Undeterred by crackdown, migrants seek U.S. ‘dream’
New rules funnel asylum-seekers to border bridges, posts
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — With the sun setting behind buildings along the Mexican riverfront, an already chill wind was plummeting toward freezing as Laura Gonzalez, her two children and her son’s pregnant teenage girlfriend settled in for the night on a bridge into Texas.
The haggard family had been traveling for much of the year — working months in southern Mexico to raise funds — after fleeing political violence that enveloped their native Nicaragua. Now, on the narrow span linking the two Laredos, U.S. immigration officers manning a mid-river checkpoint blocked the family’s final 100-yard dash to their goal.
More than a dozen other asylum-seekers — men, women and young children from Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador and several African countries — lined the bridge. Each told a version of the same tale: repression and ruin at home, refuge beyond the Rio Grande their only recourse.
“We have to get in,” Gonzalez, 40, said as she tucked thin clothing around her 10-month-old daughter, Jesiah. “Our country has been ruined by the government.”
Frustrated this year by a spike in undocumented immigration and several caravans of asylumseeking Central Americans heading for the U.S. border, President Donald Trump has doubled down on his vow to close the border to people like Gonzalez and her family.
Trump has dispatched troops to the border to dissuade those crossing illegally. He also has issued a presidential order — under
challenge in the courts — requiring that, for the next three months, anyone seeking to apply for asylum must do so at international bridges or other official border posts.
Saying they are overwhelmed with petitioners and short of detention space, officials at those legal crossing points are restricting the numbers of asylum-seekers who can be processed daily. That has caused delays of days, even weeks, for those trying to make asylum claims according to the rules.
The measures may be aimed at sending a tough message to the estimated 8,000 migrants in the caravans heading toward the border with California. But they’ll perhaps have a greater impact along the Rio Grande, especially in South Texas, where illegal crossings and asylum applications have for years been heaviest.
“What’s going to happen to us now?” asked Dania Rodriguez, a clothing merchant from El Salvador who was waiting on the Laredo bridge with her daughter. She said they were fleeing threats from street gangs back home. “This is all going to make it harder for everyone, even those of us with legitimate reasons to be here.”
Despite talk of a broken border, illegal immigration has been plummeting since the turn of the century as border security increased and Mexico’s economy and demographics have kept more people at home.
Border Patrol agents detained slightly fewer than 400,000 unauthorized migrants on the southwestern border in the twelve months ending in September. They arrested more than 1.6 million such migrants 18 years ago.
But in recent years there also has been a steady surge of teenagers traveling alone and of parents — like Gonzalez and Rodriguez — migrating with children in hopes of winning asylum by asserting that they live under threat of violence from gangs, spouses or their governments.
The Border Patrol detained 107,212 migrants traveling as families along the Mexico border in the twelve months ending Oct. 1, a seven-fold increase in such detentions compared with the 2013 fiscal year. An additional 50,000 minors traveling alone were detained at the Mexico border last year.
This October, more than 23,000 of those detained on the border with Mexico were members of families, a new monthly record. Nearly 5,000 other detainees were teenagers migrating alone.
Migrant families and unaccompanied minors are more inclined than job-seeking older men to apply for asylum. By law most can’t be detained longer than 20 days, meaning they are given appointments to appear in immigration courts and released in the meantime.
Gonzalez said she decided to leave the family home in the farm town of Chinandega last spring after pro-government thugs tried to press-gang her son, Bryan Robelo, 19, into helping them suppress protests against the country’s authoritarian leftist president.
The family’s decision was finalized after her mother died from a stab wound sustained in a robbery. Now, Gonzalez hopes to be able to return to Miami, where she and her son had lived for years before returning to Nicaragua voluntarily to care for her mother.
To underscore the danger his mother says the family faces if returned home, Robelo, 19, pulled back his collar to show light scars on his neck. He said they were the result of wounds inflicted by the recruiters as a threat. “Either you do what they say or they kill you,” Robelo said.
If they can persuade initial interviewers they have a “credible fear” that their lives would be in danger if they had to go back home, Gonzalez and her family can win at least temporary U.S. residency as they plead their cases in immigration courts.
Targeting Central Americans
Three-quarters of asylum-seekers pass the first “credible fear” hurdle at the border, according to U.S. immigration officials. The process leading to a grant of asylum, or to an order for the removal of the petitioners, can take months, even years. Immigration courts and the agencies that deal with the migrants are overwhelmed, with pending cases ticking toward the 1 million mark.
“The extremely low bar for establishing credible fear is ripe for fraud and abuse,” Michael Bars, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said. “The reality is that our asylum system is being exploited by those simply seeking economic opportunity, not those fleeing persecution.”
Trying to discourage asylumseekers, the Justice Department ruled last spring that most migrants claiming to be running from criminal gangs or domestic violence would no longer be considered for asylum. That was followed by this month’s order that only petitions received at international bridges or other official border posts would be considered.
Both rulings aim at the heart of the asylum claims of many Central American migrants, who are fleeing countries consumed by gang violence and poverty. Rather than trying to avoid capture, many migrants traveling as families have taken to searching for Border Patrol agents to whom they can surrender — so they can apply for asylum.
Funneling even more asylumseekers to the bridges and other border posts — even if their claims are ruled frivolous in the end — could overwhelm an already crippled system, stoking rather than solving any border crisis, critics say.
A September report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said that turning back or delaying asylum-seekers at the bridges has the “unintended” consequence of forcing some of them to try to cross illegally. Under Trump’s recent order, anyone caught crossing illegally could not apply for asylum.
Rather than hardening the border with troops or physical walls or overloading an already paralyzed system, the surge of migrants can best be met by streamlining their processing so invalid claims are rejected quickly, said Doris Meissner, an expert with the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
Doing so, Meissner said, “would not only benefit the individual but lessen the perverse incentive that causes some to file dubious claims in order to remain in the United States, often for years.”
“The Trump administration’s efforts to address an asylum system that is certainly in trouble are shortsighted at best,” said Meissner, who headed the U.S. immigration bureaucracy in the 1990s. “The goal should be decisions within months, rather than years.”
Looking for the ‘dream’
In the meantime, migrants hoping for asylum will continue trekking to the border.
“We had been told that it was easier to cross here than elsewhere,” said Yadira Hernandez, 20, who fled Honduras seven months ago with her boyfriend after gang members accused him of murdering one of their own in a drug deal gone awry.
The couple had been working in southern Mexico since the spring before deciding to make their try for the U.S. Her boyfriend, Johnson Hernandez, 19, denies the gang members’ accusations against him. He’s pinning his asylum hopes on convincing U.S. officials that he’ll be killed if he’s returned to Honduras.
For now, the couple is camped out with about 20 other asylum hopefuls — the majority of them Cubans — on the Mexican side of the international bridge connecting Matamoros with Brownsville.
Mexican immigration officials cooperating with their American counterparts prevent the migrants from rushing onto the bridge itself. Instead, they sign up for the chance to cross and turn themselves over to U.S. officials.
Under a two-decade-old policy that was ended by President Barack Obama days before he left office, Cuban asylum-seekers who set foot on U.S. soil were given immediate residency and a path to citizenship. Brownsville became their favored port of entry. It remains so.
But now some Cubans say they have been waiting weeks for the chance to cross. In the meantime, they have been sleeping on cots and under blankets donated by residents on both sides of the border.
“We all looking for the Yuma dream,” said Daniel Diaz, 22, a student from Havana who arrived at the border earlier this month, using Cuban slang for the U.S. and its citizens.