Austin American-Statesman

Asylum seekers bring evidence to show the dangers of home

- By Emily Schmall

An MS-13 gang member left eight voicemails on Brenda Mendez’s cellphone demanding that she turn over her teenage boy. If she refused, he said, the gang would dismember both her sons.

“I’m going to send you a finger from each hand. You are going to see what the (expletive) happens to your son,” one message said. “Show up or you’re dead. We know about Little Gustavo and also about your baby boy. What the (expletive)? You want him turned into pieces, too?”

The family soon fled Guatemala with hopes of getting into the United States, being careful to bring along the voicemails and a copy of the police report Mendez filed against the gang member known as El Gato.

Other migrants are doing the same. As the White House puts up more legal barriers for asylum-seekers, some immigrants take steps to arrive at the border with evidence to show U.S. authoritie­s the dangers they are trying to escape. The documents are often carried inside protective folders, and they are sometimes all that the migrants bring with them, except for the clothes on their backs.

On July 1, the Mendez family waited on the Mexican side of the internatio­nal bridge to Brownsvill­e, Texas. Even with their evidence, they seemed to face long odds after Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month removed gang and domestic violence from the conditions that qualify for asylum.

To bolster their asylum cases, immigrants bring audio recordings, crimescene photos, police paperwork and even medical examiner records — anything that will support their claims that home is too dangerous. They carry these grim records across deserts and rivers, sometimes for months or years, because they could mean the difference between a lifetime of safety in the U.S. or swift deportatio­n.

The evidence is critical for so-called credible-fear interviews, which test asylum seekers’ reasons for fleeing to the U.S., specifical­ly their claims to be victims of persecutio­n. The interviews, conducted by immigratio­n officers from the Department of Homeland Security, are the first screening in the long asylum process.

In a migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, Piedad de Jesus Mejia, 31, and her husband, Isidro Sacasa, 37, unsnapped a hefty clear plastic folder they had carried from their home in Honduras.

The couple fled in April with their five children the day after MS-13 gang members told their eldest, 14-year-old Ruben, that they would kill him unless he agreed to sell their drugs inside his high school.

Several years earlier, two of the family’s cousins were slain.

“They were killed right in front of the house. I saw it all,” Mejia said in Spanish. A copy of a medical examiner’s record listed one man’s cause of death on July 27, 2013, as homicide as a result of “various bullet wounds.”

 ?? EMILY SCHMALL / AP ?? Piedad de Jesus Mejia sits in a storage room at a migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, in late June. She and her husband and five children fled their Honduras home a day after MS-13 gang members threatened a son.
EMILY SCHMALL / AP Piedad de Jesus Mejia sits in a storage room at a migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, in late June. She and her husband and five children fled their Honduras home a day after MS-13 gang members threatened a son.

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