trump’s xenophobic immigrant policies, saying that the Biden Administration’s changes at the Southern border were “intentional.”

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, chimed in by demanding to know why 1.2 million asylum seekers who had final deportation orders had not been booted out of the country. “How many ICE agents do you need to deport them?” he asked.

Stoking the rhetoric, Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said: “You are responsible for thousands of young girls being forced into prostitution.” He added: “My constituents want you impeached because they believe you committed treason. . . . They compare you to Benedict Arnold.”

Mayorkas, in response, had this to say: “It is quite regrettable that individuals who seek humanitarian relief in this country, who qualify for humanitarian relief, are painted with a brush of criminality.”

Mayorkas does have a plan for the expected increase of migrants. But the twenty-page strategy memorandum, while stressing partnerships with nonprofits and local governments, takes a wrong turn toward enforcement.

“Core to this plan is our commitment to continue to strictly enforce our immigration laws,” it states.

The plan steps up militarization of the border, spending $70 million on additional aircraft and sensors, along with more than $250 million on border security technology. The 23,000 Customs and Border Protection agents and officers provided in the plan are backed by about 10,000 additional personnel from federal agencies.

And Mayorkas will soon begin implementing a revamped asylum system, which calls for increased use of expedited removal. It is a process that has resulted in deportations without giving asylum seekers a fair shake.

Under the new system, asylum officers will play a much larger role. They will be authorized to grant asylum in their review of cases, which is a plus. But the strict guidelines for completion of a case will make it harder to get a full airing by immigration judges of any asylum officer denials.

“The timelines will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for many people to find counsel,” says Victoria Neilson, supervising attorney for the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. “And if you don’t have counsel in these asylum cases, it’s very difficult to win because these cases are so complicated.”

Democrats who are wavering in their support for rescinding Title 42 should realize that nonprofit agencies and religious groups stand ready to help asylum seekers.

Task forces of nonprofits providing services for asylum seekers have formed in the four states that border Mexico—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—says Bilal Askaryar, communications coordinator with the Welcome With Dignity Campaign. He urges the public to look at asylum seekers with a wider lens.

“Whether you’re a person fleeing the war in Ukraine or fleeing institutional violence in Central America, you are fleeing the same thing,” he says. “You are running for your life.”

Ruben Garcia, executive director of Annunciation House in El Paso, says “root causes” need to become a focus of the immigration debate. “No one is really talking about why these people come,” he says. “What are they worried about? What do they need.”

Garcia, who has been helping asylum seekers for more than four decades, heads up a network of churches that provide shelter for about 400 new arrivals each day, after they are processed by immigration agents at the border.

Honduras remains a dangerous place, with journalists and community leaders assaulted and murdered for defending their land and basic rights.

Contrary to the Republican narrative, asylum seekers are not let loose. Rather, groups such as Annunciation House help them connect with their sponsors, often family or friends, who will take care of them throughout their asylum proceedings.

President Joe Biden initially made addressing root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—nations that accounted for about 684,000 of migrant apprehensions by Border Patrol last fiscal year—a cornerstone of the administration’s immigration agenda. But not much has been heard about this initiative since. 

A recent report assessing the Biden Administration’s immigration track record so far—  published by a broad coalition of faith-based and grassroots organizations—tells how Guatemala’s and El Salvador’s leaders have “moved to capture judicial systems, protect corruption, and violate human rights.”

Honduras remains a dangerous place, with journalists and community leaders assaulted and murdered for defending their land and basic rights, notes the report. But this past November, Hondurans turned out in large numbers to elect Xiomara Castro as president.

Promising fundamental change, Castro seeks land reform and is committed to fighting corruption and protecting human rights.

In February, her predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández, was arrested at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice and extradited to New York on charges of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers in exchange for protection from law enforcement.

But it was the Obama Administration that, in 2009, readily accepted a coup that ousted then-President Manuel Zelaya, who is Castro’s husband, and steered Honduras off a democratic path. As historian Dana Frank notes, “U.S. support for the coup warned all other governments that they could be next.”

What’s needed now, says Patricia Montes, executive director of the Boston-based Centro Presente, is to dismantle the “narco-state” that has taken hold in Honduras.

The Biden Administration, according to the new report, wants to step up funding in the Northern Triangle for agriculture, education, and the environment as well as address such problem areas as child health and sanitation. But Vice President Kamala Harris, who heads the root causes initiative, has made corporate investment a key plank.

No wonder the report found skepticism about U.S motives in a region that has experienced a history of exploitation by U.S. multinationals.

“It is a problematic model—particularly in Honduras and particularly with the United States’ history in this country,” says Elizabeth Kennedy, the Central America research specialist for the Washington Office on Latin America.

“In multiple examples,” she adds, “these development projects—and capitalist industrial projects—have led to displacement and abuses of the poor and of the Indigenous and Garifuna populations.” 

The Difference Between Asylum Seekers and Refugees

Both granting refugee status and asylum in the United States provide safe haven but are used in different situations.

Those seeking either must show they have been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, as set forth in the 1980 Refugee Act.

This standard was originally set by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in response to the large numbers of displaced persons afraid or unwilling to return to their homelands in the aftermath of World War II.

“It is really saying citizens have lost their protective bond with their country of origin,” says Katherine Rehberg, vice president of programs for Church World Service, an interdenominational group that helps both refugees and asylees.

Asylum applies when individuals have already set foot in the United States or are at a land border port of entry. If they pass an initial screening, asylum seekers must be granted an opportunity to have a full airing of their claim. They could face deportation if they fail to meet the persecution standard.

Individuals admitted as refugees apply from outside the United States. They have typically fled their homeland and seek refugee status from another country. Some are referred to the United States for resettlement by U.N. refugee agency employees and are interviewed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staff to determine if they should be admitted as refugees.

Humanitarian parole—a provision in immigration law that provides temporary admission into the United States—has been used in emergency situations because the refugee approval process can be so slow moving.

More than 70,000 Afghans evacuated from their homeland last year were admitted under humanitarian parole. This provision is also now being used to admit Ukrainians fleeing the current war. Efforts are underway to pass legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for the Afghans.

Under the Refugee Act, the president, in consultation with Congress, sets a ceiling for refugee admissions, which has varied over the years. The resettlement system was virtually shut down during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Trump set a refugee admission ceiling of 15,000 for fiscal 2021. It was eventually raised by President Joe Biden to 62,500, but only 11,411 refugees were admitted that year. Though Biden raised the ceiling to 125,000 for the current fiscal year, the administration is nowhere near on pace to reach that number, says Lacy Broemel, policy analyst for the International Refugee Assistance Project.

“It is really, frankly, high time this administration ramps up the resources available to interview these individuals and adjudicate their claims,” Broemel says.

                                        —James Goodman