Tougher rules issued for asylum at border
Changes in policy speed process of deportation
For months, Edwin Antonio Gonzalez contemplated heading to the United States illegally.
He said he was trying to escape local gangs who came to his stall weekly and threatened to kill him or his 2-year-old son unless he handed over cash from his business selling clothing at a market in Guatemala.
But when the 24-year-old dad heard the Trump administration was separating families at the border, Antonio Gonzalez decided he didn’t want to risk having his own son taken away.
Then on June 20, amid mounting political pressure and global condemnation, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that abruptly halted the practice of taking children from parents under a zero-tolerance policy aimed at stopping families from entering the U.S. illegally.
Trump’s decision to end the family separations was all over the news in Guatemala, Antonio Gonzalez said. Relatives and friends already living in the U.S. also confirmed the separations had stopped, he said.
So less than two weeks after the separations ended, Antonio Gonzalez decided to head to the U.S. after all with 2-year-old Francisco, joining the thousands from Guatemala who have already come this year.
Their experience at the border turned out to be much different than the thousands of parents who were prosecuted for illegally crossing the border under the zero-tolerance policy. Under the policy, prosecuted parents had their children taken away and placed in shelters often far away in different states. The Trump administration is now scrambling to reunite some 3,000 separated children with their parents before a court-ordered deadline of July 26.
Instead, after crossing the border illegally with his son near San Luis, Arizona, Antonio Gonzalez said he and his son were kept together in a Border Patrol holding center for two days and two nights, then driven to an immigration facility in Phoenix, where they spent a third night.
On Thursday morning, Antonio Gonzalez said he and his son were then placed in an unmarked white van, driven to the Greyhound bus station and then released by immigration authorities along with two other fathers from Guatemala and their two sons. Like the other parents who had just been released, Antonio Gonzalez wore an electronic GPS monitoring device around one of his ankles.
He had also been given instructions to report to immigration authorities once he arrived at his destination, West Valley City, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah.
Moments after being dropped off, Antonio Gonzalez sat in the bus station’s waiting area while Francisco climbed on the chair next to him, and admired his good fortune.
“Nothing happened to us, thanks to God,” Antonio Gonzalez said.
Maybe so, but just weeks after being forced to back off the zero-tolerance policy, the Trump administration has launched a new asylum crackdown aimed at stemming the flow of families arriving at the border, mostly fleeing poverty, gang violence and political strife in Central America.
New asylum rules put into place on Thursday are intended to make it harder for families to seek asylum in the U.S. and easier for the government to quickly deport them back to their home countries.
The Border Patrol has apprehended 68,560 family members through June of this fiscal year, nearly half of them from Guatemala.
Apprehensions of families are up 8 percent compared with the same period last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics.
Under a directive by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles asylum claims, fleeing domestic violence and gang violence will no longer be accepted as reasons to pass so-called credible-fear interviews, the first hurdle undocumented immigrants must clear in order to be allowed into the U.S. to apply for asylum.
The asylum rules solidify U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ earlier