Immigrants can wait weeks to cross US border
Carlos Salio, left, interviews people seeking political asylum in the United States at Tijuana, Mexico, just across the U.S. border south of San Diego. Lines are getting longer at the crossings, officials say, with people sleeping overnight for days and weeks.
TIJUANA, Mexico — Undaunted by President Donald Trump’s tough talk on immigration, asylum-seekers are forming unusually long lines at the Mexican border, with parents and children sleeping on cardboard in the sweltering heat and waiting for days or even weeks to present themselves to U.S. inspectors.
Wait times of a few hours or longer are not uncommon at the border. But the backlogs that have developed over the past several weeks at crossings in California, Arizona and Texas — and people sleeping out in the open for days at a time — are rare.
Telma Ramirez made the trip from El Salvador to seek asylum in the United States. She arrived at the border in Tijuana with her 5-year-old son and year-old daughter only to find a crush of others ahead of her. Asylum-seekers have to report back to U.S. border officials every day or risk losing their place in line.
The 27-year-old mother kept checking in at the border crossing to see whether civilian volunteers were close to calling their numbers.
Finally, on the 20th day, Ramirez made it to the front of the line.
“You must come every day to see if it’s your turn,” Ramirez said. “If you don’t come, you’ll lose your place in line.”
The exact reasons for the bottleneck are unclear, but the U.S. has been seeing a surge in requests for asylum over the past few years.
A top Homeland Security Department official told lawmakers last month that new asylum filings tripled between 2014 and 2017 to nearly 142,000, the most in more than 20 years.
The official, Francis Cissna, director of
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the asylum backlog stood at 318,000 cases.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that any waits in Mexico are expected to be temporary. It said the number of people the agency can take depends on such factors as detention space, complexity of cases, translation requirements, medical needs and traffic at the crossing.