Migrants about to test truth of Trump’s order
MEXICO: About 130 Central Americans, mostly women and children, have arrived at the United States’ border with Mexico in a ‘‘caravan’’ of asylum-seeking immigrants that has drawn the fury of US President Donald Trump.
Two busloads of migrants arrived on Tuesday in the Mexican border city of Tijuana at two migrant shelters just steps from one of the most fortified stretches of the border. They joined another 50 or so who had arrived in Tijuana over the last two weeks.
Four more busloads of about 200 Central Americans – mostly women and children but including some men – were expected to arrive yesterday, said Alex Mensing, project co-ordinator for Pueblos Sin Fronteras, which is organising the effort.
US lawyers plan to hold clinics later this week on US asylum law to tell the migrants what to expect when they seek asylum. The first groups are expected to try to enter the US on Monday, at a border crossing in San Diego.
Trump and senior aides have portrayed the caravan and the asylum seekers as evidence of a dysfunctional border and a serious threat. The president tweeted this week that he had issued orders ‘‘not to let these large Caravans of people into our Country. It is a disgrace’’.
The caravans have been a common tactic for years among advocacy groups to bring attention to Central American citizens seeking asylum in the US to escape political persecution or criminal threats from gangs.
But the latest one drew Trump’s attention from almost the moment it began on March 25 in the Mexican city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, and while it slowly travelled across Mexico.
Trump has used it as an example to try to win more support for his planned border wall – even though the asylum seekers plan to turn themselves in to US border inspectors.
Jovanne Torres, a taxi driver from El Salvador, said yesterday after arriving in Tijuana that Trump’s attacks on the caravan made him doubt whether he would succeed in getting asylum for himself, his wife and his daughters, aged 4 and 10 months – but he still planned to try.
Torres, 37, said he fled his home town near the country’s capital, San Salvador, and joined the caravan just days after a gang threatened to kill him and his wife after he refused to give a free ride to a gang member.
He said he was almost certain to be killed if he returned home. He had decided against seeking asylum in Mexico because he wanted to join relatives in Houston, Texas.
‘‘Trump’s words have made it difficult for us,’’ he said.
US Customs and Border Protection had space to hold about 300 people at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing, the nation’s busiest, said Pete Flores, director of the agency’s San Diego field office. It turns them over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine if they should be held long-term of if they can be released while their cases are pending, often wearing ankle monitors.
The San Diego border crossing was so overwhelmed by Haitians in 2016 that US officials worked with their Mexican counterparts to create a ticketing system that let the Haitians in over time. Some waited their turn in Tijuana more than five weeks.
More recently, asylum seekers had to wait at most only a few hours, never overnight, Flores said.
If asylum seekers make it through initial screenings with asylum officers by establishing ‘‘credible fear’’ of being returned to their homelands, they are allowed in and face what can be lengthy proceedings before US immigration judges.
Ginger Jacobs, a San Diego immigration attorney who helped Haitians seeking entry to the US in 2016, said Trump’s concerns about a rush of Central Americans seeking asylum were ‘‘completely overblown’’.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that US authorities may detain asylum seekers ‘‘while their claims are adjudicated efficiently and expeditiously’’. Others would be criminally prosecuted for illegal entry, she said.
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said he may assign additional immigration judges to handle caravan cases.
The Juventud 2000 migrant shelter, on the edge of Tijuana’s red-light district, is filled with dome-shaped tents to accommodate more than 200 arrivals.
Its director, Jose Maria Garcia Luca, said two caravans last year had about 100 people each. Those who sought asylum had reported no significant delays entering the US. –AP