Hopes dim for migrants on border
Asylum, relief granted this year to just 1% of cases completed under new policy
The bridge connecting Matamoros to Brownsville used to be a symbol of hope for thousands of asylum-seekers. They made an encampment of tarp and garbage bags right next to it, their tents often facing the Rio Grande and the U.S.
But with court hearings postponed amid the pandemic, a lack of U.S. immigration lawyers in northern Mexico, fear of kidnapping and a recent hurricane, the migrants in Matamoros and all along the border have the slimmest of chances of getting into the U.S.
More than 43,800 cases have been completed for the migrants who were caught in the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which requires them to wait in Mexico while they attend hearings on the U.S. side. The policy began in January 2019 but largely has been shelved. Most migrants now are quickly deported without
asylum hearings.
Only 525 migrants — just over 1 percent — were granted asylum or another form of relief this year. The rest were deported, or their cases were terminated.
About 21,000 migrants still are stuck in the process, waiting for the courts to reopen to resume their hearings, according to the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
“I feel frustrated, I feel desperate. I can’t go back, I can’t go forward,” said Perla, a Nicaraguan asylum-seeker who has been waiting for 13 months at the northern Mexico border.
More than 32,500 MPP migrants already have received orders of removal. And more than 28,000 of those orders were because the migrants missed their court hearings.
“It’s hard for me to take in because we’ve been hustling to get people to court,” said Charlene D’Cruz, director of Project Corazón, a Lawyers for Good Government program. “A lot of people missed hearings because they didn’t have the right time, or cartels kidnapping them.”
Since October 2019, 89 percent of the migrants who were allowed into the U.S. attended every court hearing. But only about 50 percent of migrants waiting in Mexico are attending all their hearings, TRAC found. Though the MPP program was reduced this year, August showed an uptick in MPP cases,
with about 770 migrants put into the program, compared with only 124 in May. The majority of the MPP cases in August occurred in El Paso, with nearly 500 migrants put into MPP, followed by the Del Rio sector at 74.
The MPP migrants who have received orders of removal were not deported to their home country. The migrants simply were sent back to Mexico and not allowed back in the U.S. Once “deported,” the tens of thousands of MPP migrants can make a choice to stay in Mexico, attempt to cross into the U.S. illegally or return to their home country.
More than 3,800 MPP migrants this year have attempted to re-enter the U.S., according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Meanwhile, thousands of migrants continue to languish in an open-air encampment and makeshift shelters along the border. The pop-up courts made for MPP hearings have been postponed until a set of criteria laid out by the Justice Department is met. It’s unclear when these criteria will be reached.
In Matamoros, the encampment that once had held more than 2,500 migrants has dropped to below 1,000. A fence was placed around the camp, and no newcomers are allowed in.
“Right now the mood is pretty somber. There’s very little hope, even more uncertainty than there was before,” said Andrea Leiner, a spokeswoman for the medical aid nonprofit Global Response Management. “It’s like, how many setbacks can the human psyche take before you just can’t take it anymore?”
In June, the first coronavirus case was recorded at the camp. Since then, 84 migrants have tested positive.
In July, Hurricane Hanna hit. It flooded the southern part of the encampment that had been used to isolate migrants who were particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 – the disabled, young and elderly. The flooding also took down GRM’s field hospital for the migrants. Rodents, snakes and mosquitoes invaded the camp for days afterward.
In August, Guatemalan migrant Edwin Rodrigo Castro de la Parra, 20, who was a leader at the camp, drowned in the Rio
Grande.
“I think it was just one event after the other that people no longer feel really secure,” Leiner said. “There’s really no pathway for them to get anywhere — right now it’s just day-to-day survival. And that’s a pretty awful place to be in, particularly if you have a family and children. When the only thing you can hope for is that your children survive, that’s pretty terrible.”
Perla, the asylum-seeker, fled Nicaragua with her daughter and two granddaughters because of her activism in the political group Constitutionalist Liberal Party, which opposes the country’s government.
“If we go back, they’ll either imprison us or kill us,” she said.
Because of the pandemic, her court date was rescheduled tentatively for November. She worries for her grandchildren, 7 and 9, who are not receiving formal education and aren’t living with a roof over their heads.
She said she doesn’t understand why officials won’t let her family continue with their court cases because of coronavirus concerns, when she sees hundreds of people going back and forth across the border every day.
“It’s just, we’re not bad people,” Perla said. “We’re good people. We’re families, we’re workers. We’re professionals, too. We’re just from another place.”