Migrant crossings plummeted after Biden’s asylum ban. But top Democrats ask: At what price?

In early June, Ofelia Arrellano said a gang in Mexico City threatened to kidnap her youngest son if she didn’t pay a $160 monthly fee to keep her toy store running.

Arellano, 37, and his two sons saved enough money and fled. She feared the gangs’ reach if she stayed in Mexico, so they headed north toward the U.S., she said.

But when they were leaving for the US-Mexico BorderJoe Biden has issued a new directive to curb high levels of migration to the US. When the number of people considered to have crossed illegally exceeded the weeklong daily average of 2,500, he would temporarily close the border to most asylum applications. The crackdown has been in operation ever since.

Unknowingly, Arellano and his children arrived in northern Mexico on July 25 and crossed rugged terrain into Arizona, at a place where the 30-foot-high U.S. steel barrier runs out. There, they waited for U.S. Border Patrol agents, assuming they could exercise their rights to seek asylum.

But when the agents showed up, “they told me I was going to be deported,” said Arellano, anguished.

“I told them I couldn’t go back to my country because our lives were in danger, but they said asylum was no longer an option and that I should live in a different area in Mexico,” she said, speaking from a shelter in Nogales, on the Mexican side of the border with its smaller sister city, Nogales, Arizona.

The regulation of the US president, published by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, it is their most restrictive immigration policy to date.

Combined with Mexican authorities’ cooperation with the US to stop people from reaching the border, the effect on numbers has been dramatic.

That gives Biden and now the Democrat 2024 presidential ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the ability to counter the Republicans’ constant and effective line of attack that Democrats will not “secure the border.”

Related: Republicans want to grill Harris on her immigration record — but what is it?

But rights advocates and some prominent Democrats are effectively asking: At what price?

Members of Congress have just sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and US Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling for Biden’s border crackdown to end “in its entirety.” It states that the executive order “forces individuals to wait in harm’s way while facing threats to their safety, in violation of U.S. law and international treaty obligations.”

It was signed by 19 US House representatives, including nine from border states – Joaquin Castro, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia and Greg Casar of Texas, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Juan Vargas, Robert Garcia, J Luis (Lou) Correa and Nanette Barragán of California – as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush of the Squad and Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

It said Biden’s regulation “mirrors a previous asylum ban issued by the Trump administration,” violating legal guarantees that “people fleeing violence and persecution can seek asylum regardless of how they enter the United States.”

Since 1980, when Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act, the US established two routes to obtaining asylum: abroad, as a resettled refugee, or on American soil, as an asylum seeker, with legal obligations to provide protection to those escaping persecution.

Meanwhile, migrant rights groups have presented a brief amicus node federal case where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others are suing the government on behalf of the Las Americas Immigrant Defense Center and the Refugee and Immigrant Education and Legal Services Center (RAICES).

The document says that since the new rules began, advocates have spoken to people who have explicitly requested asylum, using their national and international rights, who have also “reported their past persecution, explained their asylum claims, shown agents their injuries and reported that they were visibly sobbing and begging to be heard.” But they “were either ignored by U.S. immigration officials or told they would be deported anyway.”

He added that others “reported that they were unable to express their fear because officers prohibited them from speaking, reprimanded them, intimidated them or told them that there was no longer asylum”, even when, for some, a lawyer supported them.

The document said that instead of referring migrants to an official “credible fear” interview with specialist asylum agents or immigration judges, there was “a terrifying atmosphere” for asylum seekers where, instead, agents border guards “verbally abused them, telling them to ‘shut up’. ‘, declaring that they ‘had no right’ to an interview, or completely ignoring their attempts to communicate.”

Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants in June it fell to a three-year low, continuing a downward trend that began earlier this year. Recent reports suggest that migrant crossings fell again in July, reaching the lowest level since September 2020. According to authoritiesthe executive order remains in effect until the average daily number of illegal border crossings drops below 1,500 for a week.

“It seems like it makes sense for political parties to be tough on the border right now, but what we need to do is ensure that asylum seekers can get the protection that the laws require,” said Alvaro Huerta, director of litigation and policy at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, based in Los Angeles, is part of the amicus brief.

In Nogales, Mexico, the Kino Border Initiative, a humanitarian and advocacy program and another signatory to the amicus brief, reported that of the 457 people it helped after they were deported to Mexico in June, 345 of them reported being ignored or not given permission to enter. ask for asylum.

“Those who verbally expressed fear or intention to seek asylum reported being completely ignored, lied to and told that asylum was no longer an option, or threatened with prolonged detention,” the document said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not respond to requests for comment.

Arellano and her children were deported from the US to Mexico in late July. She found her way to the Kino shelter and, speaking on her fifth day there as she assessed her limited options, said: “My final destination was Indiana, where my oldest son lives. But now we may have to go back to where we fled.”

The USA government says: “Those ordered removed will be subject to a re-entry ban of at least five years and possible criminal prosecution.”

Pedro de Velasco, director of advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative, said the shelter has seen a sharp increase in the number of people arriving after being deported, with up to 80% being women and children. The group also provides food, medical and legal services to male deportees sleeping in other shelters.

De Velasco said some people have been going back and forth to Kino for months, trying unsuccessfully to secure an official appointment with U.S. authorities to request asylum through the cell phone app known as CBP One. The app distributes about 1,500 appointments daily. for asylum seekers waiting in Mexico, which doesn’t come close to meeting demand.

On the wall of the shelter there is a poster that seeks to dissuade people from going out to the desert as a last resort, try to enter the USA, evading the authorities.

“Many people died on the crossing. There is not enough water. Many people were lost in the vast desert,” the poster says.

De Velasco explained the broader danger.

“With no options, the government is further pushing migration away through remote areas. The cost of this policy could be the loss of human life in the desert,” he said.

Humanitarian aid volunteers from the Samaritans of Tucson, a group that tries to prevent migrant deaths in the Arizona desert, helped 10 asylum seekers one recent morning who had crossed the border near Sasabe, a small village in an arid, unforgiving landscape of brush. , but few other features other than the imposing border barrier and distant mountains.

Border patrol agents ended up rounding up the asylum seekers – four from Latin America, three from Nepal and three from India.

Since Biden’s new directive, however, volunteer Chris Craver said fewer people have been arriving at the Samaritans’ tent outpost in Sasabe, hoping to turn themselves in to agents to seek asylum. There were “a lot more people saying they should have crossed the desert” and tried to escape detection, he said.

At that moment, two men approached the border barrier from the Mexican side.

Alberto, 35, and Jesus, 36, Mexican cousins, who asked that their last names not be used to protect their safety, said they left Hermosillo, about 180 miles south of Nogales, because of high crime and low wages. They called through the fence, saying they would cross the border the next morning, through the Sonoran desertwhere summer temperatures regularly exceed 100F (38C).

Related: Looking for Diego: The Hunt for a Missing Migrant in the Arizona Desert

They had water but little food, and they were hungry, they admitted, their feet sore in worn boots after walking through the bush. They intended to reach Tucson, 70 miles north, guided by smugglers, but were also worried that their cellphones were running out of charge.

Pima County, which largely straddles the Arizona-Mexico border, is responsible for collecting most of the human remains recovered when migrants are unable to arrive. From January to July this year, the remains of 95 of these travelers were recovered, more than a third died from heat exposure, others from drowning, falling into a diabetic coma or undetermined causes. Unfortunately, that number is typical, Greg Hess, the county’s chief medical examiner, told the Guardian.

“We’ve seen very little variation in who makes what executive order or who puts up a wall here or there, which doesn’t seem to affect deaths,” Hess said.

THE climate crisis also plays a role. Hess said what worries officials “is how hot and dry it is out there. This has been a problem for southern Arizona since the early 2000s. The hotter it gets, the more people will die.”

Alberto and Jesus left and their fate is unclear at this time. Arellano and her children have not returned to Mexico City but have gone to stay with a relative a few hours away, trying to resettle as they fear gang members will show up on their doorstep again.