María Gabriela is sitting on the metal bench calling on the phone while she wipes her tears with the sleeve of her gray t-shirt. His two children, a boy just four years old and a slightly older girl, are sitting next to him. Dark eyes, wide open. The girl leans on the backrest and kicks the air. The sneakers, blackened by dust, have no laces. None of the shoes of the dozens of deportees crowding outside the Nogales port of entry, on the Mexico-Arizona border, have them. The American officers, “la migra”they cut them off once they are arrested to prevent them from fleeing. This is common practice.
“We crossed through Sonoyta on Saturday night and this Monday they deported us. They didn’t even ask me, they just told me to sign the papers,” María Gabriela explains with a broken voice. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t go back and I don’t know where my brother is. “They separated us.” The family was fleeing Jalisco and crossed on this side of the Mexican border that faces Arizona and is about 195 kilometers from the port of Nogales. María Gabriela and her children, like the rest of the deportees, are the reverse of the executive order that President Joe Biden approved in June to “take control of the border” and try to silence criticism about one of the most sensitive issues these days. elections after three years with record numbers at crossings with Mexico.
The decree curtails the right to asylum and establishes that any undocumented person who crosses the border will not be eligible to request asylum when daily arrests exceed the average of 2,500 for a week. Since then, deportations have accelerated to a window of just 24 hours.
Blanca Pérez and her three children traveled “four days and four nights non-stop in a packed van” from Chiapas, southern Mexico, to one of the gaps in the border that is not fenced in Sonoyta. That was where the coyote he left them. “We deliver on Sunday,” she says with a trembling voice as she holds Liam, about two years old, in her arms. The little boy plays with a stuffed animal no bigger than his hand, just like his two brothers, Mateo and Cristal, do. These are toys distributed by the Samaritans, a Tucson organization made up of volunteers that offers support to migrants on both sides of the iron wall that extends through towns and lands for more than a thousand kilometers.
Since the executive order came into effect on June 5, until the end of September, the US Government has expelled or returned more than 160,000 people, according to data published this Tuesday by the Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP). in English) of fiscal year 2024 operations. In total, during this period the United States has repatriated more than 700,000 migrants, a maximum not seen since 2010.
While the Republican candidate attacks the Democrats for their “open borders” policy and promises mass deportations, the reality is that during his almost four years in office, Biden has already achieved a record in expulsions that has exceeded the million and a half carried out. by Donald Trump between 2017 and 2020. In June, the Migration Policy Institute already warned that Biden had carried out 1.1 million deportations from the beginning of the 2021 fiscal year to February 2024.
Before Biden’s executive order, officers had to ask people they detained if they feared for their lives in their home country or if they had reason to seek asylum. Now it is no longer necessary, which speeds up the process. “They didn’t ask me, they just told me: sign here. I wanted to tell them that I’m running away because I’m afraid, but they didn’t listen to me,” explains Blanca. In theory, if a person actively expresses fear, officers are obligated to treat the person.
“It’s not legal, but it’s a sad thing we’re hearing from many migrants now. Under the law, what should happen is that the officers, if someone expresses their fear, should refer them for an interview,” says Chelsea Sachau, a lawyer for the Florence Project who advises migrants on their asylum situation.
“If it was already difficult to get asylum since June, trying to do it in the middle of the electoral campaign is the worst time. Who knows if this woman [Blanca] I would have been luckier at another time,” says Tim, one of the Samaritans volunteers, who pays for taxis for migrants to take them to the shelter managed by the Kino Border project. “You have the most powerful army in the world removing the laces of little children for fear that they will run away,” he comments indignantly while looking at Blanca’s children’s shoes.
Families continue to be separated
In the midst of lowered heads and disoriented eyes, some tearful, others empty, two parents look for their daughter. “Did you see my daughter? They separated us in the detention center, we have not heard anything else. Her name is Gabriela, she is 22 years old,” asks María Celia Marta Buendía while she does not stop squeezing with her hands the plastic bag in which the North American officers return the few belongings that the migrants carry with them.
“I can’t leave here without her.” María’s voice breaks as she says it. At her side is Marcelo, her husband, while he keeps dialing a phone that doesn’t answer. The family, who also has a 16-year-old daughter and is with them, traveled from Durango to try to request asylum and look for “a better life.”
Gabriela appears half an hour later, when her family has already left for the shelter on the second deportation bus of the morning. The immaculate white vehicle has tinted windows. In line, already escorted by five Mexican police officers and a Red Cross worker, about twenty women arrive first and after them, 29 men. Everyone carries a plastic bag with belongings and lifts their feet heavily due to the discomfort of not having laces to fasten their shoes.
Fifty people enter the Local Representative Office of the National Migration Institute in Nogales. After 15 minutes the first women begin to leave. “Girl, do you know where my parents are?” a girl with her hair dyed red and tied up in a braid shouts agitatedly from the ramp. “The guards told me that my parents went to another shelter. They didn’t want to tell me where they went. “I thought I had lost them.” Gabriela tries to hold back her tears behind her round glasses.
“Everyone focused on the separation of families in 2018 and it was horrible, but what many people do not know is that there is another type of family separation, which is a result of the law that only considers mother and daughter as a family unit. /or a father with minor biological children. So, if you have adult children or if you go with a minor who is not your biological child, such as your nephew, they will be separated,” explains Sachau. “This generates situations in which, for example, parents with their youngest son arrive at their destination and end, and the older brother, being treated as an individual adult, is deported.”
Other scenarios that Sachau encounters with this concept of “family” in the law is that many minors who arrive with other relatives who are not their biological parents end up being separated and treated as unaccompanied minors.
“In the history of migration it is very common for parents to leave first because they are being threatened and leave their children with their grandparents. And once the threats also affect the grandparents, they flee with the grandchildren. But it doesn’t matter that they have notarized documents, they separate them,” says Sachau. Until they can be reunited with their families, it may take “days or weeks.” In the Florence project they also have resources designed to help people search for their relatives. Luckily Gabriela does not have to resort to this help, since she ended up finding which shelters her parents are in.
“They are pushing migrants south”
With its sights set on the elections, the Biden Administration has taken note of the plummeting number of encounters at the border since it limited the right to asylum. In December 2023, a record 249,741 encounters with the Border Patrol were recorded, up from 53,900 this September, according to the CBP.
The US Government presents these figures as a success of its new immigration policy, although Sachau has a different vision: “The decrease in the numbers of people crossing is more because the US Government has foreign policies with different countries to prevent people arrive at the border, like for example in Mexico.”
The Mexican Government is intercepting migrants on their way to the US border and what it is doing is taking them back to the south of the country, near Guatemala. “In this way, migrants have to start the path again. What they are doing is pushing the problem south, because the majority of people who manage to reach the border and request asylum do not know what CBP One is.”
CBP One is the application offered by the United States to request asylum from outside the country. Which is also leading to a large concentration of migrants in northern Mexico, in places that “are not safe.” “But the request can take months or even more than a year. If you are in a life or death situation, or desperation, you cannot wait. The system shouldn’t work like this. They are limiting the right to asylum so much that people are already directly trying to cross,” explains the lawyer.
About 30 kilometers from the Sásabe port of entry, west of Nogales, in one of the gaps in the wall that is still under construction, the coyotes They unload the migrants. “Now there are fewer people, but there are more who try to move forward and cross the desert instead of asking for asylum,” says Tim while placing some jugs of water for the migrants. Almost every day he makes the route along this side of the wall, where the Samaritans and other organizations that work to help migrants have a small camp with water and food. There are also some tents to protect yourself from the sun, which bores into your head despite it being October, and some plates where you can charge your cell phones.
The job of these organizations is to offer humanitarian aid and advise against continuing on the route. “People die in the desert, the sun and heat can be fatal. Please stay here and rest here, where you can have access to food and water,” says one of the information cards that Tim has in the truck. When he has not yet discharged all the water, a young man appears running from the hills on the other side of the wall. “Do you have water?” he asks. He says his name is Carmelito and he is 23 years old. He is traveling with his cousins, in total there are three in the group, the youngest is 15 years old. Tim and Sonia, the other volunteer, start giving him water and boxes of energy bars. They are waiting to cross at the right time.
Along the way, more trucks from other organizations bring water to different points of the wall where they know there are people trying to cross. “The fact that the water runs out faster is a sign that there is more movement and more people trying to cross,” explains Tim and adds, “the other day we found a pregnant woman trying to cross the desert because she knew that if she asked for asylum, she would be deported.” . They are not going to stop migration with the wall, or with anything, people will continue trying to arrive. The only thing that will happen is that the harder they make it, the more people will die in the desert.”
Since 1998, the Border Patrol has found at least 8,000 bodies along the border. Although the figure is surely much higher, since these are only the bodies that can be recovered.
#Biden #expelled #migrants #Trump #cut #childrens #shoelaces #dont #flee
