Shorter waits for asylum seekers

Nogales officials: Earlier lines tied to staff woes

NOGALES — U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have accelerated the processing of asylum seekers here, eliminating lengthy waits that forced families for months to camp out in the sweltering summer heat.

Advocacy and humanitarian organizations who had aided hundreds of migrants stranded in Mexico were surprised by the sudden, efficient processing of asylum seekers and wondered what had caused the processing delays to begin with.

“Over the course of the summer, it was averaging about three families a day, and then all of a sudden, they were processing 10 or 15 families a day,” said Joanna Williams, advocacy director with the faith-based migrant aid group Kino Border Initiative.

As of Thursday afternoon, no migrants waited to talk to an immigration officer at Nogales’ DeConcini crossing. Williams said asylum seekers were be-

ing processed as they arrived, compared with two-week waits earlier this summer.

Customs and Border Protection attributed the earlier processing delays to staff shortages and limited holding space for migrants.

CBP officials had also said its priority for customs officers at ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border was stemming the flow of illegal drugs, not handling asylum seekers.

Despite the reduction in wait times, a CBP representative in Arizona told The Arizona Republic that there have been no changes in the way customs officers are process asylum seekers in Nogales.

Since April, hundreds of unaccompanied minors and families, mostly from Central America and southern Mexico, have arrived en masse at the DeConcini port of entry to talk to an immigration officer.

They were met by long lines of migrants who camped just outside the entrance to the border crossing. Up to 100 people waited, ranging from babies just a few months old to middle-aged mothers and fathers traveling with their children.

“The challenge during the summer was that the rate of processing was not keeping up with the rate of asylum seekers arriving,” Williams said.

In response, community and advocacy groups such as the Mexican Red Cross and Kino Border Initiative set up shelters throughout Nogales to house migrants while they waited. They also developed a numbering system to make sure migrants had a spot in line, and arranged transportation to get them from the shelters to the ports.

But with reduced wait times, the numbering system and temporary shelters recently were disbanded.

“We’re more than happy to have all that system crumble and be not necessary,” Williams said, adding that meeting the humanitarian needs of asylum seekers had forced them to shift resources away from “traditional aid.”

“The people who were being deported to Mexico (from the United States) were not getting as much attention, resources, case management and the support that we like to give them because we had to redirect our staffing,” Williams said.

As customs officers in Nogales reduced wait times for asylum seekers from two weeks to a few hours, Customs and Border Protection officials in Arizona insisted there had been no changes at the DeConcini crossing.

“We processed them as we can. There’s nothing more to it,” a CBP spokesperson said. “Before, it boiled down to all those factors that come into play, activity level ... everything that has to do with our mission.”

However, migrant advocates and human-rights groups questioned the agency’s handling of the situation.

Adam Isacson, a border expert with the Washington Office for Latin America, visited Nogales in June, when migrant families were waiting up to two weeks to present asylum claims.

“If CBP can so quickly increase the pace of processing asylum applications, that leads us to believe that the agency was artificially reducing that pace during May and June,” he said.

He pointed to statistics from Customs and Border Protections showing that officers processed less than half the number of families and unaccompanied minors in June than they did in May. Numbers for July are not yet available.

The month-to-month decrease “further indicates that some kind of slowdown was going on,” Isacson said.

Williams with the Kino Border Initiative said the situation in Nogales is unique among border towns.

“There are still very long lines, and growing lines, along the Texas border, and even more serious humanitarian situations because there is less infrastructure to respond,” she said.

Williams said the Kino Border Initiative has fielded questions from shelters elsewhere on the U.S.-Mexico border about how to deal with such situations.

“We have partner shelters reaching out about the public backlash now, and the people who are waiting in over 100degree heat who are sitting out in a line, instead of in a shelter because they don’t have capacity,” she said. “It’s not a national fix.”

“The challenge during the summer was that the rate of processing was not keeping up with the rate of asylum seekers arriving.” Joanna Williams

Advocacy director, Kino Border Initiative