Texas Border Agents Releasing Immigrant Families After Mexico Refuses to Take Them Back

Border patrol agents in parts of Texas have begun releasing some undocumented immigrant families after Mexican authorities refused to take them back under a Trump-era policy that expelled thousands of people who had illegally moved to the US.

This points to a significant shift in recent years, when former President Donald Trump ordered that all immigrants and asylum seekers caught trying to enter the United States illegally be returned to Mexico. Since March 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has immediately expelled 382,552 immigrants to Mexico. Referring to a section of the Public Health Code known as Title 42, the Trump administration said it was necessary to deport immigrants to stop the spread of the coronavirus. But an unintended consequence of the policy was that immigrants repeatedly tried to cross unnoticed, which increased the number of arrests at the border.

CBP said the families were recently released due to COVID-19 restrictions that caused some of its facilities to reach capacity. Mexico also recently passed a law banning authorities from detaining children without immigration in immigration centers. With no room to refuse the families in U.S. detention centers and Mexico to take it in, CBP began releasing them last week in border towns like McAllen and Brownsville in Texas.

“COVID-19 protocols, changes in Mexican law, and limited U.S. capabilities have forced us to adapt,” CBP said. “For the migrants who are released, CBP can work with non-governmental organizations that will help them through the process of outside custody.”

The National Institute of Migration (INM), the immigration enforcement agency in Mexico, rejected requests from BuzzFeed News for comment. However, the country’s foreign ministry told Reuters that there were “local” policy adjustments, citing a child protection law passed late last year. A senior Mexican official told the news agency that the changes were “minor” and appeared to be limited to the state of Tamaulipas, which sits across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

The release of the families has been used by immigration hawks and former Trump administration officials to warn of an impending frontier crisis fueled by President Joe Biden’s recent executive orders. Chad Wolf, the former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted that the change meant the return of ‘capture and release’ and warned that it would lead to a ‘full-scale crisis’ at the border.

The phrase ‘capture and release’ has been coined by advocates of immigrants who say it is a dehumanizing way to describe the practice of allowing asylum seekers to wait outside detention while their cases are being assessed.

In Del Rio, Texas, which is also across from Tamaulipas, a shelter run by the Val Verde border humanitarian coalition said immigrants seeking help have increased. In a Facebook message on January 30, the organization said it helped an average of 25 people a week. The coalition said it helps at least 50 immigrants a day.

A DHS official told BuzzFeed News that the release of a certain number of families takes place in only one area of ​​the border. Local media reported that up to 50 immigrant families were released daily in Brownsville; a shelter in McAllen told Reuters it has been 50 to 80 people a day since Jan. 27.

Shelters in San Diego are also seeing higher numbers.

Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services at the Jewish Family Service of San Diego, which operates immigrant shelters, said it assisted 54 asylum seekers in December.

“In January, we welcomed 110 asylum seekers, the largest number we have seen in the last ten months,” she added.

It is unclear why some families have been admitted to the US, and others are still being deported to Tijuana. An INM official in Baja, California, said they were still receiving Title 42 immigrants and that there was no order or agreement saying Mexico would no longer accept families.

Taylor Levy, an immigration attorney in El Paso, said the number of asylum-seeking families released in central and southern Texas began to increase on Jan. 27. Some of the families come from countries that CBP cannot officially expel to Mexico. , such as Haitians, Cubans and Venezuelans, Levy said. But others were Central Americans.

“About 50 people are released a day, which is pretty mediocre,” Levy said.

Levy nevertheless warned that some immigrants are still being deported instead of being released into the US, either via land to Mexico or by plane to their country.

“Title 42 [expulsions] ‘normally continues in the El Paso, Arizona and California sectors,’ ‘Levy said.

Historically, a source with knowledge of the situation said, INM would detain immigrant children and families, transfer it to Mexico’s version of child protection services and make a determination on their right to stay. Due to the new law, immigrant families who are evicted can only be sent to the agencies’ shelters as long as they have the capacity.

But Levy said the new policy made no sense because INM families who were evicted under Trump’s 42 in any case almost never persisted.

‘While some people who were chased under Title 42 were handed over directly to INM,’ Levy said, ‘a large number of people were taken by CBP to the middle of the bridge and told to walk south. This is it. There was no interaction from any state or federal Mexican authorities. ‘

In some cases, families expelled from the U.S. have been taken to shelters in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, Levy said, but this is not considered detention and will not be affected by Mexico’s new legislation.

Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative, a non-profit organization in Nogales, Arizona, said that INM, with four or five exceptions last year, never gave families or individuals a document after it was suspended. The agency may give them directions to a shelter, but the immigrants have to make their own way there.

“Essentially, they’re just left on the street,” Williams said.

Expulsions of immigrant families continued in the Nogales area, she added.

Formerly in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Mexican immigration officials would issue documents to families they evicted to give permission, said Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic charities in the Rio Grande Valley. From there, families were left ‘more or less’ to figure out where to go, she added.

The border with South Texas was one of the busiest areas for immigrants who wanted to cross the U.S., but Trump administration policies have effectively shut down the border in recent years.

Before the pandemic was declared, the US used another policy, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, to release families in the country. Under MPP, unofficially known as the “Stay in Mexico” policy, immigrants and asylum seekers would be forced to wait in Mexico until their cases are adjudicated by a U.S. immigration judge. Thousands of immigrants are still waiting, some in dangerous border towns, though the government announced in Biden in January that it no longer wanted to enroll new immigrants in the program.