Out of space
SAN DIEGO — A new policy to deny asylum to anyone who shows up on the Mexican border after traveling through another country threatens to exacerbate overcrowding at severely strained U.S. immigration detention centers and makeshift holding areas.
Photos and video of Vice President Mike Pence’s visit Friday to Mcallen, Texas, showing men crammed behind chain-link fences offered the latest glimpse into squalid conditions at Customs and Border Protection facilities. Women are being held in smaller tents at the station.
The Border Patrol housed 900 people in an area with capacity for 125 in El Paso, Texas, according to a Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog report on an unannounced visit in May. Inspectors saw detainees standing on toilets to gain breathing space. Agents described detainees being held in standing-roomonly cells for weeks.
A sharp drop in illegal border crossings, coming during a seasonal decline as summer heat sets in, has eased pressure temporarily. The Border Patrol has fewer than 10,000 people in custody, down from 19,000 in May, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to share the figures publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, was the only one of nine sectors on the Mexican border over capacity Wednesday, with about 6,000 detainees, the official said. El Paso has plummeted to 500 detainees.
Still, the space crunch is daunting and holding people who are denied asylum until they are deported can only pose more challenges.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates longterm detention centers that are far better equipped, but that agency is also heavily burdened. It is holding more than 53,000 people, hovering near an all-time high and above its budgeted capacity of 45,274, including 2,500 spots for families.
The dramatic policy change took effect Tuesday, denying asylum to anyone who must pass through Mexico to reach the United States by land. It will have the biggest impact on Guatemalans and Hondurans, who account for most Border Patrol arrests and tend to travel in families.
Hours after it went into effect, the policy drew two lawsuits in federal court, one in San Francisco and one in Washington, D.C. Both lawsuits ask for an order to immediately halt the policy while it is challenged in court. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups requested a hearing Thursday in the San Francisco case.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post obtained a complaint filed in April from an undocumented Guatemalan woman in California that says a Border Patrol agent sought her out, sent her Facebook messages and asked her to watch a live video of him masturbating — all while her 12-year-old son was in custody at the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, where he worked.
The complaint, filed with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, outlines conversations between the agent and the woman, beginning with his asking for her Facebook handle after she was allowed to speak by phone with her son, who had been taken into custody at the border. She said in interviews that she had hoped the communication would yield information about her son but that instead she endured sexual advances from the agent.