China Daily Global Edition (USA)
ASYLUM-SEEKERS FACE ANXIOUS WAIT AT BORDER
More Central American migrants trying to enter US
From a distance, United States Border Patrol vehicles can be seen stopping along or inspecting the border near the San Ysidro port of entry, the country’s busiest land border crossing, which connects the San Diego area in the US and Tijuana in Mexico.
On the southern side of a corrugated metal fence are the same rolling hills studded with clumps of brush that can be found to the north. A rusted barrier, lined by razor wire on the ground, stands in the warm April sun.
This section of the border has seen an increased flow of migrants from Central America seeking asylum in the US.
“I saw migrants’ camps close to
the border until one or two months ago,” said a tour guide working for American WF Vacation. The man, who only gave his surname as Liu, had just led 30 tourists from Dalian, Liaoning province, through the San Ysidro port of entry back into the US.
A half-day tour of Tijuana is usually the first stop on the company’s 10-day itinerary from the US West Coast to the East Coast. Liu said such itineraries had not been disrupted even amid the national emergency called by US President Donald Trump concerning the US-Mexico border.
Emmanuel Molina, 33, an architect in San Diego who crosses the border frequently to meet with friends and classmates in Tijuana, said, “Sometimes, the word ‘crisis’ is in one’s head.”
“I read news articles saying the migrants made a lot of trouble for local vendors at the border. I asked the vendors, and they told me they had no trouble,” said Molina, a Mexican-American who was born and raised in San Diego.
Molina, who has never seen a migrant camp, said he believed the adults and children who gather at a plaza in front of the San Ysidro port of entry in Tijuana were from Central America.
He once invited a family of five from El Salvador to eat tacos with him. “A warm meal is the least I can share with them. Life was tough (in El Salvador). The family came here to escape violence and seek work. They are nice people,” Molina said.
He never saw the family again, and said no people appearing to be asylum seekers were gathering at the plaza any more.
At the Otay Mesa port of entry, about 16 kilometers east of San Ysidro, there were also no signs of asylum seekers.
A woman working for a McDonald’s outlet about a four-minute walk from the entry point, who gave her name only as Annalee, said she had never seen any asylum seekers near the border.
She and her family have lived in Tijuana and worked in the US for many years.
“Waiting time at the port of entry is two or three hours now. It was 10 or 15 minutes in the past,” she said, adding that this is inconvenient, but it would be unimaginable if the border was shut down.
On the Mexican side of the border, long lines of cars wait to cross.
Manuel Gutierrez, who cleans cars at a parking lot near the border, said, “These people are going to work afternoon shifts in the US.” He spoke in fluent English because he used to work in the US.
“A very good apartment on the Mexican side costs about $200 a month, but the rent for similar apartment in San Diego is between $2,000 and $3,000 a month,” he said.
Migrants had never approached this port of entry, Gutierrez said. They used to stay in a makeshift shelter in a stadium, but because it was close to the border, the Mexican authorities closed it and put them in warehouses farther away.
‘Credible fear’
Recalling the life she left behind in Honduras, a 37-year-old woman, calling herself Maria, breathed a sigh of relief while resting on a cot at a shelter run by the San Diego Rapid Response Network, a coalition of human rights and faith organizations.
The shelter is in a former courthouse in downtown San Diego, about 27 km from the San Ysidro port of entry.
“The economy is really bad in Honduras, but the main reason we fled home is that there is a lot of violence there,” Maria said through a translator.
Her family made a living by selling food in Honduras, but she said gang members kept extorting them. “If you don’t pay them, they threaten to kill your family,” she said.
Events on the night of Dec 29 were the last straw for the family.
“One gang member wanted to be with me, but I didn’t want to be with him. At about 11:30 pm that night, he broke into the house where I was staying with my mother. He then started stabbing me,” Maria said.
“He didn’t kill me, but only because my younger brother intervened,” she said. Her brother ended up with a broken knee.
Maria’s knife wounds have healed, leaving red scars about 5 centimeters long on her forearms, but the incident is etched permanently on her mind.
In January, Maria, her 20-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son boarded a bus heading to Guatemala. Her husband was in Mexico at the time and had heard that the US was granting asylum to people from Central America.
After traveling thousands of kilometers by bus across Mexico, Maria, her husband and their two children arrived at the San Ysidro crossing and were given a number. They waited in Mexico for six weeks before being held in custody for three days by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
After passing the initial screening, known as a “credible fear” interview, the family was released and dropped off at the shelter.
“I’m in a place where I feel I’m protected. That person who hurt me will not come here and hurt me again,” Maria said.
Wearing a monitoring bracelet around her right ankle, she said they would leave the shelter in two days for Iowa, where her husband’s sister lives. The family is required to appear in an immigration court later, which will decide whether their asylum case is legitimate.
“I’m not worried now, and believe that if you follow the law, everything will be OK,” Maria said.
At the start of this year, Central Americans were among the largest groups of people applying for asylum in the US.
According to the International Rescue Committee, people living in Central America’s Northern Triangle region, which comprises Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, are enduring violence comparable to that in a war zone.
According to an NBC News report on April 9, the White House is working on plans to approve fewer Central American migrants in initial screenings by putting border agents in charge of the interview process because they will be tougher on asylum seekers.
The issue has become a humanitarian one because the White House has significantly cut the number of asylum applications it processes daily, creating a bottleneck of hundreds of frightened, vulnerable people on the Mexican side of the border, the San Diego Rapid Response Network said.
On Oct 26, the US began releasing hundreds of migrant families on to San Diego’s streets without following the usual protocol that ensures asylum seekers have travel plans and the means to join relatives and friends elsewhere in the country, the response network said.
Michael Hopkins, CEO of Jewish Family Service of San Diego, an agency that operates the shelter, said that since then, about 12,500 people have been released by the US and passed through the network’s shelter, the only one in Southern California.
“These are families who crossed the border with no money, no cellphones and no tickets to go anywhere. They would more than likely be victims of human trafficking, or end up on the street if we didn’t assist them,” Hopkins said.
“San Diego has a large homeless population. Even if just a small percentage (of the 12,500 people released by the US) fell through the cracks, it would greatly increase the homeless population,” he added.
Every day, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers drop asylum-seeking families at the shelter any time after 5 pm.
The facility currently shelters about 200 people, most of them staying for 24 to 48 hours before leaving for their final destinations across the US. California is their main choice, followed by Texas, Florida and New Jersey.
Staff members and volunteers at the shelter help to look after medical requirements, travel arrangements and legal work.
When migrants are dropped off at the shelter, they are thirsty and hungry, wearing clothes that have not been changed for months, and are without shoelaces (a jail suicide prevention policy), Hopkins said.
While they await medical screening, volunteers provide them with new clothing and shoes.
“We look for flu and tuberculosis symptoms, scabies and lice,” Hopkins said. “We want to make sure that these folks are coming into the country healthy before they travel to their final destinations.”
It is not unusual for families to cry when they eat dinner, as it is an emotional experience for both the migrants and those who work at the shelter, he said.
Although the shelter has secured $2.2 million in emergency funding from California to support operations through June, it still needs another $500,000 for the next six months.
On the Jewish Family Service of San Diego’s GoFundMe page, nearly $196,000 has been raised in five months.
But anti-immigrant groups are protesting over what Hopkins considers critical humanitarian work.
“Haters have been here in front of the shelter when the bus drops off asylum-seeking families. They believe these people are invaders,” he said. “All I see is young moms and dads with very young children who talk about making the journey because they want new lives for their children.”
San Diegans for Secure Borders, one of more than 80 anti-immigrant groups in California listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has regularly posted memes mocking immigrants on its Facebook page.
One of the memes, a map of Mexico with “A” marked at the southern border with Guatemala and “B” at the northern border with the US, states, “If the migrants are escaping danger, why not seek asylum between A and B?”
It echoes the Trump administration’s controversial policy Remain in Mexico, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.
‘Lives in danger’
The policy, launched in January at the San Ysidro port of entry and later expanded to El Paso, Texas, requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico until their scheduled court date in the US. They had previously been allowed to remain in the US while awaiting their court hearings.
The US has defended the policy as necessary to deter “baseless” asylum claims that “exploit” the country’s immigration laws.
But critics argue that forcing migrants to wait in Mexico puts their lives in danger because of violence, crowded encampments and vulnerability to local gangs. They said the policy also violates their legal right to seek asylum in the US.
On April 8, a federal judge in California blocked the policy after finding the administration had not done enough to ensure asylum seekers’ safety.
Only a few days after the practice was halted, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the US government’s emergency motion to stay the lower court’s ruling. The practice resumed on April 16.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to close the border with Mexico and impose a 25 percent tariff on all cars made there if Mexico stops apprehending migrants trying to cross into the US.
The Mexican government has discouraged migrants from continuing their journey north and urged them to stay in the country by granting them a large number of humanitarian visas, according to media reports.
Doris Meissner and Sarah Pierce, policy analysts at the Migration Policy Institute, said in an article published on the organization’s website that the Trump administration’s measures, including the zero-tolerance policy that led to family separations, have seemingly encouraged prospective migrants to travel to the US before such policies are hardened further.
In the fiscal year that began on Oct 1, the number of “unaccompanied children” and “family units” apprehended along the southwest border has reached 225,482, representing 62 percent of all apprehensions, according to the figures released by US Customs and Border Protection on April 9.
Despite the rise in the number of asylum-seeking families, the total number of border apprehensions last year was lower than for most of the past six decades, according to CBP data.
The CBP southwest border sector reported 396,579 apprehensions in the 2018 fiscal year, compared with more than 1 million in the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s.
Many factors are behind the recent increase in arrivals, such as endemic violence, limited economic opportunities and poor governance in the Northern Triangle area, as well as available jobs and long-standing social and family ties in the US, the article by Meissner and Pierce said.
Many people from that area fleeing to the US border are banding together and traveling in “caravans” for safety. While only a small percentage have arrived in such caravans, their emergence may have inspired more people to go to the US.
In front of a liquor store near the Otay Mesa port of entry in Tijuana, Gutierrez, the car cleaner, showed a local newspaper article that reported 1,100 migrants from Central America were arriving in Mexico.
He saw migrants climb over the border fence near the beach and turn themselves in to US agents. “If home is safe, who would want to flee?” Gutierrez asked.
Haters have been here in front of the shelter when the bus drops off asylum-seeking families. They believe these people are invaders. All I see is young moms and dads with very young children who talk about making the journey because they want new lives for their children .”
Michael Hopkins, CEO of Jewish Family Service of San Diego