Immigrant rights advocates led by Witness at the Border released an open letter on January 17, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, urging the Biden administration to honor his memory by upholding the rights of migrant victims of family separation to full reparations and restorative justice. They argue these steps should include the creation of a truth commission to investigate and document serious human rights crimes on both sides of the border. This is especially appropriate, as well, amid ongoing observances of Black History Month.
The Trump administration’s policies of family separation were clearly unconstitutional, violating fundamental rights of family integrity and substantive due process. They also included practices which violated the U.S.’s obligations pursuant to international law. These acts were equivalent to torture and forced disappearances, according to leading legal and clinical experts.
Such practices have been defined as “crimes against humanity” pursuant to Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. All victims of human rights crimes of this kind are entitled to just and adequate remedies. International crimes of this order of magnitude trigger state duties to fully redress victims’ rights to truth, justice, and to material and symbolic forms of reparation, as well as guarantees of non-repetition, according to internationally recognized standards.
No administration, and no public official has the “discretion” or “option” to promote or implement policies that are unconstitutional and/or which violate international human rights standards. This is especially so, as in the cases of family separation during the Trump era, where the acts at issue (forced disappearances and torture) rise to the level of “crimes against humanity.”
Thus, it is especially appropriate that the Biden administration take full measures to respect, protect, and fulfill victims’ rights to memory, justice, full reparations and restorative justice in Dr. King’s memory. His universalist commitment to human rights, as well as his foundational commitment to restorative justice and reparations in compensation for historical crimes against people of African descent in the U.S. underscore the urgent need to honor these principles not only in the context of anti-Black racial injustice, but also in the context of crimes against humanity on the border.
The Biden administration should also take urgently needed remedial steps within this latter context because of the persistent disproportionate impact of U.S. immigration policy and border policy on communities of color. Family separation, and the continued use of Title 42 and the “Remain in Mexico” policy as pretexts for the negation of the right to seek asylum, reflect these continuing legacies today, with the active complicity (and thus ultimate responsibility) of both U.S. and Mexican authorities.
Historical Origins and Continuing Legacies of Family Separation
These culminated in compulsory residential or boarding schools for Indigenous children and continuing abuses within the framework of family and child welfare systems, the administration of orphanages, and adoptions. The overall objective of these policies, as in Canada and Australia under similar circumstances, was to “assimilate” these children by destroying their identities. Trump-era family separation policies shared crucial features of these longstanding genocidal practices.
Mass deportation of persons of Mexican origin in the 1930s and 1950s reproduced these destructive mechanisms of family separation through practices of detention and deportation, which have reappeared with the recent mass deportations of Haitians carried out by the Biden administration in the last few months. Similar practices which resulted in involuntary separation of families were engaged in during the period of internment of persons of Japanese origin between 1942 and 1945. The Trump administration’s family separation policies embodied all of the most regressive, convergent characteristics of these oppressive practices.
These legacies are articulated in the large numbers of migrants of African descent and of Indigenous origin who were among the victims of the Trump administration’s family separation policies, as reflected in the lead plaintiff in the paradigmatic Ms. L case (an asylum seeker originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and in two of three named plaintiff families in the Wilbur P.G. case (asylum seekers of Maya Mam Indigenous origin from Guatemala), among others.
Biden Administration Policies
The Biden administration has recently announced its decision to withdraw from global settlement negotiations regarding pending family separation cases and to litigate each of these individually. More than 5,500 children and families who were victims of Trump-era policies may be affected by this decision. This includes many who were seeking to exercise their internationally recognized rights to seek asylum and were in effect punished for this by being subjected to both the forcible separation of their families and to detention under inhumane conditions, pursuant to Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, and more recently through mechanisms such as Title 42 and the Remain in Mexico policy.
The administration has “denounced the prior practice of separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border” and “condemn[ed] the human tragedy” that ensued. But it has also argued, unconscionably, that the decision to separate and detain these families and others fell within the federal government’s “reasonable” range of discretion as to its choices in immigration policy.
The Biden administration cannot have it both ways. The practical effect of its position would prevent further proceedings and trials in these pending cases, and the denial of the full compensation to which these victims are entitled. This compounds the original injustices that led to the case filings, and further exacerbates the suffering and victimization of these families and children.
The Biden administration has also argued that Trump’s family separation and detention policies were lawfully executed, and thus, justify immunity for those who implemented these deliberate acts of cruelty. This in practice would likely result in impunity for Trump officials who were responsible for the massive suffering inflicted on thousands of migrants between June 2017 and June 2018. This also leaves the door open for future administrations to opt again to enact these kinds of criminal policies.
Forced Disappearances and Torture
As plaintiffs have alleged in the complaint filed in Wilbur P.G., et al v.U.S. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, families subjected to the Trump administration’s family separation policies were often held in separate, distant facilities that were unknown to them, and were denied the right to communicate with their fellow family members. This reproduces the kinds of paradigmatic conditions which have been defined as constitutive of “enforced disappearances,” pursuant to international human rights law and international criminal law:
When the government separated these families, the Plaintiff children were 6, 11, and 13 years old. The children did not know why they had been separated from their parents. The parents did not know why they had been separated from their children. None of the Plaintiffs knew whether they would ever be reunited with their families, and at various times, Plaintiffs believed that they might be deported from the United States alone, without their accompanying family member. All suffered from extreme emotional distress at the point in time when the government forcibly separated them, went on to endure additional weeks of sustained emotional distress during their forced separation, and then continued to experience lasting emotional distress even after they were reunified. This suffering was the intentional purpose of the Policy.” (para. 4, p. 3 of the complaint)
Gerald Gray, a psychotherapist and clinical social worker who specializes in treating victims of torture and co-founder of the renowned Center for Justice and Accountability, noted the following in the first text published in the U.S. (shortly followed by others published internationally), which argued that Trump’s policy of family separation must be understood as involving acts of forced disappearance and torture:
What is happening with the … separation of children from parents or other caretakers is one form of forced disappearance — in this case, the kidnapping of two parties instead of one. Even if the parent or caretaker knows enough of the prison staffs’ language (presumably usually English), they don’t really know most of the time where the children are, who is responsible for them and whether they care, how the childrens’ health is, and if and when they will ever see the children again.
For the children, the separation is even worse — are the parents or caretakers alive? What are the guards in the prisons saying in a new language? What does “Chicago” mean? How can they survive bullying or sexual predation? And of course, if and when will they ever again see their families or caretakers? An adult may sometimes temporarily have a rough idea of the location of a childrens’ prison, but without language, constant contact, and all the education required to understand geography, children have an impossible task. For the reader here, look at the clinical literature on the outcome of kidnapping or holding children as hostages.”
All of this suffering was compounded for families of Indigenous origin who spoke neither English nor Spanish proficiently and were systematically denied necessary attention and services in their native Indigenous languages. This included children from involuntarily separated families detained under inhumane conditions in abusive settings, such as the Tornillo, Texas, and Homestead, Florida, migrant youth detention camps.
A member of Witness at the Border’s leadership team was able to confirm at this time that the Guatemalan children he interviewed were of Indigenous origin, in need of appropriate services in their own languages, and suffering deeply because of their mistreatment by U.S. officials and the precarious conditions which characterized their confinement. Within less than a month, two Indigenous Guatemalan migrant children, aged seven and eight, died in the custody of the Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, due to the deliberate neglect of their urgent medical needs in confinement.
Conclusion
The position that the Biden administration has taken in its recent filings in the family separation cases is the predictable result of its failure to settle the claims of thousands of victims of the criminal policies during the Trump era.
We must stand with the children and families who were victims of these crimes to demand full measures of accountability, reparations and restorative justice for all human rights violations related to the forced separation and detention of migrant families, regardless of the administration which is responsible. The Biden administration’s current approach amounts to active complicity with the continuing effects of these extraordinarily serious violations.
The Biden administration has the moral, ethical, and legal obligation to fully redress all of the injuries and suffering inflicted by these criminal policies. This must be undertaken through a comprehensive program of restorative, transitional justice, consistent with the international standards that are referenced above.
This goes way beyond the limited mandate of the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families. What is needed, in addition, is a full-fledged transitional justice process including a truth commission empowered to investigate and document serious human rights crimes on both sides of the border, and to make recommendations for needed reparations and measures of restorative justice, consistent with international standards.
This commission’s mandate must include not only family separation, but also the continued deployment of Title 42 and the Remain in Mexico policy, and the mass deportations of Haitians, among other specific instances, as well as their historical origins and contemporary implications. It must also include human rights crimes attributable to U.S. policy that have unfolded on Mexican territory and beyond, as part of the extraterritorial impact of policies, such as “prevention through deterrence.”
This is the Biden administration’s duty, pursuant to both U.S and international law.
The latest Tory threat to use the navy to stop refugees in the English Channel has been ripped to shreds. This week Boris Johnson, possibly to distract from his partying habits, signed off on a “cruel and inhumane” plan to hand control of the channel to the military. But two security scholars have pulled this pledge apart.
Professor Timothy Edmonds and research associate Scott Edwards, both from the University of Bristol, published their critique in The Conversation. The pair looked at key Tory claims around the issue. But they weren’t particularly convinced.
Key claims
Home secretary Priti Patel then told the Commons on Tuesday 18 January, that she had “commissioned the MoD [Ministry of Defence] as a crucial operational partner to protect our Channel against illegal migration”. She spoke of a “blended approach” which – she said – the public would support.
Unacceptable numbers of people continue to make the dangerous Channel crossings and last November’s tragic deaths serve as the strongest reminder of the need to stop them.
The ships
The Bristol academics debunking starts with the maths. They said that while on the face of it navy ships outnumber Border Force ships, this is itself deceiving. The Archer and River class ships which would be most useful are already in use as far away as the Indo-Pacific, Gibraltar, the Caribbean and the Falklands/Malvinas.
They added:
With so many vessels already in use elsewhere, it seems unlikely that the Admiralty will welcome new deployments to the Channel -– especially so soon after an announcement that Border Force is receiving money for an upgraded fleet of cutters.
So it seems that the navy lacks the ships for the task, and the political will to do the job anyway.
Leadership role?
Secondly, the pair questioned how naval involvement would change anything – even if the capacity was found. They also tested the underlying motivations:
Perhaps there is a hope that the Royal Navy will put some backbone into this policy, especially given that Border Force’s union has recently threatened strikes if pushbacks are implemented.
But would the navy even have the authority to carry out the government’s “cruel and inhumane” anti-refugee operations? Legally, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all.
Bound by law
Edmonds and Edward warned that if the navy did start to push back small boats crossing the channel, they would breach long established maritime law:
This is enshrined in Article 98 of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea and elsewhere. The Royal Navy is just as bound by the law of the sea as Border Force.
They wrote:
The navy has already indicated that it has little appetite for such pushbacks, and any extra capacity it can bring is most likely to be deployed in search and rescue tasks.
The truth
This leads to questions about what the navy can actually do in the Channel. As the authors point out, not much more than they already are. The authors registered surprise at the announcement of a “blended response”. Because “that is exactly what’s already happening”.
They say the navy has been increasingly integrated into border operations since 2010. One recent expression of this ‘blended approach’ is:
The Joint Maritime Security Centre, established in 2020, coordinates the UK’s maritime assets and helps different agencies to work together at sea. Hosted by the navy, it enables cross-agency information sharing through its Maritime Domain Awareness programme.
So if this is already happening – and has been for a decade – we should question why Priti Patel is calling for it anyway.
A grown-up response?
Edmonds and Edwards proposed a different approach. They said:
The UK needs to move beyond populist announcements on the small boat problem and develop a response along three lines.
First, it should continue to develop better interagency operations. Secondly, it should “foster closer cooperation with France and Belgium to help manage this shared problem of human desperation and misery”. And thirdly, it should “recognise that policing at sea can only address symptoms rather than causes of increased Channel crossings”.
They added:
A long-term solution requires the reestablishment of humane and accessible refugee and migration routes into the UK.
Populist distraction
The Tories have made a habit of using refugee-bashing and the militarist populism to distract from their internal problems. This latest call looks much the same. But this time the incoherence of such callous inhumane plans has been laid bare.
Johnson and Patel seem oblivious to the fact they’ve blood on their hands when it comes to refugees crossing the Channel and instead want to talk the talk. But even if the navy did have the capacity to intervene in the channel, doing so does nothing to address the root causes of the refugee crisis.
A protest inside two compounds of the Broadmeadows Immigration Detention Centre (MITA North) at the end of December prompted a solidarity rally calling for the detainees to be released. Chevy McBride reports.
At least 56 migrants — mostly from Guatemala, many of them families with minor children — being transported from Mexico’s southern border region to the country’s heartland in Puebla by smugglers, were recently killed in an apparent road accident, with dozens more seriously injured.
This unspeakably tragic event is being widely reported as “accidental” in a more fundamental sense — as an exceptional event that was beyond anyone’s control, at the margins of human will or the stratagems of political power. But for many who have dedicated their lives to defending the rights of migrants throughout the world, mourning these devastated lives is pervaded by recognition of all the ways that migrant death and suffering have been utterly normalized as the result of prevailing immigration policies.
From this perspective, the recent migrant deaths in Chiapas — and those of 651 more at the United States-Mexico border in 2021, a new record, as well as more than 7,000 there since 1998, plus tens of thousands globally — are the largely unaccounted human cost of the policies of containment and repression of “irregular” migrant flows that have been imposed on a planetary scale. This incident’s toll marks the highest number of migrant deaths in a single instance since the massacre of 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, just 90 minutes from the U.S. border, in August 2010, and the discovery of mass graves with hundreds more victims in the same region in March 2011.
This kind of targeting of migrants for persecution, terror and death because of their status and identity as migrants gives these incidents a genocidal dimension and triggers their recognition, at minimum, as “crimes against humanity,” pursuant to Articles 6 and 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and its relevant case law and interpretations. This includes “killing” members of an identifiable social group, and “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”
All of these deaths are the proximate results of the paradigm of “prevention through deterrence” that U.S. and Mexican authorities are jointly, vigorously enforcing on both sides of the border. This is what is at the core of the two principal mechanisms of exclusion: Title 42 and the “Remain in Mexico” (or Migrant Protection Protocols) policies that the Biden administration inherited from the worst days of the Trump era, and that it continues to implement and expand, with Mexican complicity. Together, in practice, these two policies have come to negate the right to seek asylum both at the U.S. border and in Mexico, and have exiled asylum seekers to precarious, life-threatening conditions of violence and persecution on Mexican soil, in improvised camps without access to adequate humanitarian assistance.
Both U.S. and Mexican authorities clothe these abuses in the rhetoric of “safe, orderly, and regular” migration promoted by the Global Compact on Migration. Similar policies have been regularly pursued by the European Union at its peripheries, and by Australia in its environs, with convergent human costs and results. It is striking, meanwhile, how spokespersons for the United Nations secretary-general and others have seized upon the news from Chiapas — and similarly, how others have responded to mass migrant deaths in the Mediterranean or the English Channel — as occasions to call for even more stringent measures of “controlled” migration.
Measures of this kind have been implemented at the U.S.-Mexico border at the same time as Mexico has been plunged into the worst human rights crisis in its recent history, with hundreds of thousands dead and tens of thousands of victims of forced disappearances, including at least 70,000 migrants kidnapped and trafficked since 2011, with migrant women and girls subjected to recurrent sexual violence within this overall landscape. The migrant deaths in Chiapas came at the close of the same week that began with the Biden administration’s joint announcement with Mexican authorities that Remain in Mexico was being reactivated and extended to asylum seekers from throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Most of the victims of the migrant tragedy in Chiapas were of Guatemalan Indigenous origin, in addition to others from Ecuador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Migration from Guatemala’s poorest and most marginalized Indigenous communities has soared since 2014, amid increasing hunger and the devastations of climate change induced by neoliberal mega-development projects, in many of the same regions where the country’s genocidal violence was concentrated in the 1980s, with U.S. backing. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to embrace the country’s current corrupt and illegitimate leadership, and to train, arm and finance the Guatemalan security forces that beat and gas migrant caravans full of women and children as part of the same containment policies that the U.S. and Mexico impose at their borders.
News of the migrant deaths in Chiapas came amid widespread Mexican and global observances of December 10 as International Human Rights Day, marking the 73rd anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly in 1948. It also came shortly before International Migrants Day, on December 18, observed globally as well, commemorating the date of the adoption in 1990 of the UN’s core treaty focused on migrant rights. But Mexico’s tragedy reminds us how distant migrants are from the protections supposedly accorded by such instruments, at the hands of states such as the U.S. and Mexico, or those of the EU.
Migrants continue to be at the margins of the “rules-based international order” that was celebrated at the Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” and will remain so until the right to freedom of movement for all those who have been denied dignified conditions of life in their home countries and communities, and until the right to refuge, asylum, sanctuary, solidarity and hospitality is fully recognized throughout the world.
Meanwhile, news will continue to come of more tragedies such as those in Chiapas, and migrants globally will continue to seek the dignity and freedom, which the neoliberal world order and the complicity of countries of origin, transit and destination has denied them.
Top U.S. and Mexican officials launched a new “United States-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities” in Mexico City on October 8, which laid the groundwork for further consultations along the same lines in Colombia and Ecuador (October 19-21). Configured at a summit intended to leave behind the failures of the Mérida Initiative — the longstanding vehicle for the U.S.-Mexico dimension of the regional “drug war” — the new framework ostensibly aims to redefine the landscape of the two countries’ still-evolving and potentially highly contested relations in several key dimensions. Key participants included Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard (a leading contender to succeed him), plus U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, among others.
The summit’s joint statement and fact sheet prioritized issues related to trans-border crime and drug policy, such as an “evidence-based public health and public safety approach to reducing drug demand, overdoses, and saving lives, as well as a focus on ensuring racial equity, community based crime prevention, and the promotion of harm-reduction efforts.” All of this echoed the long discredited rhetoric of Plan Colombia, its key forerunner, while carefully avoiding any details as to the most critical dimensions of key unfolding issues at the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexico’s border with Guatemala, such as the de facto binational management of the recent Haitian migrant surge, which has complex regional implications. But the essence of the new framework, as with the Mérida Initiative, is U.S support for, and complicity with, the “strategic fallacy” of continuing militarization of public security throughout Mexico and the region as a whole. Meanwhile, concrete, urgent human rights issues in both countries were relegated to a ceremonial, decontextualized closing paragraph.
By the time the one-day summit was held, over 10,000 Haitian migrants had been expelled or deported throughout the Western Hemisphere within a three-week period: over 8,000 from the U.S. and several thousand more from Cuba, the Bahamas, Mexico, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, including hundreds intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. This has included complex, mostly hidden collaboration on the ground between U.S. and Mexican authorities regarding the logistics and execution of these expulsions at Mexico’s northern and southern borders, and the presence of U.S. immigration agents on the ground in the region.
Most of these were expulsions pursuant to emergency public health powers under Title 42 activated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, without any of the vestigial elements of due process theoretically associated with deportations, and without any assessment of individual and family needs for international protection, refuge or asylum, much less clear standards for differentiating between those who were expelled or those who were permitted to remain in the U.S. to press potential asylum claims.
All of these abuses together constitute serious human rights violations which may rise to the level of crimes against humanity, particularly where they lead to the indiscriminate return of migrants entitled to some form of international protection because of prevalent conditions in Haiti. They also reinforce deeply embedded elements of overall discrimination in the application of U.S. immigration policies against people of Haitian origin — and more broadly against immigrants of African descent — which have been characterized by recurrent patterns of abuse against Haitians since the 1980s. Recurrent violations against migrants of Haitian origin are further compounded by the extent to which the underlying conditions of structural injustice in Haiti are themselves the product of longstanding U.S. policies, including support for corrupt and repressive elites and their illegitimate régimes there, as elsewhere in Latin America.
Increasing outrage regarding these racist human rights crimes against Haitians has led to the successful mobilization of a National Day of Protest in over a dozen U.S. cities in solidarity with Haitians and other Black immigrants on October 14 and a National Week of Action between October 10-16, as well as related actions in defense of Cameroonian migrants subjected to restraints during deportation that were equivalent to torture.
This is the single largest mass expulsion undertaken by the U.S. since “Operation Wetback” in 1954, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were forcibly returned at the height of the convergence between deeply rooted traditions of anti-Mexican racist violence and the McCarthy era’s targeting of foreigners as national security threats, which helped lay the foundation for renewed xenophobia and virulent white nationalism post-9/11, especially during the Trump administration. But ironically, now it is under the ostensibly more progressive Biden administration and AMLO’s supposedly “leftist” leadership in Mexico that the two governments have colluded most deeply to undermine human rights on both sides of the border. This kind of complicity continues to be a guiding thread of the new “Bicentennial Framework.”
The U.S. has acquiesced in AMLO’s unprecedented deployment of the Mexican military and security agents to persecute migrants throughout Mexico, including the violent containment and repression of migrant caravans there and in Guatemala. It also has included for the first time measures by Mexican officials to restrict travel on public buses to passengers with proof of legal immigration status, in order to avoid the kind of crises which led to the images of Border Patrol agents using reins as whips against Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas. There has been widespread collusion by Mexican authorities, meanwhile, as the U.S., under both Trump and Biden, has implemented regressive measures such as the “Remain in Mexico” program and Title 42.
Persistent regional implications include Mexico’s increasingly direct role in containing and repressing migration flows throughout its territory in service to U.S. policy imperatives, at a high cost to its sovereignty and relations with neighboring countries of origin in the Mesoamerican region and the Caribbean (especially Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic). Migration policy issues have also become much more central to hemispheric relations within the last few years in contexts such as Venezuela, Colombia and Panama, including Blinken’s leadership of a regional ministerial summit focused on migration issues during his trip to Bogotá.
The Mérida Initiative was launched in October 2007 with emphasis on Mexico’s role within the regional framework of the U.S. drug war and was further reinforced during Security of State Hilary Clinton’s tenure during the Obama administration. Its domestic counterparts in Mexico included hitherto unprecedented levels of militarization of public security during Felipe Calderón’s presidency between 2006 and 2012, which were further intensified by his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, between 2012 and 2018, including Mexico’s Southern Border Plan, which, for the first time, militarized Mexican immigration control in its southern border region with Guatemala.
The results of the Mérida Initiative, in addition to increases in drug trafficking and consumption in both countries, have included a surge in serious human rights violations by military and civilian authorities in collusion with drug lords. This includes unprecedented mass crimes such as the San Fernando migrant massacre and mass graves in 2010 and 2011, and the disappearance of 43 students from the Rural Teachers’ College at Ayotzinapa in 2014. These mass crimes occurred within a broader framework that now includes more than 100,000 forcibly disappeared dispersed among hundreds of mass graves throughout the country, and more than 200,000 civilians killed since 2006, likely exceeding those killed in Colombia during a much more extended period. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of migrants have disappeared who have not yet been accounted for within this overall human rights holocaust. Key human rights indicators have continued to worsen under AMLO, who has relied on the military to sustain his increasingly authoritarian rule, even more intensively than his predecessors did, with U.S. funding and support.
Closer U.S.-Mexico collaboration within the framework of the drug war has also coincided with spectacular cases of corruption at the highest levels in Mexico, including prosecutions of its successive public security and drug czars, Genaro García Luna (Calderón’s coordinator of public security between 2006 and 2012) and Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda (the country’s defense minister between 2012 and 2018), as well as several state governors in cartel-controlled regions such as Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Quintana Roo.
Despite the shifts in packaging and rhetoric between the previous versions of the Mérida Initiative and the new Bicentennial Framework, nothing fundamental is likely to change in the devastating patterns and consequences described above, until the structural failures of the drug war and its inherent tendencies towards militarization and corruption are finally abandoned. At the core of this are the deeply embedded inequities in U.S.-Mexico relations, and more broadly U.S.-Latin America relations, which are still trapped in the outmoded pretensions of regional hegemony which continue to shape U.S. policy. A renewed process of Latin American and Caribbean integration “from below” in resistance to U.S. hegemony, including the persistent impositions of the drug war and of “free” trade in contexts such as Mexico and Colombia, is the crucial next step as U.S. domination begins to wane regionally and globally.
Notwithstanding President Joe Biden’s promise to pursue a more humane immigration policy than his predecessor, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been illegally expelling Haitian migrants, with the Border Patrol cracking whips and herding them like cattle. When U.S. authorities put them on a plane to Haiti, “they chained us like animals — our hands, feet and waist — and once we arrived, they unchained us so journalists wouldn’t see us,” one Haitian man told John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight.”
When confronted about his administration’s use of horse reins as whips to menace Black migrants at the southern U.S. border, Biden said it was “horrible … to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous.”
Biden declared, “I promise you, those people will pay,” and noted that a federal investigation is underway. “There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous; it’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. It sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”
Biden’s denial is reminiscent of that of Barack Obama, who reacted to the 6,700-page report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that documented a widespread program of U.S. torture by saying that torture “is contrary to who we are.”
But like torture, vicious beatings of Black people have been sanctioned by the state throughout U.S. history. “The images of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents on horseback whipping and assaulting Haitian refugees blatantly display the clear historical relationship between slavery and modern immigration policy, policing, and the carceral state,” the National Lawyers Guild said in a statement.
The Biden administration has expelled more than 4,600 Haitian migrants from the United States since September 19, conducting 43 flights from Del Rio, Texas, to Haiti, which is still reeling from its recent devastating earthquake, flooding from a tropical storm and a presidential assassination. Most of the people in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince have no access to drinking water, electricity or garbage collection.
The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) called on states to refrain from expelling Haitians without a proper assessment of their individual protection needs and urged them to uphold fundamental human rights. In their statement, they cited the escalation of violence and insecurity in Haiti, noting that at least 19,000 people were internally displaced in Port-au-Prince during the summer of 2021. In addition, more than 20 percent of girls and boys have been victims of sexual violence, and nearly 24 percent of the population (over half of them children) live below the extreme poverty level of $1.23 per day. Nearly 46 percent of the population (4.4 million people) face acute food insecurity, and 1.2 million are at emergency levels, with 3.2 million people at crisis levels. The four organizations estimated that 217,000 Haitian children suffer from moderate-to-severe acute malnutrition.
Expelling Haitian migrants to face these horrific conditions is not only cruel; it is also racist and illegal.
The Use of Title 42 to Expel Asylum Seekers Is Racist, Illegal and Damaging
“The whipping of Haitians by mounted Border Patrol agents was spectacularly racist, but the use of Title 42 to expel asylum seekers is equally racist, and illegal, and much more damaging,” attorney Brian Concannon, a board member at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, told Truthout.
Indeed, on September 23, Daniel Foote, U.S. special envoy for Haiti, handed in his resignation to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, stating he will “not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees” from the U.S.-Mexico border. Foote called the U.S. policy toward Haiti “deeply flawed.”
Biden is continuing former president Donald Trump’s policy of misusing Title 42 in violation of U.S. treaty obligations. The Title 42 program stems from a misapplication of an obscure public health law, the Public Health Service Act of 1944. The act was designed to grant quarantine authority to health officials to expel any persons, including U.S citizens, who arrive from a foreign country. Title 42 was never intended to distinguish between noncitizens who could or could not be removed or expelled from the United States, according to Human Rights Watch.
Section 265 of U.S. Code Title 42 empowers the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to “prohibit … the introduction” into the U.S. of individuals if the director believes “there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States.”
As Trump did, Biden is disingenuously citing the excuse of potential health hazards from COVID to justify continuing the use of Title 42 to expel migrants, in spite of the consensus by experts that there is no correlation between the entry of migrants and the danger of increased risk of COVID infection.
“Title 42 was implemented by Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller as part of his efforts to maintain a white majority in the United States,” Concannon said. “The Biden administration knows the policy is illegal, racist and unjustified on public health grounds, but it keeps invoking it to reduce criticism from white supremacist groups.”
Federal Judge Grants Injunction Against U.S. Expulsion of Migrants, But Appellate Court Pauses Injunction
On September 16, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan of the D.C. Circuit issued a preliminary injunction against the Department of Homeland Security’s use of Title 42 to expel migrants from the United States. Judge Sullivan’s 58-page ruling would require the Biden administration to process migrant families with children who want to apply for asylum. But the judge suspended the injunction for 14 days to allow the government time to appeal his ruling.
In granting the injunction, Judge Sullivan found that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on the merits of their claim that the administration’s use of Title 42, which has never been applied in the immigration context, is illegal. The judge agreed with the plaintiffs’ contention that “‘nothing in [Section] 265, or Title 42 more generally, purports to authorize any deportations, much less deportations in violation of’ statutory procedures and humanitarian protections, including the right to seek asylum.”
Judge Sullivan also concluded that plaintiffs would suffer irreparable harm if an injunction were not granted, because they would be sent to their home countries which “are among the most dangerous in the world due to gang, gender, family membership, and other identity-based violence.”
Finally, Judge Sullivan determined that a preliminary injunction would not harm the government, and it would promote public health to quickly process, quarantine and regulate people who arrive at the border. He accepted the plaintiffs’ claim that the public interest requires the U.S. to refrain from wrongfully sending people to countries where they are likely to face substantial harm.
But on September 30, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals paused Judge Sullivan’s injunction while it reviews Biden’s appeal. As Lee Gelernt, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the ACLU, toldCBS News, this is just the first step in the appellate litigation. “Nothing stops the Biden administration from immediately repealing this horrific Trump-era policy,” Gelernt said. “If the administration is making the political calculation that if it acts inhumanely now it can act more humanely later, that calculation is misguided and of little solace to the families that are being sent to Haiti or brutalized in Mexico right now.”
Title 42 Policy Violates U.S. Treaty Obligations
The Title 42 policy violates the Refugee Convention, which grants noncitizens the right to asylum if they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, if they are sent back to their home countries. The Refugee Convention (which the United States has ratified, making it part of U.S. law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause) forbids refoulement, that is, sending a person to a country where it is more likely than not that the individual would face persecution on one of the protected grounds.
Furthermore, the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (to which the U.S. is also a party) forbids the expulsion of asylum seekers to face threats to their lives or liberty without an opportunity to apply for asylum and have a full and fair examination of their claim.
The Biden administration’s use of Title 42 also violates the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (which the U.S. has ratified). That treaty contains a non-refoulement provision. It forbids sending an individual to a country where there is a substantial likelihood he or she would be subject to torture.
the obligation [of the U.S.] not to extradite, deport, expel or otherwise remove a person from their territory, where there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk of irreparable harm, such as that contemplated by Articles 6 [right to life] and 7 [right to be free from torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment] of the Covenant, either in the country to which removal is to be effected or in any country to which the person may subsequently be removed.
UNHCR has confirmed repeatedly during the pandemic that expelling asylum seekers and migrants at the border without an individualized determination of the need to protect them violates the non-refoulement provisions of international law. The UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection Gillian Triggs stated, “The right to seek asylum is a fundamental right. The COVID-19 pandemic provides no exception.”
Public Pressure on Biden to End Inhumane and Illegal Policy
Congressmembers and civil and human rights organizations are demanding that Biden halt the expulsions of Haitian and other Black migrants.
Four Black immigration organizations — the Haitian Bridge Alliance, UndocuBlack Network, African Communities Together and Black Alliance for Just Immigration — filed a complaint with the DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, demanding that the Biden administration halt its deportations of Haitian migrants.
Fifty-six members of Congress wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, urging the administration to indefinitely halt deportations to Haiti, release detained Haitians and support administrative closure of removal cases, grant humanitarian parole to Haitians arriving at the southern U.S. border, and end the barrier to Haitian vaccine distribution.
Thirty-nine human and civil rights leaders called on the Biden administration to restore asylum access at ports of entry and rescind the CDC’s expulsion order, stop deportation flights to Haiti, and grant those seeking safety at U.S. borders their legal right to apply for asylum. The leaders further stated that the administration must end its reliance on incarceration for immigration processing and instead work with community-based legal and social service providers.
Democratic congressmembers, including Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, held a press conference outside the Capitol and called for the suspension of deportation flights. They demanded accountability for what Pressley called “the cruel, the inhumane and the flat-out racist treatment of our Haitian brothers and sisters at the southern border.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is seeking a private contractor to operate a migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay and is hiring guards who speak Spanish and Haitian Creole. But after a public outcry about sending Haitian migrants and asylum seekers to Guantánamo, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “There’s never been a plan to do that.” In the early 1990s, George H.W. Bush used the base as a refugee camp to detain 12,000 Haitians fleeing their country after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a military coup.
Since the horrific photos of mounted Border Patrol agents menacing Black migrants with whips became public, voices against the Biden administration’s cruel, racist and illegal policies have reached a crescendo. This pressure must continue until Biden makes good on his promise to implement a truly humane immigration policy.
The Migrant Action Trust has condemned a proposal by a diversity academic calling for a New Zealand nation-building course before people are granted permanent residence or citizenship as “dangerous” and “discriminating”.
“This proposal is dangerous. It is dangerous because it comes at a time when the world — including Aotearoa — has demonised a religion and those associated with that religion,” the trust said.
“We have inculcated in the minds of others that ‘these people’, and by association, all people of colour are a danger.
But the Migrant Action Trust chair, Associate Professor Camille Nakhid, described the proposal as “cynical”, saying it raised many questions.
‘Values of our colonisers?’
“Firstly, whose values will inform this nation-building paper? Will they be the values of the colonisers or of our tangata whenua? Will it be the values of those whose labour built this land or those whose dubious transactions stole this land?,” Dr Nakhid asked in a statement.
“Will it be the refugee with the ideologies of terrorist groups or the resident Pākehā with the ideologies of terrorist Pākehā groups which hold the ideologies of the dominant Pākehā group which hold the ideologies of white supremacists?
“Who will be made to take this nation-building paper? Will it only be potential citizens such as migrants, asylum seekers and those from refugee backgrounds but not those wanting to remain permanent residents?
“What about citizens themselves who mistrust the government, challenge their laws and protest their policies?
“Will they need to go back to school to take this nation-building paper?”
Dr Pio’s research had found lone terrorists to be “dangerous and hard to combat” when compared to group terrorists.
She said “higher impact” policies were needed to combat terrorism and she called for legislation to require people to pass nation-building courses before being granted citizenship or permanent residence.
A Sri Lankan-born refugee, Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, 32, stabbed seven people in the Countdown supermarket before he was shot dead by police.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the Islamic State supporter as a “lone wolf terrorist”.
Today, Government Accountability Project, filed its second complaint with federal oversight agencies detailing abuses at the Fort Bliss, Texas Emergency Intake Site (EIS) for unaccompanied immigrant children. Government Accountability Project’s first complaint, dated July 7, 2021, is attached as an exhibit to this second complaint.
The Fort Bliss EIS is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’s) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The children are in the custody of ORR. Fort Bliss is one of several EISs holding them, ostensibly on a temporary basis.
The information disclosed in the second complaint was provided by Arthur Pearlstein and Lauren Reinhold, current career federal civil servants and attorneys who volunteered to support ORR’s work.
Jeffrey R. Baker and Allyson McKinney Timm, Zero-Tolerance: The Trump Administration’s Human Rights Violations Against Migrants on the Southern Border, 13 Drexel Law Review 581 (2021). Abstract below. In 2017, the Trump Administration imposed its policy of zero-tolerance immigration enforcement…
New Zealand’s largest ever crowd in support of migrant rights gathered in Auckland’s Aotea Square at the weekend in triple protests that also marked solidarity for Palestinian justice and the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.
More than 1500 people filled the square on Saturday proclaiming “migrant lives matter” with speakers calling on them to stand up for their rights.
New Zealand governments over the past few years were accused of cynically exploiting migrant workers and that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “nation of 5 million people” excluded about 300,000 migrants.
The protesters then marched down Queen Street calling for changes to the “broken” immigration policies.
Among demands were:
Visas to be extended to allow for workers who had been trapped overseas, and
Creation of “genuine pathways” to permanent residence.
Unite union president Michael Treen said successive governments had built the economy on the back of migrants and then consistently “lied” to them about their prospects.
President of the Migrant Workers Association Anu Kaloti said migrants were suffering at the hands of the “broken immigration system”.
Before the march, Palestinian community leader Maher Nazza declared to the crowd “No one is free until we are all free”, saying that the world community must pressure Israel into honouring the United Nations resolutions and restore justice and hope for Palestinians.
One speaker said: “If I said the truth [about the Chinese Communist Party] as I am saying here today in China, somebody would come within minutes and take me away.”
Palestine, migrant rights and the Tiananmen massacre
1 of 12
Pal 1: Community leader Maher Nazza speaks at the Palestine solidarity rally. Image: David Robie
Pal 2: “No one is free until we are all free.” Image: David Robie
Pal 3: “Put Palestine back on the maps.” Image: David Robie
Pal 4: Maher Nazza and Joe Carolan speaking at the Palestinian solidarity rally. Image: David Robie Joe Carolan at the
Pal 5: PSNA’s Neil Scott and Palestine supporters at the Auckland rally. Image: David Robie
Pal 6: Aotearoa’s “team of 5 million” – what about the migrants?
Pal 7: I am a migrant: “When can I speak to my parents?” Image: David Robie
Pal 8: “migrant Lives Matter”. Image: David Robie
Pal 9: “Let them stay.” Image: David Robie
Pal 10: “Reunite families.” Image: David Robie
Pal 11: Rembering the Tiananmen massacre. Image: David Robie
Pal 12: “Criminal China!”- the Tiananmen massacre. Image: David Robie
After the Biden administration on Friday announced a “dedicated docket” process that aims to “more expeditiously and fairly make decisions in immigration cases of families who arrive between ports of entry at the southwest border,” migrant rights advocates and experts expressed alarm that the changes could negatively impact asylum-seekers.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to dramatically shift away from immigration policies of former President Donald Trump that were widely denounced as cruel. Human rights defenders have urged Biden to enable fair and timely asylum hearings, while avoiding the “rocket dockets” of the Obama and Trump administrations that critics say eroded due process, exacerbated backlogs, limited access to counsel, resulted in high rates of in absentia removals, and ultimately endangered lives.
Under previous administrations, “families were quickly rushed through proceedings without a fair chance to seek protection,” explained Ursela Ojeda of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) in a statement Friday. “As a result, many were ordered deported without ever having the chance to meaningfully make their case to an immigration judge.”
“While we encourage the Biden administration to continue efforts to expand access to legal orientations,” Ojeda said, “we are concerned that these families will be unnecessarily placed on electronic surveillance and subjected to a shortened timeline that risks undermining meaningful due process within the highly politicized and subjective immigration court system.”
“Although the decision suggests some flexibility so that ‘fairness will not be compromised,’” she added, “WRC is deeply concerned that the suggested time constraints, lack of guaranteed counsel, and meaningful community-based case support could set families up to fail.”
These policies risk undermining due process in asylum adjudications, while the Biden administration continues to fail to end illegal Trump policies that deny refugees U.S. protection.
— Human Rights First (@humanrights1st) May 28, 2021
The Biden administration’s dedicated docket announcement came Friday in a joint statement from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as BuzzFeed Newsreported on government documents it obtained detailing plans to reshape how asylum-seekers are processed.
“Families arriving at the border who are placed in immigration proceedings should have their cases decided in an orderly, efficient, and fair manner,” said Mayorkas. “Families who have recently arrived should not languish in a multi-year backlog; today’s announcement is an important step for both justice and border security.”
Garland said that “the mission of the Department of Justice’s immigration courts is to decide the cases that come before them promptly and fairly” and “this new program for certain newly arriving families will help achieve that critically important goal.”
However, as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, toldThe Hill:
Legal processing doesn’t happen in a vacuum so I have two concerns. One, are you going to be shortcutting anywhere that is going to have detrimental impact on the claims that people who are on this special docket receive? Because they’re not going to have enough time to find lawyers, to build up their legal cases. It just takes time to do that, and then you’re shortchanging the quality of justice meted out…
And the second part is about the people whose cases get displaced because court resources are being redistributed… Are those people just being pushed to the back of the line and having to wait interminable amounts of time before they find out what their future looks like?
Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First, echoed warnings that “while measures that both reduce delays for asylum-seekers and strengthen due process would be a step in the right direction, creating ‘dedicated dockets’ for families seeking asylum may amount to another round of ‘rocket dockets’ that short circuit due process and aggravate backlogs.”
“Noticeably missing from the administration’s announcement is any mention of when they will undo Trump policies that deny asylum to victims of deadly gangs and domestic violence,” Acer added. “The announcement is also glaringly silent on the Biden administration’s continued use of the Trump administration Title 42 policy that expels asylum-seekers to danger, and makes no mention of restarting asylum hearings for people who remain waiting and blocked from seeking asylum at U.S. ports of entry.”
This is not good. Lightning adjudications of asylum cases with life-or-death consequences restrict due process, limit access to counsel, and increase the risk of people being deported to the hands of their persecutors. @DHSgov@TheJusticeDept, do better.https://t.co/Dh2MbBkcfb
National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) executive director Mary Meg McCarthy similarly called out the current administration for forcing asylum-seeking families to go through expedited court proceedings “that will rob them of basic due process protections, including the opportunity to obtain adequate legal counsel or to fully prepare their cases,” and warned against a return to “failed” policies.
“A rocket docket that moves people too quickly through this flawed system is the opposite of justice,” said McCarthy. “Instead of moving to expedite cases without guarantee of counsel and injecting further chaos into the overburdened immigration courts, the administration must build an appointed counsel program and quickly focus its attention on urgent deficiencies in the asylum and immigration court systems.”
The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law concurred: “Instead of reviving the failed policies of past administrations, the Biden administration should swiftly end cruel and illegal Trump-era policies and fully restore safe asylum processing at the southern border.”
The center highlighted that despite the president’s campaign promises, “families seeking asylum face enormous roadblocks to safety and justice,” pointing to the Title 42 policy and that the Biden administration “has yet to address Trump policies that have gutted protections for people escaping domestic violence and gang brutality.”
We're deeply concerned by today’s announcement that the Biden administration will begin fast-tracking asylum cases for certain families seeking refuge. These policies sacrifice fairness in the name of speed and will endanger lives. #WelcomeWithDignityhttps://t.co/q7E1Sm2N9Q
“CGRS and our partners have set forth a clearroadmap for the Biden administration to adjudicate asylum cases in a timely manner and mitigate backlogs, all while improving fairness and protecting due process,” said the center’s legal director, Blaine Bookey. “As advocates, we’ve been down this road before. We know policies that rush asylum adjudications fail to keep families and children safe. We implore the administration not to make the mistake of putting speed above justice.”
WRC’s Ojeda encouraged the Biden administration to “immediately end the use of summary expulsions under the guise of the pandemic and rescind Trump-era asylum case law decisions that will wreak havoc for anyone who manages to access the asylum process, including those under today’s announcement.”
“Families and individuals seeking refuge cannot wait a minute longer,” she said. “WRC urges the Biden administration to implement policies that ensure all families and adults who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border can seek asylum and have their cases be fairly decided. It is time to restart asylum and welcome with dignity, once and for all.”
By Hugh Fitzgibbon, Som-Mai Nguyen, and Catalina Ramirez Palau, Law Student Representatives, Transnational Legal Clinic, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School On May 20, 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas directed ICE to sever its contract with the Irwin…
Please Join the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School, the Migration and Human Rights Program at Cornell Law School, and the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, for…
This week’s news of the Biden-Harris administration’s about-face on U.S. refugee policy was a win for all the progressive forces that have been pressuring Biden to discontinue Trump’s egregiously low cap on the number of refugees accepted each year. But the victory did nothing to change the other massive structural ways in which the Biden-Harris administration is continuing to perpetuate the humanitarian crisis at the border through its embrace of Trump’s other asylum policies.
For example, even as the Biden-Harris administration now says it will increase the refugee cap to 62,500, rather than adopting Trump’s annual cap of 15,000 refugees as it had earlier announced it would do, the Biden-Harris administration is still continuing the Title 42 program that Trump imposed a year before, effectively closing the border to most refugees with no due process, court date or record of an asylum application.
Since Trump implemented the Title 42 program on March 20, 2020, more than 630,000 people have been expelled from the United States, 240,00 of them on Biden’s watch.
Republicans and Democrats alike are preoccupied with the so-called border crisis.“There is no crisis at the border caused by migrants,” Nicole Phillips, legal director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told Truthout. “There is a humanitarian and human rights crisis because the U.S. government has effectively closed the border to asylum seekers and has not allowed them to file for asylum since March of 2020.”
More Haitians were returned to Haiti in the first two months of the Biden-Harris administration than in all of fiscal year 2020, according to a report titled, “The Invisible Wall,” that was released on March 25, 2021, by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the UndocuBlack Network and the Quixote Center. Haitians, who make the long, treacherous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border are fleeing instability, violence and persecution in Haiti, “only to be abused by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] officers,” the report notes.
The Biden-Harris administration’s continuation of Title 42 to expel asylum seekers is causing family separations, as documented in an April 2021 report published by Human Rights First, Haitian Bridge Alliance and Al Otro Lado. The policy propels desperate families to send their children over the border to protect them from kidnapping, sexual assault, and other forms of violence. Moreover, CBP is still separating children from aunts, uncles and grandparents with whom they traveled to the border and expelling those relatives to Mexico.
In addition, the administration has continued Trump’s policy of expelling mothers who have just given birth in the U.S. with their newborn U.S. citizen children to Mexico with no proof of citizenship for their babies.
The Title 42 Policy Is Based on a False Assumption
The “Biden-Harris [administration] is hiding behind Title 42 in order to justify keeping the border closed because they’re afraid of the backlash from Republican and right-wing media,” Phillips said. “Harris should know better,” as she opposed Title 42 when she was a senator. Harris, along with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, signed a letter calling for an end to Title 42. In March, Biden made Harris his point person on immigration.
The Title 42 expulsion policy is based on the misapplication of an obscure public health law. The Public Health Service Act of 1944 was designed to grant quarantine authority to health officials which would apply to all persons, including U.S citizens, arriving from a foreign country. It was never intended to be used to distinguish between noncitizens who could or could not be removed or expelled from the U.S., according to Human Rights Watch.
Section 265 of U.S. Code Title 42 allows the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to “prohibit … the introduction” into the U.S. of individuals if the director believes that “there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States.”
Like Trump, the Biden-Harris administration is disingenuously using the excuse of health hazards from the COVID virus to justify continuing the Title 42 closure, in spite of the consensus by experts that there is no correlation between the entry of migrants and increased risk of COVID infection. It is really a political decision.
Using Title 42 to keep migrants out of the United States was the brainchild of Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration adviser. Although the CDC opposed the program because it was not supported by a public health rationale, the director succumbed to pressure by Vice President Mike Pence and other administration officials. “It has become clear that the Trump Administration used the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for its larger racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant plan to close the U.S.-Mexico border to migrants seeking humanitarian protection,” according to “The Invisible Wall” report.
Expelled Migrants Face Dangers in Mexico
Migrants whom the U.S. government turns back at the border — including mothers with young children — are “sitting ducks” for kidnappers and others when they are returned to Mexico. Human Rights First identified at least 492 reports of violent attacks since January 21, 2021, including kidnapping, rape and assault against people who were stranded at the border and/or expelled to Mexico. Eighty-one percent of LGBTQ asylum seekers have reported attacks, including rape, kidnapping, trafficking, and other violent assaults.
About 1,500 people are living in a tent encampment in Tijuana near the port of entry at San Ysidro. Many of them have been stranded there for more than a year because they can’t apply for asylum due to the Title 42 expulsion policy.
The people who are not sent to Mexico are kept in ICE or CBP detention and sent back to their home countries with no chance to apply for asylum. CBP officers and Border Patrol agents abuse the migrants in their custody, denying them emergency medical care, stealing their belongings and conducting expulsions at night to dangerous border towns, according to Human Rights First.
In 2016, the Obama administration initiated a policy called “metering,” in which migrants take a number “as if they were at an ice cream store, in order to be able to file an asylum case,” Phillips said. Metering “prevented asylum seekers from meaningfully accessing their right to seek asylum because it forced them to remain in Mexico.” As of February 2021, more than 16,000 asylum seekers remained on metering waitlists. There may be 10,000 to 15,000 Black migrants who are stranded at the southern border, Haitian Bridge Alliance estimates.
Meanwhile, the migrants wait at the border, compelled to stay in Mexico — some for as long as two to four years just to be able to file for asylum. CBP used Trump’s March 2020 Title 42 order, which continued the metering program, to turn away almost 13,000 unaccompanied children. Biden has promised to end the metering program.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now receiving and processing unaccompanied children. On November 18, 2020, a federal judge ruled that expelling them violates the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Although a federal court stayed that order in January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration amended the CDC’s Title 42 order to exempt unaccompanied children arriving at the border. As a result, they haven’t been expelled since November 2020.
“That shows that DHS has the capacity to process the backlog of asylum seekers at the border who haven’t been able to enter ports of entry because of Title 42 since March of 2020,” Phillips said.
The Title 42 Policy Is Illegal
Title 42, which has never been applied in the immigration context, violates the Immigration and Nationality Act as well as the Refugee Convention, which grant noncitizens the right to asylum if they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, if they are sent back to their home countries.
The Refugee Convention forbids refoulement, sending an individual to a country where it is more likely than not that the individual would face persecution on one of the protected grounds. The Title 42 procedure also violates the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which contains a non-refoulement provision. It forbids sending an individual to a country where there is a substantial likelihood he or she would be subjected to torture.
The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has confirmed repeatedly during the pandemic that expelling asylum seekers and refugees at the border with no individualized determination of their needs to be protected violates the non-refoulement provisions of international law. The UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection declared, “The right to seek asylum is a fundamental right. The COVID-19 pandemic provides no exception.”
The Title 42 Policy Is Racist
Using Title 42 to keep migrants out the United States under the guise of protecting health is a cynical and racist policy. “President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost,” Cynthia Garcia, national campaigns manager for community protection of United We Dream, said in a statement.“Biden could instruct the CDC to lift the [Title 42] policy,” Phillips suggested.
Many Black migrants and asylum seekers from Africa and the Caribbean are disproportionately harmed by the expulsion policy. Sixty-one percent of Haitian asylum seekers who were denied U.S. asylum protections were crime victims while languishing in Mexico. Many are targets of anti-Black violence.
To its credit, the Biden-Harris administration suspended the repressive Trump administration policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program. Those migrants could file for asylum in the United States but then had to leave the U.S., return for court hearings, and then leave again. It left approximately 25,000 asylum seekers in Mexico living in dangerous conditions as their cases progressed through the U.S. legal system. Six thousand of them are now being processed and they no longer have to stay in Mexico.
“This is a big victory for them and their families,” Phillips said. But it only applies to migrants from South and Central America and the Caribbean. This doesn’t help the thousands of Haitians languishing at the border, who don’t come under the MPP. “The border isn’t open to Haitians and Africans,” Phillips added.
The administration’s quick reversal on refugee caps demonstrates the power of political pressure in holding their feet to the fire. The importance of continued opposition to their inhumane asylum policies and demands for humane ones cannot be underestimated.
The Biden administration’s moral missteps and waffling on U.S. refugee policy last Friday revealed a worrisome willingness to treat refugees as political footballs, putting many lives in limbo and only partially reversing course after intense blowback from centrist Democrats like Sen. Dick Durbin.
On April 16, after experiencing a few hours of outcry from congressional Democrats and grassroots organizations in response to Biden’s decision to keep Trump’s 15,000 cap on refugee admissions for the fiscal year ending this September, Biden made an unexpected about-face: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that the limit on refugee admissions would be increased, but by a yet-to-be-determined amount, with the new number to be announced by May 15.
The Biden administration’s initial decision to reimpose Trump’s cap on refugee admissions — a cap that progressive lawmakers have decried as “unacceptably draconian and discriminatory” — came as somewhat of a surprise after Biden’s efforts to otherwise unravel Trump’s xenophobic policies and regulations, reverse the stance the government was taking in arguing key immigration cases before the Supreme Court, and attempt to create a more humanitarian process for unaccompanied minors crossing the border without paperwork. Immigration activists who had recently cheered the administration’s decision to reverse signature Trump initiatives, such as the new “public charge” rules that all but barred immigrants from emergency food, housing and medical assistance, expressed dismay over the Biden administration’s initial attempt to impose Trump’s refugee policy for the rest of the fiscal year.
The ostensible reason for Biden’s order on refugee admissions was that the resettlement system is currently overwhelmed with the huge influx of asylum seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border, and that adding tens of thousands of refugees into the mix would overstrain the system. In reality, as Biden and his team know all too well, the two systems are apples and oranges. There are different laws regulating asylum admissions and refugee admissions, different government agencies and nonprofit systems are involved in the actual resettlement process, and, by and large, different pots of money are available to resettle refugees as opposed to processing asylum seekers through the courts.
More to the point, as administration officials told the media on Friday, Biden’s team is worried about the political optics of increasing refugee admissions at the same time as so many people are claiming asylum. They worry about public opinion and congressional blowback, and fear it could end up eclipsing all the other big-picture reforms and investments that they are seeking to achieve over the coming months. After all, while solid majorities of U.S. voters approve of Biden’s approach to COVID-19, to the economy, and to infrastructure investments and tax law changes, that majority vanishes when it comes to Biden’s approach to immigration and his handling of the surge of migrants on the southern border.
Now, the refugee admissions process has long been a political football — a way, for example, for Cold War warriors to show their fealty to Florida’s anti-communists by making it easier for Cubans, during the Cold War and decades immediately following its end, to claim refugee status; or for religious groups to advocate for their members in the countries of the former Soviet Union to be considered as refugees. In the Trump era, bashing refugees became an easy way for the demagogue-in-chief to whip up his mob. He repeatedly traveled to Minnesota, for example, where many Somali refugees have been resettled, and made racially inflammatory speeches about them, as well as about Rep. Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child refugee. Given this history, perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that POTUS 46 has caved on refugee admissions at the first sign of fragile public support on the issue.
But Biden and his team have, repeatedly, linked U.S. admission of refugees to a broader sense of the country’s place in the world. They have, from the get-go, set up refugee admissions as a litmus test for our moral values. And last week, they spectacularly failed that test.
What made Biden’s initial announcement on Friday particularly hard to bear was that during his campaign, Biden pledged to raise the annual refugee admissions level to 125,000 — and, mere weeks after his inauguration, he promised to get halfway to that goal, 62,500, just this year.
Biden’s team sweetened the announcement about adhering to the 15,000 cap and walking back his commitment to rapidly expand admissions with promises that, because Trump’s Muslim travel ban no longer held sway, the refugees would be admitted from places of greatest need, including those fleeing the ghastly civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
That’s true. But, to be honest, it’s also largely window dressing. If refugee admissions continue at this historically low level, thousands of individuals and families, who have undergone years of vetting and are now just waiting for the final word that they can set off for the U.S., will remain in limbo, in often overcrowded and unsanitary refugee camps overseas, for months (and quite likely years) to come. That’s a huge stain on the U.S.’s moral reputation.
Moreover, the refugee resettlement infrastructure — which took decades to build after World War II, and which was largely shredded during Trump’s presidency in an act of epic institutional vandalism — won’t be easily jump-started again so long as the refugee cap is kept low. That’s because, with only 15,000 refugees admitted in 2021, the federal funds (based on the numbers being resettled) won’t flow in adequate measure to groups like the International Rescue Committee and World Relief. As a result, these organizations will likely be unable to reopen shuttered offices in cities around the country, or to rehire skilled staffers who have been let go during the past four years, making it even harder down the road to quickly get up to speed should refugee admissions increase in 2022.
The about-face that the Biden administration made after facing blowback from congressional Democrats and activist groups is better than nothing, but, in its vagueness, it’s still a far cry from the earlier pledge to increase admissions up to 62,500 this year.
Around the affluent world — as wars, climate change, population stresses, water shortages, the pandemic, and other crises rage, and as tens of millions of people flee these conditions — governments are battening down their hatches against refugees and asylum seekers. In Denmark, a supposedly liberal government has begun deporting hundreds of Syrian refugees, who have lived in the country for years, back to Syria. They claim, disingenuously, that Syria is now no longer dangerous. In the U.K., the government is instituting quick-deportation policies against asylum seekers that look shockingly close to those adopted in the U.S. under Trump. In Australia, would-be asylees and refugees, many of them children, are held in prison-like conditions, for years on end, in an island fortress hundreds of miles from the mainland.
Biden promised something different, something better. He’s delivered on many of his promises in these past three months. But now he’s dropped the ball on refugees. Hopefully, the political pushback he has received will help set him on a more ethical course. For whatever the short-term political optics, it’s simply wrong to turn desperate refugees into political footballs.
It’s no surprise that there are claims of a new crisis on our border. A new year, a new administration, new policies in regard to who can cross and how they are processed will always bring a crisis claim from one side or the other. Depending on which side you are on politically often determines how you feel about migrants coming to our country. Conservatives usually feel we allow too many migrants to enter; liberals believe we should allow more.
That is a generalized statement of course. There are all sorts of nuances about our immigration policies and what we believe to be the best course of action. In my activism, I have come across few who believe we should have completely closed or completely open borders. Most want humane immigration laws, but with some reasonable amount of precautions to protect Americans from truly dangerous people.
The 19thGeneva’s International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) has wrapped its first digital edition with the announcement of its winners. Running from 5 to 14 March, the event gathered nearly 45,000 people who watched the films, debates and various content available online. “While we regret not having been able to open this Festival to a physical audience, some of the experiments carried out this year will be perpetuated. We must pay tribute to the FIFDH team, which has been able to adapt to many challenges with increased energy,” mentioned general director Isabelle Gattiker.
Starting with the Creative Documentary Competition, the jury headed by Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, and featuring Lamia Maria Abillama, Yulia Mahr, and Arnaud Robert, bestowed the Grand Prize of Geneva valued at CHF 10,000 – offered by the city and state of Geneva – upon Shadow Game by Eefje Blankevoort and Els Van Driel. The jury’s statement mentions that the film “deals with a crucial issue in modern time: young migrants alone on their road, trying to cross boundaries and as they say: ‘playing their game’.With the use of videos and social media material produced by the teenagers themselves, it has innovative filmmaking, and it is pushing cinematic boundaries in many ways.”
Shadow Game also picked the Youth Jury Prize, as it “brings to our attention the fact that we need not look far to find human rights’ violations. This confrontation makes it necessary to take greater responsibility at the sight of this injustice and to abandon the often-stereotypical image of migrants,” the jury stated.
The CHF 5,000 Gilda Vieira de Mello Prize in tribute to her son Sergio Vieira de Mello, went to Downstream to Kinshasa [+] by Dieudo Hamadi for its “powerful and brave character-orientated filmmaking, about reparations for forgotten communities who endured atrocities (the Six-Day War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2000). This film is haunting and shows such a rage of the protagonists seeking justice and reparations.” Once Upon a Time in Venezuela [+] by Anabel Rodríguez Ríos received a Special Mention by the jury as the director “approaches the protagonists in a very crude and yet subtle way, showing brilliantly the inextricable relation between industrial pollution, political and electoral constraints as well as citizens’ welfare.”
In the Fiction Competition, the Grand Prize Fiction and Human Rights, valued at CHF 10,000 and offered by the Hélène and Victor Barbour Foundation, went to Veins of the World [+] by Byambasuren Davaa as it “points beyond itself, towards a formless totality, a shared human experience often forgotten and instantly remembered where the beauty and pain of a profoundly essential human longing is unearthed and laid bare,” according to the jury presided by American filmmaker Danielle Lessovitz, with Santiago Amigorena, Laïla Marrakchi and Philippe Cottier. The film also won the Youth Jury Prize.
The Special Mention went to Should the Wind Drop [+] by Nora Martirosyan, “an important film, especially in the current context where borders are moving and closing and where it is difficult to travel.”
Finally, in the Grand Reportage Competition, the CHF 5,000 Prize of OMCT (World Organisation Against Torture), went to Coded Bias by Shalini Kantayya which, according to the jury, “powerfully depicts the threats that artificial intelligence poses to our liberties, including by hardwiring into algorithms racist and sexist biases.” The Public Award went to Dear Future Children [+] by Franz Böhm, which received CHF 5,000 from the FIFDH.
There are about 2.5 million farmworkers around the U.S., many of them undocumented immigrants working under dangerous and exploitive circumstances without sick leave or healthcare. Despite their status as essential workers, however, many farmworkers are facing an uphill battle to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Estella Cisneros, legal director of the Agriculture Worker Program for California Rural Legal Assistance, says an uneven rollout in California as well as technical barriers have left many farmworkers unvaccinated. “There’s been a lot of inequities that we’ve seen,” she says. We also speak with Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, who says it’s “puzzling” that farmworkers in New York state were left out of the current phase of vaccine distribution “at a time when we’ve seen an increasing number of COVID cases among the farmworker population.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org,The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we look at the push to vaccinate some two-and-a-half million farmworkers around the country who are essential workers and have continued to labor throughout the pandemic. Farmworkers are mostly Latinx, many undocumented. Their employers do not provide sick leave or healthcare. This is Iris Figueroa of the Farmworker Justice, addressing the House Appropriations Labor Subcommittee Tuesday.
IRISFIGUEROA:COVIDhas had a devastating impact on farmworkers. A Purdue University tracker estimates that almost 500,000 agricultural workers have contractedCOVIDthus far. The study that Chairwoman DeLauro cited found not only that food and agricultural workers have experienced the highest excess mortality in the pandemic compared to other workers, but that increase is even higher, 20% higher, for Latino food and agricultural workers.
AMYGOODMAN:According toCDCguidelines, farmworkers are part of Phase 1B, the second group to receive the vaccine, after frontline healthcare workers. California Governor Gavin Newsom has still said the state will provide 34,000 vaccines to farmworkers, and thousands are now being vaccinated at pop-up clinics in the fields, hosted by growers and run by the county health department. So far,datashows just 16% of vaccines in California have been given to Latinx residents, even though they account for nearly 40% of the state’s population, and Black and Latinx Californians are suffering the highest rates ofCOVIDdeaths in the state.
Meanwhile, here in New York, the news outlet Documented New Yorkreportsmore than 50,000 farmworkers were removed from the Phase 1B tier at the last minute, just before New York opened up its vaccine rollouts to other workers, including those in the food industry, like grocery, restaurant and food delivery workers.
This comes as Colorado, Idaho, Michigan and Wisconsin say they plan to start vaccinating farmworkers this month. But some states have restrictions that could deter workers, like Florida, which grows much of the nation’s citrus fruit, where people must prove residency to get a vaccine.The New York Timesreportssome pharmacies in Georgia have turned away immigrants unable to show a Social Security number, and officials in Nebraska say immigrant workers who lack legal status at meatpacking plants will be vaccinated last.
For more, we go to Modesto, California, where we’re joined by Estella Cisneros, Agricultural Worker Program legal director at California Rural Legal Assistance. Also with us, in Ithaca, New York, Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, faculty member in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University.
We welcome you both toDemocracy Now!Estella Cisneros, let’s begin with you. Lay out the issue in California. Who is getting vaccinated? Who’s not?
ESTELLACISNEROS:Right now farmworkers are eligible to be vaccinated. Farmworkers became eligible to be vaccinated right after healthcare workers and those aged 65 or over. There’s other workers that are included in this group, as well: teachers, other food industry workers, child care workers, as well as emergency services personnel. Those are the workers that are currently eligible to be vaccinated in the state.
There’s been problems, however, with the way that vaccines are distributed statewide. They are run by the different counties, especially the public health departments. And there’s been a lot of inequities that we’ve seen throughout counties, because of the decision by the governor to put people aged 65 or over before individual employment sectors. That was originally the intent that theCDCrecommended, but that was a last-minute change in the state, as well.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And could you talk about just the issue of being able to schedule a vaccine appointment, since so much of this is being done online and sometimes in extremely complex forms you have to fill out online? The impact that this has on farmworkers that are living basically in rural areas, maybe don’t even have internet accessibility? Could you talk about those who are trying to help farmworkers get on the list of eligible vaccine recipients and to get appointments?
ESTELLACISNEROS:Definitely. That has been a challenge in a lot of counties. Some counties are only allowing appointments to be made online. Some local pharmacies that are now supplying theCOVIDvaccine are also only making appointments online. That’s a huge barrier to individuals who have either little technology literacy or who lack access to broadband services or other reliable internet or cellphone services. There’s also been issues with call centers — or, excuse me, where people can make appointments by phone, not having either Spanish-speaking or, in the case of farmworkers in California, individuals who speak Mexican Indigenous languages. So, there’s just the barrier of actually making an appointment, once agricultural workers become aware that they are eligible. There is that challenge that we’ve definitely have seen expressed throughout the different counties in the state.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And can you talk about the situation specifically in Riverside County in California, a county that’s nearly 50% Hispanic, and it’s become the first — according toThe New York Times, the first in the nation to prioritize farmworkers for vaccination?
ESTELLACISNEROS:Definitely. So, in that area, what appears to be happening is there appears to be a pretty strong connection between the local public health department and employers in terms of providing either pop-up vaccination efforts or other similar efforts like that to actually bring vaccines into the fields. That’s the first county that I am aware of that is doing a program like that. In most other counties, it falls on the local public health departments. In some other counties, there’s also collaborations between local clinics and other service providers that have deep connections to the farmworker community. But in Riverside, it does appear to be that. That’s certainly being exemplified as a really good example of what we need to do statewide. And that’s certainly something that we would love to see replicated in other counties that are still struggling to vaccinate farmworkers.
Riverside does have significant farmworker population, but, actually, farmworkers — there’s more farmworkers in other counties throughout the state, specifically in the Central Valley. That’s actually where Governor Newsom a week ago made an announcement that more — that he was actually going to allow and promote 11 pop-up vaccination sites in the Central Valley specifically, to address that concern, which is that there, a large — there’s a lot more farmworkers that live there, and they have really struggled with not just vaccine access, but also the distribution of the vaccine.
It did seem like, for some time, the vaccine distribution was being done by the number of healthcare providers in each county. And so, in one county in the Central Valley, for example, they had the second-lowest vaccine distribution numbers, even though they had the fifth-highest number ofCOVID-related deaths. The change in this provision of pop-up vaccination sites will hopefully address that concern. But also, the governor has said that more vaccines are going to come to that area because it’s essentially a twofold problem. It’s not just do you have enough vaccines, but also do you have the infrastructure to actually be able to provide those vaccines to the population that you’re trying to reach.
AMYGOODMAN:And, Mary Jo Dudley, you’re head of the Cornell Farmworker Program. Can you explain what happened? TheCDCguidelines include farmworkers in the list of frontline essential workers now eligible to get the vaccine in Phase 1B. That’s like corrections workers, food and agricultural workers, U.S. Postal Service, grocery store workers, etc., as well as daycare workers. But at the last minute, the state of New York removed farmworkers from that list?
MARYJODUDLEY:Thank you, Amy. It’s very puzzling, because on February 9th, President Biden set aside an additional 11 million vaccines for underserved and vulnerable populations, among them farmworkers, homeless individuals, limited English proficiency communities and those living in public housing. So this would bring additional vaccines to New York state. It would not diminish the number currently coming.
But the problem right now is that farmworkers are not included on the list of those eligible to receiveCOVID-19 vaccines in New York state at a time where we see an increasing number of cases ofCOVIDamong the farmworker population. And we’ve seen farmworkers, farmworker-led organizations, such as Alianza Agrícola, advocacy groups, healthcare providers and farmers have all been calling upon the governor to add farmworkers to the list of those eligible. And the response is puzzling, that this hasn’t happened yet.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And how would these vaccines be distributed to farmworkers in New York state? Are there distribution centers already being set up?
MARYJODUDLEY:Yes, Juan. Thank you for that question. Because these vaccines would be distributed directly to the federally qualified health centers, and among them are the migrant health centers, so they would go directly to those centers that have the language abilities, cultural competency, 20 or more years of experience in giving vaccines, and the equipment which would allow them to go to farms to administer the vaccines. It’s important that these vaccines would go to those centers, because they are already known and trusted by the farmworker population, and they know where the farmworkers live. So we’ve had a lot of interest, offers of farmers to make their farm a pop-up site. But we don’t have the vaccines. And until farmworkers are added to the list, vaccines cannot be administered to them in New York state.
AMYGOODMAN:You’ve interviewed dozens of farmworkers. What have been their experience withCOVID-19, many sick?
MARYJODUDLEY:Many sick, and it’s very distressing that many of them have experienced long-term symptoms, such as headaches, dizziness. And this long-haulCOVIDamong the farmworker population is very worrisome, since they wouldn’t have any access to a security net, a Social Security net, a backup net, and they continue to feel ill after having recovered fromCOVID.
AMYGOODMAN:I want to thank you both for being with us. In the U.S., we call it “long haulers”; in the rest of the world, they call it “longCOVID,” those that suffer fromCOVIDfor many, many months since they have gotten it. Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, faculty member at Cornell University’s Department of Global Development, and Estella Cisneros, speaking to us from Modesto, California, legal director of the California Rural Legal Assistance’s Agricultural Worker Program.
That does it for our show.Democracy Now!produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Libby Rainey, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Carla Wills, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Adriano Contreras. Special thanks to Julie Crosby, Becca Staley, Miriam Barnard, Denis Moynihan. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Happy Birthday! Happy First Birthday, Miles!
Each year, untold numbers of migrants disappear in the borderlands after being pushed into dangerous and remote terrain by Border Patrol, the same agency that is then tasked with responding to migrants’ search and rescue emergencies. A new report released Wednesday found that the federal agency does not respond to 40% of these emergency calls. In a series of reports published over the course of five years, the southern Arizona organizations No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos have cataloged and reported the specific Border Patrol policies and tactics that have fueled a crisis of death and disappearance in the borderlands. The first report, released in 2016, detailed the 1994 Border Patrol policy “Prevention Through Deterrence” in which the United States militarized
During the election campaign that led him to the White House, Joe Biden promised swift reversal of Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies. On his first day in office, President Biden signed executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, reverse the Muslim ban and safeguard DACA, a temporary programme that protects some migrants who came to the U.S. as children.
Only a week into his term, the bold plans for reform began to falter. Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium was barred by a judge. The plan to reunite separated migrant families is delayed. And Biden’s most ambitious proposal, amnesty for most of the 11 million undocumented, is already in doubt. Meanwhile, in the midst of a raging pandemic, Democrats are calling for more targeted relief for undocumented immigrants who act as essential workers.
A Progressive Vision?
The precedent for immigration relief for workers on the frontlines of COVID-19 came from the other side of the Atlantic a month earlier. In late December 2020, the French government announced that it was fast-tracking citizenship applications for immigrants working as essential workers during the pandemic, in order to reward them for their special service to French citizens. The naturalisation applications of these immigrants already on the path to citizenship would be expedited, but they would still go through the required steps, including proving their integration into French society.
France’s new citizenship exception would seem to offer a progressive vision for the new Biden administration. The spectacle of white nationalists storming the U.S. Capitol on 6 January, with their belligerent messaging of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, redoubled the calls by liberals to undo or reverse Trump’s immigration policies. Many continued to advocate specifically for immigrant essential workers.
However, it would be wrong to follow this vision of immigration policy. To address the entrenched racism exposed and exacerbated — but not created — by the Trump administration, different tactics are required. The demands for the Biden administration should reach much further than reforms that entrench the system itself, whether a path to citizenship for the most deserving essential workers or protecting DACA, which is just a temporary programme with no path to citizenship.
France’s fast-tracked naturalisation process undoubtedly improves the lives of a few immigrants, providing them with security and benefits that they would not otherwise have. Notably, these are not undocumented immigrants but those already on the path to citizenship. Yet, it is a mistake to uncritically celebrate the French government and its pandemic-era generosity.
While a few hundred, or even, eventually, thousand immigrants may become French citizens in recognition of their “commitment to the nation”, this policy makes no change to the country’s harsh immigration system. By recognising essential migrant workers, the French state is primarily making a statement about how it values the lives of citizens who require care. U.S. observers are pointing to France as an example of inclusive immigration policies when France, like the U.S., is actually waging a racist war against immigrants.
As with the exceptional humanitarian measures the French state has instituted in the past, which simultaneously justify criminalising and deporting a majority of immigrants, these policies draw attention away from the precarious conditions in which the majority of immigrants live — which include an increasing number of informal camps in the heart of Paris.
The French immigration system is increasingly draconian, under pressure from the extreme rightwing populist National Rally party, formerly known as the National Front, and the turn to the right in Europe more generally. President Macron imposed a new law in 2018 that cut the timeframe to legally apply for asylum — with the goal of deporting people more quickly — and doubled the amount of time that immigrants could be kept in detention. In 2018, France detained more migrants than any other EU country.
No Pathway to Legalization
Like the U.S., France is home to legions of undocumented immigrants who work in exploitative conditions that now expose them to COVID-19, and who have no pathways to legalisation, before or after French government’s new policy. Furthermore, there is the long-standing fear in France that acknowledging race and racism or even the existence of different ethnic communities in its society would lead to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ acceptance of divided communities. But this unacknowledged racism, often expressed as Islamophobia, has been called out by French immigrant rights groups and anti-racist collectives, who say the country’s colonial history is expressed in exclusionary immigration policies, among other practices.
If the U.S. government adopted the policy of fast-tracked naturalisation for essential workers, as some are calling for, it would similarly serve to draw attention away from the difficult and often violent conditions under which so many immigrants live, covering up the fact that both American and French societies primarily value immigrant lives when they are sacrificed. The trend in the U.S. throughout the last two decades of Democrat and Republican administrations has been increased surveillance and criminalisation of immigrants, expansion of immigrant detention and deportation, and extreme militarisation of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rewarding essential workers with citizenship entrenches the idea that most immigrants should not be granted legal status and that the state’s job is to keep its borders closed, protecting limited resources — this is so even as both France and the U.S. are fully reliant on immigrant labour.
Rather than putting in place a standard policy of inclusion, the state decides which few immigrants have proved themselves most deserving of inclusion, gathering accolades for its generosity. Speeding up citizenship for immigrant essential workers in the US — similarly to members of the U.S. military, at least in theory — would serve the same purpose. These policies are designed to build pride in the nation’s benevolence and care, even as they work behind the scenes to legitimise the mass exclusion, detention or exploitation of migrants, based on racist ideas of belonging. They make citizens feel better about the woeful ways in which their governments treat immigrants, giving them a moral pass.
Premising citizenship on exceptional deservingness is a common way of talking about who deserves to become a citizen. Before this pandemic, France gave citizenship to a Malian immigrant who risked his life to scale a building and save a child. But rewarding heroes has also meant implicitly consenting to criminalising everyone who is not a hero.
During the pandemic, the stories of immigrant deservingness in the U.S. shifted from exceptional youth to essential workers — farm labourers, cleaners, medical personnel — who were amply demonstrating their utility to the nation. Some called on the U.S. government to give these undocumented essential workers protection from deportation or even a path to citizenship. This would undoubtedly improve the lot of these immigrants, yet once again lifts up the few, while maintaining a system that criminalises most. Such calls draw attention away from the failures of the government to provide state payments that allow people to stay at home during a pandemic or make their workplaces safer.
The linkage between citizenship and productivity in a capitalist workplace, usually as an exploited worker, has uncomfortable implications. Firstly, it leaves out all those who work outside the narrow definitions of productivity, such as in unpaid care work, and those who are young, elderly, disabled, and otherwise outside the capitalist market. Secondly, immigrants are positioned as deserving of the protections of citizenship by the dint of their labour for others.
After the past year of uprisings against white supremacy in both France and the U.S., it is easy to connect this way of valuing immigrants to the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Indeed, immigrants are being valued for their ability to take the fall, to get sick so “we” do not. To pay this impossible debt — the debt of life, and generations of life, valued as lesser — the state is recognising these immigrants now: quid pro quo. It says: now, we owe you nothing — all histories can be forgotten. We must resist judging the worth of human life and dignity in this way.
Protecting Ill-Gained Riches of Empire
What if, in fact, France and the U.S. truly followed the principles upon which their nations were formed — liberty, equality, fraternity; and to be the land of the free? What if they valued everyone’s life equally? Tendayi Achiume, legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, argues that citizenship for all immigrants from the “Third World” to the “First” would simply enact an entitlement to political equality that recognises the interconnections created by past and ongoing forms of imperialism. In other words, French or U.S. citizenship for immigrants — all immigrants — is a form of decolonisation or even debt repayment for past and ongoing imperial projects. Militarised borders, in contrast, are attempts to protect the ill-gained riches of empire.
There should be an immediate amnesty and path to citizenship for all immigrants in the U.S., whether or not they are deemed essential. While Biden’s plan to provide a pathway to all 11 million undocumented immigrants is a start, why should it be delayed for eight years? More urgently, the U.S. border must be demilitarised, through the dismantling of ICE and Border Patrol, as these groups create the need to label some people as “illegal”, enabling violence against them, and will continue to do so, regardless of a one-time pathway to citizenship. These demands tie in with the Black Lives Matter movement’s abolitionist demands to undo the carceral system, and replace it with one that treats all people with care and respect.
With a week left in his presidency, Trump visited the border wall in the Rio Grande Valley, to shore up his legacy of hate. A true break with racist policy would knock down the wall and all its supporting ramparts, including the idea of deservingness.
A short walk from the border, in the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora, sits a modest building packed with long, cafeteria-style tables. The comedor, as it’s known locally, is clean and inviting, with space for up to 60 guests. The walls are decorated with hand-painted images of Christ and his apostles, done in the style of a children’s book. Tucked away in one corner of the room are medical supplies, stacked and organized in plastic bins. Sister María Engracia Robles Robles, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, floats from the kitchen into the common area, serving hot breakfast and lunch to anyone who needs it.
The comedor was born out of work Robles and two other nuns began in 2006. At the time, Arizona was the epicenter of migration along the border and the site of a major humanitarian crisis. While people headed north were dying in the desert in record numbers, a growing deportation machine was sending a steady flow of survivors to Nogales. The nuns began feeding the deportees out of the trunks of their cars. In 2008, they secured the property where the comedor now stands. Officially run by a coalition of organizations known as the Kino Border Initiative, its first iteration had no walls. There was no relief from the desert heat. When the monsoons came, the nuns walked through standing water to serve food.
In
years past, the guests were almost all recently deported Mexican men.
That’s no longer the case. Sitting in the corner of the comedor on a
bright, clear morning in late February, I watched as a long line of
families from Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries in Latin America
and across the world walked through the front door. They filled the
benches, packed shoulder to shoulder. Many came by bus from Ciudad
Juarez, crossing contested cartel territory where a Mormon family was
massacred just a few months prior.
Once the parents and kids were settled in, Sister Robles went around
the room asking them what they were thankful for. As I scribbled a man’s
answer in my notebook — to be with his daughter — a little girl in a
pink jumper handed me an empty tube of Chapstick, then a tiny figurine
of a woman in a green dress, then a broken blue crayon. She smiled as
she shared her treasures one by one. The girl and her sister were from
Chilpancingo, her mother later told me, a Mexican city in the state of
Guerrero, not far from the town where 43 students were disappeared by police in 2014. It was the violence, the mother said, that caused them to leave.
I was halfway through a three-week reporting trip from one end of the
border to the other when I stopped at the comedor. The aim of the trip
was to take stock of the Trump administration’s impact after three and a
half years in office, to spend time with those caught in the crosshairs
of the president’s policies, and to check in with the border-wide
network of immigration attorneys, humanitarian aid workers, and asylum
advocates by their side. From Matamoros to Juarez, from Nogales to
Tijuana, I had heard stories from asylum-seeking families who were
drowning in a system of punishment, power, and exclusion, vast in both
its scope and viciousness. They were running from one form of violence
into another, slamming headfirst into the most gleefully anti-immigrant
government in modern American history. Across the border, everyone
seemed to agree: This moment was different, and it was hard to imagine
that things could get any worse.The
coronavirus presented the architects of Trump’s border policies with
the pretext to shut down the border and choke off asylum once and for
all.
The months that
followed upended that notion. The coronavirus presented the architects
of Donald Trump’s border policies with a remarkable opportunity, a
real-world emergency that would provide the pretext to shut down the
border and choke off asylum once and for all. With Covid-19 swiftly cast
as a foreign invader, the president, vying for reelection, returned to
the narrative that helped land him in the White House in the first
place. Border Patrol agents began throwing people back by the thousands,
tossing men, women, and children across the international divide
without a trace of due process. With hearings postponed and canceled,
the wait grew increasingly indefinite and uncertain for the roughly
60,000 individuals in the administration’s Remain in Mexico program,
many of them young families stuck in the continent’s most dangerous
cities — places where more than 1,000 people had already been kidnapped,
assaulted, or murdered.
With the administration pushing asylum-seekers back into Mexico,
jails and detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
were becoming blackholes where it seemed the only way out was
deportation. By late February, three weeks before Trump declared the
coronavirus a national emergency, Linda Rivas, executive director of the
legal advocacy organization Las Americas in El Paso, Texas, was among a
small group of attorneys still making trips into Juarez to meet with
clients. “There are no eyes on the detention centers right now,” she
told me at the time. “The conditions are really deteriorating.”
For more than three decades, Las Americas has provided legal
representation to migrants. Rivas and her colleagues have seen their
share of suffering on the border. Still, she said, the Trump years had
managed to produce “some of the hardest, darkest, most difficult times
in our history.” Front-line advocates were reaching a breaking point.
“We need some level of hope,” Rivas said. “The question of what comes
next is utterly terrifying.”
An Unsettling Reality
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent
standing in the U.S. is seen from the Mexican side of the international
bridge as people wait to be allowed to cross into the country in
Matamoros, Mexico, on Feb. 13, 2020.
Photo: Veronica G. Cardenas for The Intercept
Standing
outside the comedor, I met Hushbaht Fahriev, a 29-year-old Muslim man
from Siberia. Fahriev explained how Islamophobic policing and skinhead
violence prompted him and his wife to grab their two toddler-aged
children and flee halfway around the world. Fahriev had been in Nogales
with the kids for five months. From a rented room not far from the
comedor, he was making progress teaching himself English and Spanish,
but there was no hiding that he was a foreigner. Just a couple weeks
earlier, five men wearing tactical vests and carrying assault rifles
stopped Fahriev as he was walking out of a corner store. They asked
where he was from.
“I told them I don’t speak Spanish well and I keep walking,” Fahriev
recalled. One of the men bashed him over the head with his weapon. The
man continued striking him as Fahriev tried to explain that he could not
communicate. The beating eventually stopped, and the men jumped into a
truck and sped off. Fahriev called the police and gave them the make and
model of the vehicle, as well as its license number. The police did
nothing with the information, he said. “Be careful,” Fahriev recalled
the cops saying. “Here is dangerous.”The
fact that a scaled-up, permanent base of operations was now considered
necessary confirmed an unsettling reality: The crisis wasn’t going
anywhere.
Across the street
from Kino’s old comedor stood the organization’s new, soon-to-be-opened
facility. The men’s dorm could house 70 people overnight. There was an
additional dorm for women and children, and another for transgender
travelers. A local quilting group donated handmade blankets for the
beds, and there were dedicated spaces for computer-aided job and English
training, mental health counseling, and legal support. Walking the
empty halls of the state-of-the-art shelter, it was clear that the
humanitarian community of Nogales had much to celebrate. Compared to the
refugee camp in Matamoros that I had visited a few days earlier, this
was like something from another dimension. Still, when volunteers began
their work in the city more than a decade ago, there was hope was that
the need would be temporary. The fact that a scaled-up, permanent base
of operations was now considered necessary confirmed an unsettling
reality: The crisis wasn’t going anywhere.
At around 2 p.m., a car pulled up outside the new shelter. The woman I was waiting for had arrived.
Dora Rodriguez was smiling as she opened her door. With chestnut hair
pulled back behind her head, she wore a royal blue shirt emblazoned
with the name of her organization: Salvavision.
“I’m never at my work!” Rodriguez said with a laugh, as she stepped
into the midday sun. Rodriguez is a full-time social worker. The border
work is her voluntary, chosen vocation. It was a Monday, which meant
that the 60-year-old was in the midst of her weekly routine, visiting
southern Arizona detention centers, where she provides translation
services for legal advocates and takes supplies across the border to
migrant shelters in Nogales. Through the windshield, I could see her
vehicle was stuffed with boxes and bags, overflowing with children’s
toys and personal hygiene items. Across the street, a line for lunch was
beginning to form at the comedor. Normally, Rodriguez radiates with a
warm and glowing smile, but when she turned to look at the growing crowd
of families, her demeanor turned grave. She had never seen anything
like it, she told me. Driving to a shelter deeper in Nogales, Rodriguez
pointed to a graveyard where a group of Honduran men had been sleeping
the last time she was in town. She recalled how one of the men told her
that his number in the Remain in Mexico waiting line was 4,425. She knew
his case was likely to fail. It was the same for just about everybody
coming to the border these days. It seemed nobody had the kind of
evidence the government was requiring.
Dora Rodriguez keeps donated items for
asylum-seekers in her home in Tucson, Ariz., on March 13, 2020. She
makes individual care packages from the donated items and then
distributes them on a weekly basis to asylum-seekers in Nogales, Mexico.
Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
“And even if they have it,” Rodriguez said, “it’s not enough — it’s just not what they’re doing at this moment.”
Winding through the back streets of the border town, Rodriguez
described a call she received last winter, when she was driving home
from one of the detention centers. It was a Tucson humanitarian aid
volunteer seeking help on a case involving an asylum-seeking family from
Venezuela. The family had managed to get paroled into the U.S., but
their daughter, who happened to turn 18 that day, did not, on the
grounds that she was now an adult. She was separated from her parents
and taken to detention. Nearly two months later, that’s where she
remained. “It was Christmas Eve,” Rodriguez said.
“There is no mercy,” she told me. “None.”
Mercy and Hardship
When Dora Rodriguez speaks of mercy and hardship on the border, she
does so from personal experience. The efforts she makes in the shelters
and the detention centers is her way of working through that experience.
In 1980, when Rodriguez was 19 years old, she fled El Salvador in
hopes of finding refuge in the United States. A civil war was raging.
The U.S.-backed regime was torturing, disappearing, and killing
civilians by the thousands. Rodriguez’s town came under government
attack. The head of her church youth group was murdered in front of her.
With three of her friends already disappeared, Rodriguez knew there was
no time to waste. She joined up with a group of refugees who were told
that, for a price, they could be safely taken across the border in
Arizona and flown to California.
On a scorching hot Fourth of July weekend, Rodriguez and more than
two dozen other refugees, including three sisters, ages 12, 14, and 16,
were taken into the Sonoran Desert. Expecting to be flown west, some of
the women brought rolling luggage and wore dresses and high heels. The
young sisters were told that they would be reunited with their mother.
The refugees were abandoned by their guide soon after they crossed.
They spent days wandering the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, one
of the most unforgiving landscapes in the Western hemisphere, in
120-degree temperatures. Their water was gone in no time, and they
resorted to drinking lotion, shaving cream, and their own urine.
Hallucination set in, and one by one they began to die. The hair on
Rodriguez’s head burned from the heat. Desperate and delirious, she
awoke on the sixth day to the sound of hooves and helicopters — a Border
Patrol rescue party. Of the 26 refugees who set off on the journey, 13
were dead. A photographer on hand for their dramatic rescue snapped an
image of Rodriguez, limp in a Border Patrol agent’s arms, that made
newspapers around the world.
Left/Top:
Detail of a bracelet that says, “DORITA” that an asylum-seeker in an
ICE detention facility made out of plastic bags for Dora Rodriguez.
Right/Bottom: Rodriguez holds the only photograph she has of herself
from the days following her grueling journey through the Sonoran Desert
as a young asylum-seeker.Photos: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
The
deaths on Organ Pipe were a turning point in southern Arizona. The
tragedy exposed how the U.S. government was systematically and illegally
denying asylum to Salvadorans and Guatemalans — people fleeing
governments the United States was backing. Those denials sparked the
Sanctuary Movement, a campaign modeled after the Underground Railroad in
which faith leaders in Tucson defied the federal government and moved
thousands of refugees into houses of worship across the United States.
The movement’s founders went on to create some of Arizona’s most
well-established humanitarian organizations, which today work alongside
the Kino Border Initiative and Casas Alitas, a Tucson-based
organization, to provide care for border crossers in the Sonoran Desert.
Among them is No More Deaths, a collective of volunteers who leave
water for migrants crossing the desert and conduct search-and-recovery
operations in the borderlands, and whom Trump administration prosecutors
have repeatedly tried — and failed — to shut down and imprison.
Rodriguez’s integration into Arizona’s humanitarian scene was slow at
first. In the wake of their rescue, she and the other refugees were
held as material witnesses against their smugglers, before the
government moved to deport them back to El Salvador. None were given
asylum, though Rodriguez eventually gained citizenship through marriage.
She worked in fast-food restaurants and warehouses, took night classes,
and taught herself English. She put herself through college and had
five children, all U.S. citizens. For years, Rodriguez stayed quiet
about her story, a fact she attributes to an abusive marriage. When she
left that relationship, some 13 years ago, she began to find her voice.“This is how I really heal from my own experience. There is no way I would ever not do this.”
On
matters of immigration policy, Rodriguez’s view of Trump’s predecessor
is hardly rosy. The Obama administration deported more people than any
government in U.S. history, including more than 150,000 Salvadorans,
many with deep roots in the country. But when Trump descended his golden
escalator in Manhattan in 2015, announcing his run for president by
claiming that Mexico was sending “rapists” and criminals across the
border, Rodriguez felt a shift. Drawing from a politically potent well
of anti-immigrant hate, Trump would fuse racist rhetoric, including his
later talk of “shit-hole countries,” with a real-world crackdown.
Rodriguez wasn’t having it.
The election, for Rodriguez, was a turning point. In the spring of
2019, she returned to the patch of desert where she was rescued — this
time with a local news crew. “I told myself I cannot just keep my story
to myself anymore because my story brings volunteers, it brings people,”
she explained. That fall, Rodriguez flew to Washington, D.C. with No
More Deaths volunteer Scott Warren, a geographer whom the government was then trying to send to prison on felony smuggling charges. The case fell apart
in November, and the government abruptly dropped its remaining charges
in February. Rodriguez told lawmakers and human rights groups about her
experience of the humanitarian crisis on the border, both as an
asylum-seeker and an advocate. The moment was as urgent as any she had
ever seen and for her, inaction was out of the question.
“This is how I really heal from my own experience,” she told me. “There is no way I would ever not do this.”
Voices From the Desert
Dora Rodriguez receives donations from
Peggie Felici-Gessner, a volunteer at the Casa Alitas shelter that
caters to asylum-seekers in Tucson, Ariz., on March 14, 2020.
Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
The disembodied voices were piped in from private jails in the desert
outside of town. The judge stared into his lap, looking half-dead as he
repeated the same script over and over, pausing to allow a Spanish
translator to relay his words for each new detainee.
The voice that Rodriguez was waiting for would come from the
shrublands between Phoenix and Tucson, from a dusty community where
incarceration keeps the economy afloat and the biggest employer in town
is a for-profit prison corporation.
In the years leading up to Trump’s inauguration, La Palma
Correctional Center, run by the private prison giant CoreCivic and
located in the town of Eloy, Arizona, saw more deaths in custody than
any ICE detention center in the country — 15 in a 14-year period,
several of them suicides. Rodriguez was a regular visitor to the
facility through her translation work with Keep Tucson Together, an
immigrant rights legal collective. In the past year, she had become
particularly invested in the fate of one young man being held there, a
Salvadoran asylum-seeker named Francisco.
Rodriguez first learned of Francisco’s case through a documentary
film crew, who had uncovered the tragic story of a young man who died
attempting to cross Organ Pipe in 2019 — the same deadly stretch of
desert where Rodriguez and the others were rescued. In addition to a
wife and two young children, Oscar Alfredo Gomez left behind his best
friend at a shelter in the Mexican border town of Sonoyta — 26-year-old
Francisco. It was rare, Rodriguez told me, that she found a Salvadoran
in as dire of straits as Francisco. She insisted upon meeting the young
man.RelatedMass Immigration Prosecutions on the Border Are Currently on Hold. What Comes Next Is Uncertain.
“This
could be my son,” Rodriguez told herself last August, when the two
finally met. “I have to help him.” From her home in Tucson, Rodriguez
kept up with Francisco in the weeks that followed, explaining through
text messages how she could help him get on his feet if he returned to
El Salvador. She implored him not to attempt a crossing — if anyone
understood the dangers of the desert, it was her. Francisco promised
that he wouldn’t do it but in late September, his messages stopped
coming. Days passed without word. “I went nuts,” Rodriguez recalled. She
called every organization she could think of. “I knew he was lost in
the desert.” Finally, in early October, she received a call from the
Salvadoran consulate: Francisco was alive and in U.S. custody at La
Palma. “That was, oh my God, the best news ever,” Rodriguez said, but
when she tried to reach Francisco’s uncle — who was living in the U.S.
and who Francisco believed would step forward as a legal sponsor — her
calls went unreturned and unanswered. Francisco, it seemed, was on his
own.
When Rodriguez first came to the U.S. as a traumatized 19-year-old
with nobody to turn to, a Mexican family in Tucson took her in. She
lived with them for more than year. “They became my second family,” she
said. The kindness she was shown made the life she now lives possible.
Considering the situation Francisco was facing, Rodriguez asked the
legal team at No More Deaths, with whom she volunteers much of her time,
if she could step forward as a sponsor for an asylum-seeker. The answer
she received was yes.
Sitting on a bench in a window-less room in a courthouse in downtown
Tucson, waiting for Francisco’s name to be called, Rodriguez rustled
through her paperwork and took notes when the cases of men she knew came
up. She winced when a young man she had spoken to the day before
quietly requested his deportation — he couldn’t take it anymore, she
whispered to me.
Detail
of items that Dora Rodriguez collected in July 2019 from the site where
she was rescued in 1980 as a young asylum-seeker crossing the Sonoran
Desert. Rodriguez went back to the location with artist Alvaro Enciso in
order to lay a cross at the site.Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
Finally,
the judge read Francisco’s name out loud. Rodriguez sat up tall when
his attorney noted her presence in the courtroom, an affirmation of her
willingness to act as his legal sponsor — of all the detainees whose
cases would be heard that day, Francisco was the only one with a lawyer
or support network present.
Rodriguez hoped her presence would sway the court to set a bond that
would be realistically payable. Her odds were not good — under Trump,
ICE’s propensity for keeping detainees locked up had exploded, and
immigration judges had shown themselves to be crucial allies in the
agency’s efforts. Francisco’s attorney implored the judge to set bond at
$3,000. The ICE prosecutor sought a payment of more than three times
that. The judge split the difference, setting a $7,000 bond.
Rodriguez was elated as she headed for the courthouse elevators —
this was an amount that could conceivably be raised. The question now
was how.For
the people I met, the virus was background noise, barely audible over
the roar of the primary emergency: the state of the border itself.
While
Rodriguez applied herself to the task at hand, the country was slipping
ever faster into a moment of historic change. The implications of the
coronavirus were coming into focus. Deaths in Washington state were
mounting. The White House was receiving alarming intelligence detailing
the threat the Covid-19 posed, though the public wouldn’t learn about
the reports until weeks later. Still, for the people I met — from
Matamoros to Nogales to Tijuana — the virus was background noise, barely
audible over the roar of the primary emergency: the state of the border
itself.
When I drove out of Tucson on the final weekend of February, bound
for the West Coast, news broke of a major federal injunction halting the
Remain in Mexico program. Across the border, advocates and
asylum-seekers scrambled to respond. In Matamoros, families staying in
the refugee camp headed for the bridge to Brownsville, Texas. The force
field the Trump government was using to repel asylum-seekers had gone
down — how long it would last was anybody’s guess. Racing west along
Interstate 8, I drove straight for Tijuana.
It was dark by the time the families appeared at the El Chaparral
port of entry, asylum-seekers from across Central and South America.
With children bundled in their warmest winter coats, they hurried down
the corridor that led to the U.S. Many of the parents carried plastic
folders, stuffed with the critical documents that told their story.
Several clutched printed copies of the injunction. As they approached
the port entrance, a friend and fellow reporter read a piece of breaking
news aloud off his phone: The injunction had been stayed. Remain in
Mexico was back on. A handful of the families with grave medical
conditions were permitted entry. Most were not.
The
weekend began with asylum-seekers across the border believing that
change had finally come. By Monday, the hope was all but gone. The White
House was pushing forward with an ambitious plan to achieve a
longstanding goal: lockdown of the U.S. border with Mexico. Stephen
Miller, a senior White House adviser and principle architect of the
president’s immigration and border enforcement policies, had been
angling for way to link immigrants and disease as pretext for closing
off immigration to the U.S. for years. His trademark fearmongering was
all over Trump’s first major address on the coronavirus, broadcast from
the Oval Office on March 12, which began by establishing that the virus
was “foreign” before detailing a series of “sweeping travel restrictions” and laying blame on China and the European Union.
After weeks of ignoring and downplaying the disease, Miller and Trump had returned to the framing they knew best.
A Pandemic Pretext
Three days after Trump’s Oval Office address, Rodriguez hosted a pair
of film screenings at a church in Tucson, showcasing the documentary
that had first led her to Francisco’s story.
The fundraising efforts had been slow-going. If the people of Tucson
could just see Francisco’s face and hear his words, Rodriguez thought,
surely they would be moved to donate to his release. Unfortunately for
her, the fundraiser coincided with Gov. Doug Ducey’s declaration of a
state of emergency in Arizona. Just seven people showed up for the first
screening. Disappointed and believing that no one would show up for the
second, Rodriguez called it off.
The following day, the Trump administration suspended all social
visits to ICE detention centers. For those on the inside, it meant being
cut off from the outside world at a moment of skyrocketing fear and
anxiety, a time when the federal government’s own experts were warning
that immigration detention was a “tinderbox” for the spread of Covid-19.
For Rodriguez, it meant the loss of face-to-face interactions with
people she cared about, including Francisco.
If she could not physically visit the detention centers, Rodriguez
reasoned, she would organize a letter-writing campaign to assure the
people inside that they had not been forgotten, and she would keep
taking their phone calls.Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.
Listening
to desperate people at the end of their rope had always been the most
difficult part of Rodriguez’s work. As news of the virus reached the
people locked in ICE jails, it became all the more draining. Rodriguez
could hear the fear in their voices. With up to 150 people in a single
unit, the arrival of the virus was not a matter of if, but when. There
was no social distancing. Protests were met with retaliation. Meanwhile,
Rodriguez’s goal of securing Francisco’s freedom was still far out of
reach. After weeks of fundraising, she had pulled together about $3,000
in donations, a healthy sum but still far from what she needed.
As Rodriguez was pressing forward with her humanitarian work, the
White House announced that it would suspend all nonessential travel
across the border, citing a rule issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the 19 days after the rule was activated, the Border Patrol expelled nearly 10,000 people
from the country, including asylum-seekers, families, and unaccompanied
children, who in the past would have been protected from due
process-free removal under federal law. For the first time since 1980,
when Rodriguez and her companions fled north, asylum-seekers would be
summarily expelled from the country without an opportunity to make their
case. The interwoven cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora,
braced to see how the rule would impact their binational lives. “The
latest announcement uses the pandemic as a pretext to advance dangerous
goals,” the advocates at the Kino Border Initiative said in a statement.
“This is a moment to come together, recognize the ways in which we are
connected, and care for one another.”
Attendees watch a screening of the documentary “Deserted” by filmmaker Jason Motlagh at the Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Tucson, Ariz., during a fundraiser on March 14, 2020 to help raise $7,000 to cover the bond for a young Salvadoran man in ICE detention.Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept’
Rodriguez
wasn’t following the day’s news. On the morning Trump announced the
border shutdown, she received a call from No More Deaths: The
humanitarian group had decided to put up the remaining $4,000 for
Francisco’s bond. Overjoyed, Rodriguez collected the donations and
headed straight for La Palma. Sitting in her car in the detention center
parking lot, the hours ticked away. Day turned to night. At
approximately 9 p.m., a van pulled up. More than a half-dozen men were
piled inside, shackled at the wrists and ankles, despite the fact that
all were scheduled for release. Francisco was one of them.The decision to take Francisco in during the middle of a pandemic was logistically complicated but morally straightforward.
ICE
had stuffed the sum total of his belongings into a small plastic bag.
He was released without shoelaces or socks, which meant that his first
stop was the local Walmart. From there, Francisco was taken to his new
home, where Rodriguez already had a room ready. He broke down as he took
the space in. “I just can’t believe I’m out,” he said. “I can’t believe
I’m here.” Francisco had emerged from La Palma physically and
emotionally exhausted. For months, he worked in the detention center
kitchen earning $1 a day. With her children grown and moved out,
Rodriguez shares her small Tucson home with her husband. For the next
two weeks, all three stayed inside, quarantining themselves, talking and
telling stories.
For Rodriguez, the decision to take Francisco in during the middle of
a pandemic was logistically complicated — “We took the risk,” she
acknowledged — but morally straightforward. She didn’t think twice about
it.
Systematic Punishment
Dora Rodriguez participates in a car rally
in front of the CoreCivic detention center in Eloy, Ariz., on April 10,
2020. Activists demand that federal immigration authorities release all
detainees from the CoreCivic detention centre.
Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
By the time Francisco left La Palma, the men in his unit believed that
the coronavirus had already arrived. Their fears were soon confirmed. In
the weeks after Francisco’s release, La Palma and the adjacent Eloy
Detention Center became two of the country’s leading hot spots for
confirmed cases of Covid-19 in ICE custody, with more than 611 confirmed
cases as of this reporting.
In April, Rodriguez pulled on a mask and gloves and hopped in a car
with her husband. Together, they joined a raucous caravan of more than
100 vehicles that descended on the detention center. As the
demonstrators banged on pots and shouted to the people inside,
Rodriguez’s phone rang — it was Nicaraguan man, one of Francisco’s
friends, who was still locked inside. “Dorita!” he exclaimed. “We can
hear you guys!”
Outside
the detention centers’ walls, advocates fought an uphill battle against
soaring bonds and a system already predisposed to detention and
deportation. Along the way, Francisco practiced his English with a woman
Rodriguez knew from the humanitarian aid community. He spent a good
deal of time in the kitchen, showcasing his cooking skills for Rodriguez
and her husband. They bought him a bicycle, and he began to make
friends in Tucson. Eventually, Rodriguez helped Francisco find an
apartment and on June 1, he struck out on his own. He’s hoping to
receive a work permit this month. For Rodriguez, the work goes on.
At both Eloy and La Palma, more than 100 people in ICE custody wrote desperate letters in May and June,
undercutting the agency’s claims that the coronavirus was under control
and begging that they not be left to die. They described the numerous
health conditions that placed those in custody at heightened risk and
detailed detention center officials use of tear gas and pepper balls to
coerce compliance from detainees. “It’s so heartbreaking getting those
letters,” Rodriguez said. “You know they went through hell in there, and
they’re still there and we’re still fighting to get them out.”
Activists from across Arizona hold a car rally in front of the CoreCivic detention center in Eloy, Ariz., on April 10, 2020.Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
“It’s
systematic and it’s punishment,” she added. “They want to break them.
They want to break the pattern of them coming and asking for
protection.” In the days of the Sanctuary Movement, asylum advocates
referred to the bonds immigration authorities placed on asylum-seekers
as “ransom money.” Forty years later, they remain one of the biggest
challenges Rodriguez and the organizations she volunteers with face. In a
conversation mid-summer, Rodriguez told me about the case of another
young man from El Salvador that she was working on. “He’s only 19,” she
said. “His bond is $30,000.”Paying bonds remains one of the biggest challenges Rodriguez and the organizations she volunteers with face.
“Where
in the hell are these people going to get this money?” she asked. “Even
us, as volunteers, as humanitarians, it’s impossible. I’m willing to
sign my credit, my bank account, whatever, and I tell them, I will sign
to get you out, but the down payment is $10,000.”
Not only is that an enormous amount of money for small,
volunteer-driven organizations to pull together, but it must now also be
raised at a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work and
millions of others are justifiably worried about their own financial
security and the health and well-being of their own families.
Dora Rodriguez spends time with her grandson, Elijah, in her home in Tucson, Ariz., on March 13, 2020.
Photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS for The Intercept
The
challenge is immense and it would be easy to look out at a network of
largely for-profit jails that chooses to lock away tens of thousands of
people, many of them asylum-seekers seeking refuge, in the middle of
global pandemic and conclude that nobody cares, but Rodriguez believes
that doing so would be a mistake. “There’s a whole army behind these
people,” she said. She is not wrong. The volunteers who pour time and
energy into a collective effort to resist the detention and deportation
machine are as much a fact of life on the border in the past four years
as anything Stephen Miller has accomplished so far. In the end, their
efforts might not be enough, but they are there and they are trying —
they were doing it before Trump came to office and they will continue
the work, if they must, when he’s gone. “That’s what really keeps me
going,” Rodriguez said. “I am not in this alone. I do this with a
community. I would never be able to do this alone.”
On Fourth of July weekend, Rodriguez returned to the stretch of
desert where she was rescued, and where the 13 men, women, and children
she was traveling with lost their lives 40 years ago. With the sun
blazing overhead, she retraced their steps the best she could and left a
cross to honor their memories. “It was a promise that we’re going to
continue,” she said. “We’re going to continue the fight. We cannot
stop.”
With the virus ripping through ICE facilities, Rodriguez’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing since we parted ways earlier this year — she estimates that she receives an average of 20 calls from people locked inside the detention centers each day. Not knowing if or when those individuals might call again, if it will be the last call they will ever make, she finds it impossible not to answer. She tells each of them the same thing: “You are not alone. We are here.”
This post was originally published on Salvavision.
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Children refusing to eat, talk, or even drink water. A surreal mental illness sweeps across families stuck in an Australian immigrant detention camp on a tiny island nation in the South Pacific.
Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.
We examine the stories of two families separated in 2018 at the U.S.-Mexico border and how what happened to them matches up with what the government said was supposed to happen.
Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.
A 6-year-old child sleeps in a vacant office building, surrounded by strangers. An infant is taken from his breastfeeding mother. We examine the stories of two families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border and how what happened to them matches up with what the government said was supposed to happen.
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Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.
Beyond the planned border wall and limits on new refugees, the federal government wants tighter restrictions on immigration to this country. On this episode of Reveal, we examine efforts throughout the U.S. to deport migrants faster, detain them longer and prevent them from obtaining visas that might offer a path to legal residency.
We're deeply concerned by today’s announcement that the Biden administration will begin fast-tracking asylum cases for certain families seeking refuge. These policies sacrifice fairness in the name of speed and will endanger lives. 
