Mexican camp illustrates failed, inhumane policies
As we enter the new year, we must confront the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border as politicians play politics with human lives.
I spent the closing of 2018 at Barretal, the Mexican government run refugee camp where individuals and families who travelled with the refugee caravan are being forcibly held.
Barretal, along with increasingly more violent and inhumane border strategies, is the U.S. and Mexican government’s response to years of failed immigration, economic, and foreign policies. It is also a stark illustration of Trump’s anticipated new policy ordering people escaping violence to “remain in Mexico” while awaiting the processing of their asylum applications. To contextualize U.S. migration conversations, it is important to understand the reality in the camp, in the journey made by migrants within it, and in the injustice and violence of the U.S. asylum process itself.
There are flagrant human rights violations in the camp itself. The 1,500 individuals remaining from the caravan are currently trapped in a militarized camp 45 minutes from Tijuana’s centre and the U.S. border. There is no running water, no school for children and migrants risk attack. In December, anti-migrant protesters entered the camp to harass migrants, two teenagers were lured out, tortured and killed, and a tear-gas bomb was thrown into the camp.
Adding to the growing hopelessness in the camp is treatment by Mexican authorities as well as procedural hurdles and tightened border conditions, extending the wait time to even begin the asylum process. Over 2,000 people have been deported by the Mexican government since the caravan arrived in November and the government has forcefully evicted other migrant shelters. Migrants in Tijuana are looking at twomonth waits to apply for asylum.
Faced with these realities, people are making life and death decisions daily between two bad options — wait in the risky camp hoping to apply for legal protection or take a dangerous chance crossing the border illegally. Pressures to abandon U.S. asylum claims are promoted as migrants are pushed into Mexican visa programs that harm their chances of winning asylum. The “humanitarian visas” offer “opportunity” to work in Mexico’s infamous maquiladoras (sweatshop factories).
The hopelessness is heightened by the insufferable conditions of the journey north itself. Migrants are traveling two months on foot, carrying belongings and children on their backs. The caravan was attacked by national law enforcements and narco-traffickers. At the border, the U.S. government uses detention, family separation, and violence against migrants to ensure that only those most willing to risk it all see the process to its end. Migration is not a choice for most, and most only depart after serious lifethreatening persecution or conditions back home that leave no choice but to flee and no availability of a “return home” option. Militarized borders and aggressive arrest and detention practices only add violence and risk to journeys that will inevitably occur.
A young 15-year-old weighed his options with me one night. He left Honduras only after he refused to join a gang and his father was murdered as they looked for him. His two friends were murdered by narco-traffickers on their way north. Facing deportation by Mexican authorities, he described to me his plan to “chart a way north” to turn himself into immigration by any means possible. He could no longer bare to wait in the camp. “En Dios confiamos” (in God we trust), he repeated.
Ultimately, future caravans are inevitable as conditions continue to make dangerous escape necessary and collective travel is relatively safer. We can only hope that the organization of thousands of migrants at the border finding one way or another to cross will help put pressure to change what are fundamentally unjust and restrictive immigration policies that fail to account for the U.S. role in destabilizing countries that so many are now forced to flee from.
As the migrants call collectively for their rights to migrate, Canadians must firmly oppose all measures that increase their risk and violence, including policies like “remain in Mexico” in proven uninhabitable camps like Barretal.
Sima Atri is a Canadian human rights, civil rights and immigration lawyer working in the U.S. She spent December volunteering with a local organization in Tijuana, Mexico, providing legal advice to asylum seekers.