Volunteers help asylum-seekers
Every afternoon between 3 and 5 p.m., the doors of Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas, open to a freshly apprehended group of migrants. Like homing pigeons or criminals, the adults have been fitted with ankle GPS devices to prevent their escape. But at the center, they are applauded, cheered and greeted with shouts of “Bienvenidos!” or “Welcome!” by volunteers and staff.
That is one of many disjunctive images captured this week by Lisa Speicher Munoz of Waterloo, Iowa. The associate professor of sociology and gender studies at Hawkeye Community College is a longtime advocate for immigrants. She’s there with fellow advocate Cheryl Roberts, who retired recently from teaching English to non-native speakers at the University of Northern Iowa.
When Munoz heard Roberts was heading to McAllen to volunteer for a week, she spontaneously joined her. Without advance notice, they found their way to the center and started pitching in.
McAllen is also home to the Ursula Detention Center for unaccompanied migrant children. That’s the former warehouse that prompted widespread outrage after video taken inside showed children, separated from their parents, sleeping inside chain link-fences.
Those separations have stopped though the families have yet to be reunited. But the unauthorized border crossings continue. This week, between 120 and 200 people a day arrived, Munoz said. It offers a respite between being processed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and heading to relatives in the U.S. or a shelter in San Benito, Texas. There they will try to make their case for asylum status to immigration judges.
But first they are fed and showered, given fresh clothes and shoes and snack bags, a chance to confer with a doctor and be briefed by a lawyer.
Munoz says the migrants, who include families and unaccompanied minors, are polite and grateful. But some are in tears, withdrawn and showing signs of trauma. “I’ve done this work a long time. I did it in Postville,” she said referring to the aftermath of the 2008 immigration raid on the kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa where 389 workers were arrested. “I’m not a parent but my heart just breaks for these kids… What makes me the saddest are the ones that are detached.”
These migrants’ only path to long-term legal status in the U.S. is convincing an immigration judge they have a well-founded fear of persecution if returned to their homelands. But that job just got harder with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ declaration that foreign-born people fleeing domestic violence, gang violence or other so-called “private crimes,” are no longer eligible for asylum.
This is a key point that Americans who say immigrants should apply legally and wait their turn need to understand. There is ordinarily no legal way.
Munoz, who communicated with me during the week by phone or Facebook, said it’s doubtful, based on what she’s heard, that all of these migrants will even get as far as a judge. Officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service may decide beforehand that they lack grounds to seek asylum.
“Some volunteers at the shelter have said that these are not true asylees, that they are really just escaping poverty,” she wrote. “I’m not sure it’s as clear-cut as violence vs. poverty but rather, these are intertwined.”
In other words, abject poverty might beget crimes that result in violence, putting people like these in double jeopardy.
A spokesperson at the federal Customs and Border Protection office in Laredo, Texas, confirmed that asylum is the only route to long-term lawful residency for these border crossers. There are also humanitarian paroles granted for short periods under specific circumstances, including to donate an organ or get medical treatment, attend a family member’s funeral or care for a seriously ill relative. But those don’t confer lawful status.
Some asylum seekers won’t even make it across the border to make their cases, according to Munoz. You have to be on U.S. soil to make a case for asylum. But she said when she and Roberts were returning after crossing the McAllen– Hidalgo–Reynosa Bridge into Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, they had to show their papers to U.S. border patrol agents on the Mexican side. That was even before reaching the border-patrol station on the U.S. side.
The CBP spokesman denied that border officers were in Mexico, saying they were checking papers on the U.S. side of the bridge. As “a result of the port’s operational capacities having been met, we are temporarily limiting entry into our facilities until our resources normalize,” he wrote.
But Munoz said she and Roberts were stopped on a ramp in Mexico that they had to take to exit Mexico. She said three men were checking papers, two in CBP uniforms. After that, she said she and Roberts each paid a quarter to leave Mexico through a gate. Then they waited in line 45 minutes to go through a checkpoint with scanners at a regular border patrol station.
If U.S. agents are actually in Mexico blocking migrants’ entry to prevent their chance of making their case, that would be a cruel breach of international protocol.
“CBP is not denying or discouraging travelers from seeking asylum or any other form of protection,” wrote the media official, who asked to be referred to simply as a spokesman.
During the week, Munoz also met people coming from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Among them was a 17-year-old Guatemalan boy who told her he was being sent to a detention center even though he has a brother in Mississippi. She didn’t understand if that was due to his minor status or something else.
She also met a boy who looked to be nine or 10, accompanied only by a sister who was wearing a GPS ankle bracelet, which keep people within a 75-mile radius. They said their mother was in South Carolina. “I asked the sister how old she was and she would only tell me “mayor de edad” or of legal age.”
The ankle monitors reminded Munoz of the Postville mothers who awaited their court dates while in limbo with their children, barred from working, unable to provide for themselves.
One would have hoped that 10 years later, we’d have substantially reformed immigration law to create routes to lawful immigrant status for people seeking to live here and employers wanting to hire them. Instead, in this caustic political environment where careers are made on being tough on immigrants, our practices are just getting more draconian.