Customs and Border Protection organizes to process a limited number of asylum seekers
SAN DIEGO — Two vans and a car pulled into the restricted access parking lot by El Chaparral Plaza on the Tijuana side of the San Ysidro Port of Entry a little before noon on Monday.
Parents and their children — 35 asylum seekers in all — got out and gathered their belongings. Many paused to hug or shake hands with the driver of the second van, a pastor who ran the shelter where many of them lived during their time in Tijuana. As they lined up, documents in hand, against the port of entry wall, one Guatemalan woman ran back to hug the pastor one last time.
They zigged and zagged their way up the walkway that would lead them to the place they had been trying to reach in some cases for over a year — U.S. soil — waving and beaming back at the group of advocates who had helped them get there.
As normal as it once was for asylum seekers to approach a U.S. port of entry on foot and be allowed to request protection, such a scene has become rare for any nationality besides the thousands of Ukrainians who were recently allowed into the United States.
Asylum processing at U.S. ports of entry has been largely closed for years due to a pandemic policy known as Title 42 that says border officials can keep out asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants and expel those who enter the United States without permission. The policy has been controversial from the beginning because it forces asylum seekers — who have a legal right in the United States to be screened to see if they qualify as refugees — to wait indefinitely in dangerous conditions. Human Rights First has documented more than 10,000 violent attacks in Mexico on asylum seekers affected by the program since the Biden administration took office.
But in recent weeks, scenes like Monday’s have played out daily in the Chaparral parking lot because Customs and Border Protection has organized two pathways to identify vulnerable asylum seekers and exempt them from that pandemic rule on a caseby-case basis.
One of those pathways is coordinated through San Diego-based Border Angels, which collaborates with directors for more than a dozen migrant shelters as well as Tijuanabased nonprofits. The second is a process similar to one that existed last summer because of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union known as the HuishaHuisha case.
Even with both processes, the numbers are small — just over 70 people entered from Tijuana on Tuesday — especially when compared with the hundreds of Ukrainians who were given exemptions to Title 42 daily at that same entry until recently.
Border Angels’ executive director Dulce Garcia said she has received videos from families thanking her organization after they reach their loved ones in the United States.
“This is life saving for them,” Garcia said. “They were very much at risk of losing their lives while they were waiting.”
CBP did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Last summer, ACLU lawyers negotiated a temporary settlement in the Huisha-Huisha case with the Biden administration in hopes that Title 42 would soon be lifted. Under the agreement, as long as CBP approved the individuals, attorneys were able to identify up to a certain number of cases per day with medical or other vulnerabilities to enter at ports of entry along the southwest border.
Garcia helped identify those cases last year. But those negotiated exemptions ended abruptly in August when it became clear that the Biden administration had decided to continue with Title 42 for the foreseeable future.
“Exemptions for vulnerable families are important but by no means are a substitute for ending Title 42, particularly since there are so few exemptions,” said Lee Gelernt, the attorney with the ACLU leading the Huisha-Huisha case.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is responsible for Title 42, recently announced that the policy would end on May 23 of this year. But that has now been challenged in court and temporarily blocked by a federal judge in Louisiana. The temporary restraining order allows for exemptions to Title 42 on a case-by-case basis provided that the numbers do not exceed historical levels.
The federal government, attorneys, advocates and asylum seekers alike are waiting to see what will happen after a May 13 hearing in the case.
In the meantime, Garcia was approached by CBP to organize with the Tijuana shelters, which Border Angels supports through monetary and other donations, to identify especially vulnerable asylum seekers staying in the shelters who should be exempted from Title 42 and transport them to the border for processing.
It began with just 10 people crossing per day, and that has grown to 35. At one point CBP asked Garcia to increase to 50, but she didn’t have the resources to make that happen right away. Officials have since told her that the capacity for her process will remain at 35, she said, which is supposed to run through May 23 and perhaps longer depending on what happens in the next few weeks.