Migrants seeking US asylum facing new, tougher hurdles
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — A new level of despair spread among tens of thousands of migrants waiting on the Mexican border to seek refuge in the U.S. as the Trump administration began enforcing radical new restrictions Thursday on who qualifies for asylum.
“TheUnited States is the only option,” Dunea Romero, a 31-year-old Honduran, lamented with tears in her eyes at a border crossing in Tijuana. She said she packed a bag and fled her homelandwith her twoboys, ages 7 and11, after learning that her ex-husband, a powerful gang leader, was going to have her killed.
The new U.S. policy would effectively deny asylum to nearly all migrants arriving at the southern border who aren’t from Mexico. It would disallow anyonewhopasses through another country without first seeking and failing to obtain asylum there.
The rule will fall most heavily on Central Americans, mainly Hondurans and Guatemalans, because they account for most people arrested or stopped at the border.
But it also represents an enormous setback for other asylum-seekers around the world, including large numbers of Africans, HaitiansandCubanswhotry to enter the United States by way of theMexican border.
It is perhaps the biggest change to U.S. asylum policy since it was established in 1980 and themost consequential move of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, a signature issue as he heads into a reelection campaign.
The Trump administration put the policy into effect the morning after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared it to do so while legal challengesmove forward.
Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan called the high court’s goahead a “big victory” in the administration’s effort to curb the flow of migrants. Migrants and their advocates decried it as tantamount to a death sentence for many of those fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands.
Jessica Collins, a spokeswoman forU.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles asylum cases, said it will be retroactive to July 16, when itwas announced.
Collins said it will help remove one of the factors that impel people to set out for theUnited States, “leading to fewer individuals transiting through Mexico on a dangerous journey.”
An unprecedented surge of asylum-seeking families from Central America has overwhelmed U.S. authorities during Trump’s tenure, prompting the unprecedented response.
More than 40,000 asylumhave been forced to wait in Mexico while their cases wind through the clogged U.S. immigration courts under another Trump administrationpolicy, introducedin January.
Many asylum-seekers denied refuge under the newpolicy will be placed in fast-track deportation proceedings and flown to their home countries at U.S. expense, authorities said.
Some seeking refuge may get to stay in the United States through other legal avenues, including protection under the UnitedNations Convention Against Torture, but the threshold to qualify is much higher.
“Our Supreme Court is sentencing people to death. There are no safeguards, no institutions to stop this cruelty,” the immigration-assistance group Al Otro Lado said in a statement. The Mexican government likewise called the high court’s action “astonishing.”
But Morgan said migrants with valid claims should instead be seeking asylum “from the first country they come in contact with.”