A new border repression revealed by the Biden The administration this week could disproportionately affect families, whose growing numbers over the past decade have drastically changed the profile of the population crossing the southern border.
Family units now represent a substantial portion of those crossing borders, representing around 40% of all migrants entering the United States this year. In general, families have been quickly released into the country due to legal restrictions that prevent children from being detained for long periods.
They then join the millions of undocumented people who remain in the United States indefinitely, under the radar of US authorities, while they await their court dates in a few years.
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But according to a memo issued by the Department of Homeland Security and obtained by The New York Times, the families will be returned to their home countries within days under President Joe Biden’s new border policy, which has temporarily closed the U.S.-U.S. border. Mexico to the majority of asylum seekers. from 12:01 pm on Wednesday.
The implications of the new policy are huge for families, who are some of the most vulnerable groups traveling to the United States. Advocates warn it could have dangerous repercussions, increasing the likelihood that parents will be separated from their children or sent to the border alone, because unaccompanied minors are exempt from the new policy.
The vast majority of families seeking asylum are from Central America and Mexico, placing them in a category described in the memo as “easily removable,” similar to single adults from those regions. The memo outlines how authorities should implement the new policy.
Smuggling organizations have long used the likelihood of migrants being released after entering the country illegally as a selling point. But the new border policy makes no distinction between how families and single adults entering the country illegally are treated, eliminating the perceived advantage of arriving as a family.
Instead, families would be prioritized for quick removal, a Biden administration official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the executive action.
“This appears to be a remarkably cynical strategy to increase the number of deportees by targeting the most vulnerable segment of the migration flow,” said Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program at the University of California, San Diego.
But with the number of people crossing the border at record levels, the new policy was an attempt to reduce illegal immigration and mitigate one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities in his campaign against former President Donald Trump. Biden is under pressure, even within his own party, to do something about immigration.
In a significant change that mimics a Trump-era practice, some families who argue they should be an exception to the new asylum restrictions will be given a so-called credible fear interview during border detention, which is difficult to pass while in custody and without a lawyer. .
“It’s horrifying to hear that the Biden administration is silently implementing one of Trump’s worst border pilot programs — subjecting families to rapid, credible interviews in fear while they are detained in Border Patrol custody,” said Taylor Levy, an attorney for immigration.
The removal of families is facilitated by the fact that the majority come from Guatemala, Honduras and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. These countries are relatively close to the United States and already accept repatriations, unlike many countries in Africa and Asia, which are far away and whose governments are less likely to accept deportees.
Biden’s order, which took effect Wednesday, authorizes border agents to reject — or quickly deport — migrants who enter the country illegally, with few exceptions.
The border will only reopen when the number of unauthorized crossings drops below 1,500 for seven consecutive days and remains that way for two weeks. The numbers haven’t been this low in years; in December, there were around 10,000 illegal crossings every day.
More recently, numbers have hovered around 3,000 crossings per day.
For decades, single adult men intending to work in the United States represented the overwhelming majority of migrants arriving in the country. They left their wives and children behind and sent money home to support them.
Around 2013, entire families began migrating in considerable numbers from Central America, driven largely by a rise in gang-related violence. The Obama administration grappled with the influx and considered it an emergency.
The tide continued to rise and did not subside for more than a decade.
“Whole-family migration has become increasingly important as a strategy to protect children from cartel- and gang-related violence,” said Cornelius.
With no immigration detention facilities equipped for women with children and no limits on how long children can be confined, families were quickly released by the U.S. Border Patrol with orders to appear in court for deportation hearings. The families then traveled to join relatives living in the United States.
Most single adults continued to be detained for days or longer – and often processed for immediate deportation.
Migrants traveling as families sent a message home that they had been allowed to remain, at least temporarily, in the United States, encouraging others to make the journey north.
Smugglers fueled rumors of special treatment for families to generate more business, as parents with children were less likely to attempt the dangerous journey without a guide.
Soon, adult men seeking to work in the United States also began crossing the border with children, who they knew would allow them to remain in the country.
Families with children have quickly become a significant and rapidly growing portion of the migrant population. At the same time, apprehensions of single adults, as a percentage of the total, plummeted. In some years, their number was overshadowed by the number of people who came as families.
Between 2018 and 2019, for example, the number of migrants in family units who crossed the border illegally jumped from 77,794 to 432,838, an increase of 456%. The number of detained migrants who were single adults increased by 30%, from 198,492 to 258,375.
Last year, 621,311 family units were detained after crossing the southern border.
In recent years, Mexican families displaced by cartels that control swathes of the territory have been crossing the border in increasing numbers in search of safety in the United States.
In the first eight months of fiscal year 2024, which began Oct. 1, the Border Patrol detained nearly 150,000 Mexican migrant families who entered the United States illegally, compared with 87,014 in 2023 and 17,040 in 2020.
“A large number of Mexican families have been coming and it is easy to send them back,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, because they can be returned to their country on a bus. .
The removal of families and exemptions for unaccompanied minors under the new restrictions will almost certainly lead to family separations as desperate parents decide to send their children alone, often with smugglers, she said.
In May last year, a 4-year-old child was thrown into the United States over the steel wall that separates San Diego from the Mexican city of Tijuana. The child survived. Two years earlier, agents rescued two young sisters, ages 3 and 5, who had been left on the U.S. side of the barrier in New Mexico.
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