U.S. ASYLUM A LIFELINE FOR THREATENED MEXICANS

Mexicans are one of the largest groups of asylum seekers in the United States. They also have a slim chance of getting asylum — less than 10% over the last decade.

The Trump administration’s assault on asylum and demonization of Mexicans doesn’t help. But responsibility runs much deeper. As a government and as a society, we have failed to acknowledge that there’s a war going on in Mexico, or that we bear any responsibility for those it has displaced and exiled.

Since declaring war on drug cartels in December 2006, Mexico has been in the grips of a violent conflict that has claimed more lives, sown greater terror, and sabotaged the rule of law on a larger scale than most of the civil wars of the past century. In July, the Mexican government acknowledged 71,688 forced disappearances since 2006 — Syria and Colombia are the only countries with more, and Mexico will soon surpass them. It’s a staggering admission that the government has been unable and unwilling to protect people who have been targeted for violence.

The severity of this conflict is often obscured by Mexico’s relative economic and cultural success. Here on the border, The New York Times published a lush culinary tour of Tijuana on Feb. 6, 2018, the year it became the most violent city on the world. The juxtaposition underscores that this violence is not random, but highly targeted (and not at foreign visitors).

The biggest challenges in documenting how this targeting works is that neither the victims nor the perpetrators fit conventional categories for armed conflicts. I have served as an expert witness in nearly 100 asylum cases from Mexico in recent years. In some, there’s a public record of persecution — a federal law enforcement agent who had helped to arrest dozens of drug traffickers and survived an assassination attempt, or political activists who refused to be co-opted by organized crime in a region where dozens of their colleagues had been threatened and murdered. Other cases depend much more on the testimony of the asylum seeker and circumstantial evidence of the violence they describe — a woman held as a sex slave by a drug cartel, who witnessed dozens of rapes and murders, or a married couple who fled their hometown after the local crime boss decided to take the woman as personal property.

The drafters of the Refugee Convention (1952), the Refugee Act (1980) and the Torture Convention (1984) surely didn’t imagine these exact scenarios. But our federal courts have

repeatedly shown that the grounds for protection they defined apply in many situations they didn’t anticipate, and persecution need not be at the hands of a military dictatorship or a caricature of the Soviet Union.

Taking these cases seriously would not open the floodgates. Undocumented immigration from Mexico is net zero since 2005 and net negative since 2009. More important, most victims of violence in Mexico do not want to leave — even when they have been chased out of their villages and had their houses burned down, when they’ve been kidnapped and tortured, or their spouses and children forcibly disappeared. In more than 250 longform interviews with victims of violence and their surviving family members, I’ve heard exactly two mentions of seeking protection in the United States. When victims do leave, it’s generally a last resort and often an emergency.

A man in Tijuana who had refused recruitment by a drug cartel was in the middle of being handed over by the police to organized crime when he escaped by jumping off of a pedestrian bridge into traffic, throwing himself at the mercy of a Department of Homeland Security security guard. Protection in the U.S. was a lifeline for a person who was specifically targeted, not a floodgate for anyone who wants to come.

The asylum system is admittedly an inefficient way to protect people fleeing such a broad wave of violence. Congress should craft legislation that acknowledges that there’s an unconventional but brutal war going on in Mexico and offer protection to well-defined groups so that we do not need to adjudicate every individual claim. This could help reduce the crushing backlog in our immigration courts and catalyze a broader assessment of why U.S. presidential administrations from both parties have failed to develop an effective policy to reduce violence and defend democracy in Mexico.

Until then, asylum remains a critical lifeline for individuals and families fleeing violence in Mexico.