Carlos Moreno/Sipa USA via AP Images
Migrants at the Agape Mision Mundial shelter, in Tijuana, Mexico, check their phones for appointments on the CBP One app that allows for asylum seekers to enter the U.S., May 10, 2023.
Three weeks ago, the pandemic-era use of Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which allowed the Border Patrol to expel migrants to Mexico without giving them the opportunity to ask for asylum, expired. The rule contradicted both U.S. and international law, and advocates had sought its end for years. But the new Biden administration policy that has replaced Title 42 will be far worse for migrants and their safety.
On May 10, Daniela, a woman in her thirties from Colombia, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with her two toddler daughters. After her husband received death threats from a criminal group in Colombia, the family fled in early March, determined to reach the United States, where they believed they would be safe. They would not get to the border unscathed, though. First, they would need to spend seven days in the jungle of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, passing the dead bodies of other migrants in the mud. In southern Mexico, the family was robbed by corrupt Mexican immigration officials, who took everything but the clothes on their backs. “Crossing Mexico was far more difficult than crossing the Darién,” Daniela said. “We don’t feel safe here. There’s no way we could stay.”
But the new Biden administration policy will require migrants to stay in Mexico, risking their lives for weeks, months, or even years, while they navigate a collection of legal hurdles. If they attempt to bypass these obstacles and cross the border, as Daniela and her family did, they will be expelled into Mexico, and possibly served with a $200 fine and the consequence of jail time if they attempt to cross again at any point in the next five years. Apprehensions at the border have already fallen by half since the law went into effect.
One of the primary annoyances for those hoping to seek asylum in the U.S. is that migrants will only be allowed to cross the border if they have received an appointment on a poorly designed app called CBP One that crashes constantly. The app only offers 1,000 appointments per day, and gives an invaluable advantage to those with access to high-speed internet. Migrants who do not have smartphones are out of luck, and a significant number are robbed of their electronics while traveling through Mexico. Dierys, a woman in her forties from Maracaibo, Venezuela, began the journey to the border with six phones among the 11 members of her family; now, they are down to one.
Before the expiration of Title 42, migrants left printed emails confirming they had signed up for the app ripped up in the dust along with other belongings they felt were useless, before they turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. “We have no time to wait for that app,” Jonas Aidé, a 25-year-old migrant from Venezuela, said. “The app doesn’t serve me. If I had come with my family, maybe it would have made sense to use it, but I don’t have anyone, it’s just me.”
Carolina Rodríguez, from Colombia, is living in a tent camp in Juárez, mere feet from a crossing point into El Paso, Texas. She is determined to keep refreshing the app every single morning, but she has already waited in a tent with her four-year-old son for two months.
Andres Leighton/AP Photo
Venezuelan migrant Dayana Ibarra, right, holding her immigration paperwork, sits with other migrants outside the Sacred Heart Church in El Paso, Texas, May 12, 2023.
“Before we got to Mexico City, we were robbed by a group of men who encircled us after we got off a bus at night. They took everything, but left our passports. They said they were being generous. I’m relieved my kid didn’t see. He just happened to already be in the shelter at that moment,” Rodríguez said. “I don’t know how much longer we can live in a tent like this before our money runs out. We’re just praying we get the appointment before that happens.”
The new law also intends to make asylum applications in the United States a matter of extreme privilege, reserved only for those who are most vulnerable, but making it as difficult as possible for those vulnerable people to reach the border at all. Perhaps the most consequential aspect of the policy is that it will require each migrant to apply for and be refused asylum in Mexico or another third country before accessing the asylum process in the U.S., unless they can prove themselves sufficiently vulnerable. How migrants will prove this remains to be seen. Many families may be allowed into the U.S., while single adults will be presumed as not being vulnerable enough.
This may lead to the manipulation of children, who will be seen as tickets into the U.S. One migrant from Honduras who did not want to share her name for fear her ex-boyfriend would locate her, said he has threatened, through a series of WhatsApp messages, to kidnap their one-year-old daughter from her, because he believes having a child with him will better ensure his entry into the U.S. As a single adult, he was already turned away once at the border.
The introduction of this third-country asylum policy means the United States is encouraging vulnerable populations to seek permanent refuge in countries that they have simultaneously deemed unsafe for American tourists to visit on vacations. Dierys was robbed and extorted several times on the Mexican leg of her journey to the U.S. border with her family, and by the time they reached Juárez, the group of 11, which included children ages 13, 7, and 2, did not have any money left. They were forced to beg on the street for food. “It has been so much more of a nightmare than we anticipated,” she said.
The Biden policy will leave tens of thousands of people with no choice but to attempt to build lives, or at least pass the time, in Mexican border cities, waiting to get an appointment to enter the United States through the official Border Patrol system, or waiting to raise sufficient funds to pay a smuggler to get them across. In border cities like Juárez, Reynosa, and Matamoros, migrants will be vulnerable to kidnappings for ransom and other forms of extortion.
Shelters in border cities like Juárez have fewer resources and support when compared to those stationed just across the fence in the U.S. On March 27, 40 migrants died in a fire in a Juárez immigration detention center. Many of those migrants were actively extorted by guards who were supposed to protect them. If a migrant failed to pay the guards $200, they would be sent back to Mexico City or further south to the Mexico-Guatemala border, forced to complete the journey north all over again, but this time with completely empty pockets. Many of the Central Americans and Venezuelans deported to Mexico under this new law are sent to a government-run “shelter” in Juárez that is much more akin to a detention center or prison, with cells and armed guards.
In El Paso, shelters like Sacred Heart are visited daily by food banks and other hunger-fighting organizations, who provide migrants with meals, blankets, hygiene packets, and other necessities. “We’re here to do whatever we can to help these people, with shelter, food, and anything else they need as they’re working through the legal asylum process,” Rafael García, a priest at Sacred Heart, said in an interview on May 11.
Smugglers will likely greatly benefit from the new law, as it will drive thousands of migrants into their hands who have now been excluded from the right to asylum. Throughout Central America and the world, many still feel that the United States is the only place they will find a safe and stable existence, but tighter controls on the legal asylum process will only spur greater demand for smuggling services, causing prices to increase further. The current cost of crossing the border from Juárez is several thousand dollars, which guarantees the migrant three tries. In some cases, migrants who do not have enough money will be left thousands of dollars in debt, which they need to pay off after finding a job in the U.S.
The relationship between criminal organizations and local Mexican officials is often more cooperative or passive than adversarial. On May 11, the day that Title 42 expired, the Border Patrol deported a group of Mexicans who had crossed the fence with a smuggler from El Paso back into Juárez. At the end of the bridge, a Juárez police officer stood, surveying them. “They’re waiting for their smuggler to come back so they can try again tonight. It’s a business,” he said with a shrug.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this new law is the convoluted manner it uses to effectively end the right to asylum in the United States, through complex legal language that migrants cannot be expected to understand. Dierys did not know what asylum was, only that she wanted to escape her current situation and give her children a better life in the United States. She did not know there was a chance she’d be separated from her children, or that some of the adults would be sent back to Mexico while the rest of her party was allowed to stay in El Paso. “We didn’t hear about that at all, we just came to the border,” she said.
