Plodding asylum process builds pressure
‘Metering’ keeps migrants waiting outside USA
Sunday’s confrontation between Central American migrants and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents ended when families fled clouds of searing tear gas near the U.S. border with Mexico in Tijuana.
It may have started months earlier after a policy shift.
In April, CBP announced it was restarting a policy of “metering” asylum seekers at the border, or allowing migrants into the USA only if there is sufficient room in holding facilities on the U.S. side, according to CBP reports.
That technique, used on and off again since 2016, created a backlog of migrants at the Tijuana-U.S. border that, coupled with confusion about U.S. immigration law and other factors, contributed to the tensions that erupted in Sunday’s widely televised brush with U.S. border agents.
“What happened (Sunday) was a wake-up call,” said Alex Mensing, an advocate for immigrants with Pueblo Sin Fronteras who has been staying with the migrants. “There needs to be a better solution than waiting in a muddy, cold camp while the U.S. decides who it can accept for asylum proceedings.”
The caravan of migrants, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, arrived in Tijuana a few weeks ago to find 2,800 immigrants already there waiting for their chance to seek asylum in the USA. The Baja California government estimates there are nearly 7,500 migrants in the state.
About 2,000 of them remain in Mexicali, about 90 miles from the border, considering whether to go to Tijuana.
The Mexican government opened Unidad Deportiva Benito Juarez, an open-air sports complex less than a mile from the border, to house the migrants as U.S. immigration officials process about 40 asylum applicants a day. Some of the migrants complained of a lack of food and water at the complex, as well as exposure to rain, mud and other elements.
The issue has become highly politicized: President Donald Trump called the migrants’ acts an “invasion” and deployed military units to the border.
Over the weekend, organizers within the caravan began plotting a march to the border to shed light on their plight and urge U.S. officials to speed up the asylum process. The slowness of the process stems, in part, from the policy change in April just as a smaller caravan arrived in Tijuana.
Because of the metering process, migrants are turned away from legal ports of entry and often decide to cross illegally between legal entry points, according to a report in September by the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General.
OIG investigators interviewed two asylum seekers apprehended by Border Patrol agents. The detainees said they crossed illegally after being turned away at ports of entry. A woman who had been turned away three times by an officer on a bridge decided to take her chances crossing the Rio Grande.
“While the Government encouraged all asylum seekers to come to ports of entry to make their asylum claims, CBP managed the flow of people who could enter at those ports of entry through metering, which may have led to additional illegal border crossings,” the report said.
Those mixed signals sow confusion and lead to manifestations such as the clash Sunday, said Theresa Brown, director of immigration and crossborder policy at the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center and a former CBP policy adviser for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“This administration, in spite of the significant increase of asylum applications, has not increased resources to process those claims,” she said. “They’ve increased resources to deter or prevent people from getting to the border to apply.”
During a surge of unaccompanied immigrant minors in 2014, Obama ad- ministration officials opened facilities inside the USA to accommodate the crush of asylum seekers as they waited for their applications to be processed.
At the sports complex Saturday, migrants painted bedsheets with signs such as “Trump We Hate You Not” or in the colors of the national flags of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as they planned the march route for Sunday, Mensing said.
He and other advocates advised them not to march, warning that tension at the border was too high. The migrants said they were desperate to shine a light on their predicament. Customs officials in San Diego said that because of the backlog, they don’t expect to process any of the recent caravan members for five to six weeks.
The march of more than 1,000 migrants started around 10 a.m. and proceeded slowly toward a bridge leading to the international crossing.
When some migrants threw rocks and other projectiles at U.S. agents and rushed a section of the barrier separating the two countries, the agents lobbed several canisters of tear gas and fired pepper spray to disperse the groups, according to a CBP spokesman.
“CBP takes Sunday’s employment of use-of-force very seriously,” a CBP statement said. “CBP reviews and evaluates all uses of force incidents to ensure compliance with policy.”
Mexican authorities arrested 98 migrants during the protests and considered returning them to their countries. Migrants debated whether they should continue waiting for their shot at asylum or return home.
Jose Alberto Rodriguez, a migrant from Copan, Honduras, and his wife were hit with tear gas during Sunday’s melee. He said he decided to go back to Honduras rather than remain “exposed” in Tijuana. “If we remain here, with each day, we’ll just end up worse,” he said.
Miguel Angel Lazo Guillen, also from Honduras, said the march was wrongheaded. He decided to wait it out.
“It’s not good to try to do things by force,” he said. “I’m afraid that they will try it again, and there will be people getting beaten.”
“What happened (Sunday) was a wake-up call. There needs to be a better solution than waiting in a muddy, cold camp while the U.S. decides who it can accept for asylum proceedings.”
Alex Mensing Pueblo Sin Fronteras