Stranded in Tijuana, a group of asylum seekers from Cameroon, Uganda and Ethiopia banded together in a shared hotel room. There, they would await the Trump administration policy that would block their ability to protect in the United States amid the pandemic.
The group has been harassed, threatened and blackmailed by Mexican officials since their arrival in the border town, an Ethiopian man told human rights researchers.
“The conditions are very dire,” the man said of the hotel. ‘We have to buy everything, like sheets and everything we need. They give us these rotten mattresses. There are many [of] bugs and animals. ”
Then, in November, a new hotel owner kicked the group on the street and said he did not like Africans, the asylum seeker said.
The group is among thousands of asylum seekers trapped in Tijuana and along the U.S.-Mexico border, who are struggling to survive as their temporary housing options go there and the orders blocking their access to the United States stretch indefinitely.
Their plight is just one of the examples published in a report by Human Rights First in December, which looked at the ways in which asylum seekers were increasingly harmed by US immigration policy in 2020, especially those introduced after their arrival. of the pandemic.
“This is both a humanitarian disgrace and a legitimate mistake,” reads the report on a series of Trump orders.
The group of asylum seekers from African countries, like many others along the U.S.-Mexico border, waited before the pandemic to call their numbers on waiting lists that became the de facto process for migrants to seek asylum in the ports of entry. . The policy, known as’ measurement ‘, limited the number of asylum seekers’ entrance gates on a given day.
When the pandemic hit, the entrance gates completely stopped processing asylum seekers.
Then the Trump administration issued an order through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep asylum seekers who cross into the United States illegally – the only other option if entrance gates are closed – to even take the initial steps in the long process of requesting protection in the US asylum system.
Under the order, border officials returned many asylum seekers to the country they were in recently – usually Mexico. Officials also detain asylum seekers and then put them back on planes to the countries to which they fled.
Returning asylum seekers to their home countries without examining them to see if they are eligible for asylum is in breach of an important part of international agreements on the treatment of refugees.
Several Nicaraguan asylum seekers who fled their country after being sent to prison and tortured for protesting the government of Daniel Ortega were put back on a plane to Nicaragua without any investigation process, the report said. When they were back in Nicaragua, they were arrested and interrogated and are still being investigated by Ortega’s network.
According to the report, Mexican asylum seekers were expelled to Mexico, including a young man who was sent back through freezing temperatures through Nogales harbor around midnight, and a woman whose 2-day-old baby was born in the United States. .
Less than 1% of the outcasts received any screening in the first three months of the pandemic related to their fear of returning home.
According to the report, there are at least 8,800 unaccompanied children and possibly as many as 14,000 children.
In October and November, Border Patrol carried out 119,500 evictions according to information on customs and border protection. Officials said many of these evictions are from people crossing several times.
The Trump administration has said the eviction policy is intended to prevent COVID-19 from spreading in the United States, and to prevent migrants from being detained.
“The government’s preventive measure has protected frontline DHS employees, individuals in our custody and the American public, thus preventing a possible disaster along the border,” Chad Wolf said in a recent speech. He served as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security despite a judge ruling that he was illegally placed in the position.
However, asylum seekers who are deported to their home countries are detained – and are usually tested for the coronavirus – before being put on planes, according to the human rights report. It claims that Human Rights First is in conflict with the government’s justification for the policy.
Public health experts from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and George Washington University have called for the eviction program, arguing that there are safe ways to process asylum seekers quickly and put them in hiding with their loved ones in the United States. State.
Human Rights First has found that blocking asylum seekers at ports of entry and evictions of people caught crossing them illegally has led to more migrants trying to cross into more remote parts of the border where they are less likely to be spotted – and more likely To die.
Ibrain Wencislao Pérez Suárez, a 30-year-old Cuban political activist who fled persecution, disappeared in the Texas desert in July, the report said. His family is still trying to find out what happened to him.
An Asian applicant in Nicaragua was hospitalized for nine days due to severe dehydration that caused kidney damage after he wanted to go through the desert. Border officials later suspended him to Nogales while he was still wearing his hospital gown, the report said.
Exiled asylum seekers and those stranded by measurement are not the only ones at risk in Mexico.
Migrants forced to wait south of the border for the duration of their U.S. immigration cases under the “Stay in Mexico” program – officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP for short – are even more disadvantaged due to the pandemic, the report said. . This is because violence against migrants in Mexico is increasing, migrants are closing shelters and court hearings for cases under the program are being stopped indefinitely by the federal government.
Human Rights First has identified more than 1,300 reported cases of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping or other violent attacks on asylum seekers that have been waiting in the program since it began two years ago.
Cartels in the border area of the state of Chihuahua, to which many migrants are being sent back, tried to kidnap and blackmail asylum seekers who returned to the United States, according to a Mexican prosecutor. And many asylum seekers report being targeted by Mexican police themselves.
A man from Nicaragua who returned to Tijuana under MPP has been beaten and robbed by Mexican police and is still facing harassment by officers, immigration attorney Margaret Cargioli and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center told investigators.
A Cuban woman who was waiting in the Remain in Mexico program in Ciudad Juárez was abducted, beaten and raped by Mexican police in June, a lawyer representing her told Human Rights First. After she was released, she immediately moved to the United States, visibly injured, asking for help, the report said, and U.S. 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 more than a year since January.
About 3,500 new MPP cases were opened during the pandemic, the report found, meaning the asylum seekers were placed in the program rather than the pandemic policy. The majority come from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Morrissey writes for the San Diego Union Tribune.