Asylum policies and practices are in chaos, but immigrants at ports of entry in cities like Tijuana still believe that they can find safety in the U.S.
Becoming an émigré requires faith and trust—faith that life will get better, and trust in others who offer help: shelter, guidance, and assistance with byzantine procedures. Faith can turn out to be unjustified, and trust is often misplaced, for there is, it seems, a scam to fit every need. Becoming an émigré also requires an extremely high tolerance for uncertainty. An émigré can only see one step ahead, if that, but musters the courage to take that step anyway. So it is that, even as the Trump Administration goes about the business of closing America’s borders, both symbolically and in practice, people who are forced to flee their homes persist in believing that they can find safety here.
In central Tijuana, one of the city’s many shelters is a hangar built of corrugated metal, a bare cube with a concrete floor on which about forty tents—blue, green, and orange ones, some designed for two people and some for three—are set up in dense rows that leave hardly any floor surface exposed. At the front of the hangar, a dozen and a half white plastic chairs are lined up in front of a television set, so that kids can watch cartoons. Most of the people in this particular shelter are Mexican families who plan to ask for asylum at the border. Elsewhere in the city, there are shelters whose occupants are primarily refugees from other Latin American countries. Tijuana is one of several dozen so-called ports of entry, where people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border can declare their intention to seek asylum. It’s hard to tell whether the number of asylum seekers is growing: statistics show that more people have come through ports of entry this year than last, but this may be because the immigration crackdown has caused fewer people to cross the border without a visa between ports of entry in order to apply once they are in the country. In any case, there is a sense of sincere and stubborn hope in this shelter and in this town: people keep coming, and will probably continue to try to keep coming, even as the United States grows ever more hostile to asylum seekers.
An asylum claim begins with the assertion that a person, or a family, is afraid to go home. There is little doubt that the asylum seekers here have indeed been driven by fear. Claudio, a farm worker, and Mariana, a housewife, travelled with their fourteen-year-old son, Jairo, by bus nearly two thousand miles from the state of Veracruz. (The asylum seekers I interviewed asked to be identified only by their first names, citing fears of retaliation by U.S. immigration officials.) They told me, through a translator, that their troubles began ten years ago, when a local gang kidnapped Mariana’s brother, a used-car dealer. The family paid a ransom, and after five days the brother was freed. He had been badly beaten; his ribs were broken. This year, threats against Mariana’s brother and other relatives intensified, and the family had seen more and more kidnappings in the community. Even being willing to pay a ransom to kidnappers no longer seemed to work, they told me: people just disappeared. Two months ago, Mariana’s brother took his son across the U.S. border, and asked for asylum. At the end of June, Claudio and Mariana decided to follow them. “We don’t want to continue living in a state of fear,” Mariana told me, as she started to cry. When I met them, on Wednesday, July 11th, they had been in town for two weeks and were living in one of the tents in the shelter. Their number in the asylum seekers’ line at the border crossing was three hundred and seventy. No. 363 had crossed on the day we spoke, so it seemed that Claudio and Mariana might have their chance to present themselves at the border later that week.
A woman named Carmen took the bus to Tijuana from the state of Michoacán. She came with her three children, who are fourteen, ten, and seven. Her husband died five years ago, of a heart attack, and since then she has tried to balance working on farms and watching over her children. This spring, she concluded that this was impossible—she feared for her children’s safety too much to be able to work instead of walking them to and from school. There are many kidnappings and drug-related murders in Michoacán, she told me. Her own cousin’s son killed two of his uncles in a drug-related fight. The journey to Tijuana took two days and two nights. Carmen’s number was three hundred and sixty-nine.
Odelia came from Guerrero—another bus trip that lasted two days and two nights. Her three sons are eleven, eight, and six. Her husband was already in the United States: he had crossed through the desert in Arizona and was now living there without legal documents. Her story was similar: violence in Guerrero had become pervasive, and the fear was unbearable, especially after two of her relatives, including her husband’s uncle, had been killed. Odelia’s sister, too, was in the United States, applying for asylum. Her sister was married to a U.S. citizen, but the procedure for securing legal residency through him had become so time-consuming and complicated that she decided simply to ask for asylum. Odelia’s number was four hundred and thirty.
Local immigration activists told me that wait times for asylum seekers looking to cross the border in Tijuana have ranged from a couple of weeks to a month and a half. Carmen said that living in Tijuana is expensive, so some people just give up, which speeds the line along. She had been so terrified of running out of money that she couldn’t sleep during her first two nights in a hotel, where she was paying four hundred pesos—about twenty dollars—a night for a room. But then she found out about the government-funded, privately run shelter, which also provides three meals a day.
When individuals or a family arrives at the border, an officer checks that they have the documents required to cross: a U.S. passport or passport card, or, for citizens of Mexico and other nations, a valid visa. Those who lack these documents are deemed “inadmissible.” Between October 1, 2017, and the end of June, more than thirty-seven thousand “inadmissible” families had come to the border—an increase of sixty-one per cent from last year. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps track of “family units” without indicating how many people are in each family.) The largest number of “inadmissibles” come from Mexico, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. The asylum seekers here are, on the face of it, “inadmissible.”
The temporary inhabitants of the shelter in Tijuana know that those who plan to seek asylum are denied entry to the regular crossing and will be taken to a different area at the border for processing. They had only the vaguest idea of what would happen after that. Everyone had, of course, heard that some children had been separated from their parents, but people in the shelter seemed remarkably unafraid of this—perhaps because to be an émigré one has to possess an endless supply of optimism. Odelia said that if she were separated from her children, other family members would come to get the kids. Mariana and Claudio had heard that adult males could be detained for as long as six months, but they believed that Mariana and Jairo would be released after three or four days.
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It is, in fact, impossible to predict what will happen to these asylum seekers in the immediate future. Policies and practices seem to be in chaos. Almost certainly, they will face some time in detention—at the border, in holding cells reserved for “inadmissibles,” or perhaps in a hotel in San Diego where families have sometimes been housed.
Under the Trump Administration, ice has instituted a practice of blanket detention for new asylum seekers and others with pending cases (including people who had been granted asylum but have faced an appeal of that decision from the government). Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union won an important judgment against that practice. That does not, however, mean that all or even a majority of asylum seekers will be released from detention.
And then there is the asylum claim itself. What none of the asylum seekers whom I spoke with seemed to realize—what they had very few ways of finding out—was just how quickly the U.S. government is shutting down the asylum system. Émigrés usually base their decisions on the information that they receive from those who have come before them—relatives or friends who have charted the path. But, even in the couple of months since Mariana’s brother and Odelia’s sister asked for asylum in the United States, there have been major changes.
Last month, the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced that nongovernment violence—the sort of violence that the inhabitants of the Tijuana shelter were fleeing—would no longer be considered a type of persecution that entitles people to asylum. The people I interviewed stressed that they could not seek protection from their local police, who were often acting in concert with kidnappers—a claim that has, in the past, helped bridge the legal gap between the experience of violence and the concept of persecution. But, with his decision, Sessions explicitly rejected the idea that gang violence toward multiple cohorts in a community amounted to persecution.
In other words, the people in the Tijuana shelter, as well as their relatives in the United States who had already applied for asylum, would probably see their claims rejected. The rate of positive decisions in asylum cases has been falling for years—from fifty-six per cent in 2012 to forty-three per cent in 2016, according to Justice Department statistics. The department has not yet compiled statistics for the first year of the Trump Administration, but, in an interview with NPR in May, Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that only twenty per cent of asylum claims were granted. Seven hundred thousand people are currently awaiting decisions on their asylum applications.
Still, an asylum seeker’s status itself provides a modicum of protection in the United States. Asylum seekers cannot apply for public assistance (this Clinton-era policy sets the United States apart from other countries that grant asylum) and, for the first six months, do not have the right to work, but they are at least in the country legally while their claims are pending. That process takes months. After presenting themselves at the border, asylum seekers are interviewed by an immigration officer—often over the phone, while the asylum seekers are in a detention facility. The officer makes a determination about whether an applicant’s fear of persecution is credible. Only after that does the actual legal process of seeking asylum commence. The final decision on a claim is made by an immigration-court judge, part of a process that is likely to take years.
The Trump Administration wants to change this, too. Following Sessions’s announcement last month, President Trump sent out a tweetappearing to propose—or advocate, or announce, or whatever it is that a Presidential tweet actually does—scrapping due process for asylum seekers altogether. “No Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” he wrote. In fact, U.S. and international law requires all asylum seekers to be allowed into the country to plead their case. Asylum seekers and immigration lawyers, though, have reported that border agents had been turning people away summarily since just before Trump took office, in January of 2017. Last week, the Times reported that a new proposal would abolish ports of entry altogether—literally closing the border to asylum seekers. It’s a two-pronged attack: on the one hand, the Administration is prosecuting asylum seekers whom it considers to have crossed the border illegally (though, again, U.S. law and international law allow them to do so in approved places); on the other, the Administration is making it impossible to enter in ways it sees as legal.
Most of the changes to asylum policies and practices have been barely noticed in the barrage of immigration news—though they probably affect many more people than the separation of families at the border. In the Tijuana shelter, no one seemed to have heard about the changes. Mariana knew that her brother had a pending asylum application and was working as a farmhand in California. Odelia’s sister was applying for asylum. Carmen’s sister, who crossed the desert into the country illegally, was cleaning houses in Atlanta and hoping to secure legal status, even though she had been scammed by someone who promised to help with documents. All of this seemed infinitely better than living in constant fear at home. Everyone had hope of making it in the United States.
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