The asylum officer who quit rather than help implement a harmful and inhumane Trump administration policy said the U.S. “has responsibility” for asylum-seekers forced to wait out their cases in dangerous regions of Mexico, saying the policy “is violating numerous domestic and international laws by sending people back and causing this harm.”
Doug Stephens, believed to be the first asylum officer to formally refuse to implement the Remain in Mexico policy, said basic international law requires that vulnerable asylum-seekers not be returned to harm. But under the administration’s policy, he told MSNBC’s Alex Witt last week, “That’s something that we are violating every time that we send someone back without really assessing whether or not they’d be harmed in Mexico.”
He said he knew he couldn’t help implement this policy after just five interviews. “I heard a number of really atrocious stories of individuals that were passing through Mexico and harmed by cartels, by police,” he said. “What really did [it] for me was in the middle of one interview, it seemed clear that someone had a claim to being able to stay in the United States by showing that they would be harmed in Mexico based on their nationality or their status as a member in a particular social group.”
But, “during the interview I checked with one of my supervisors to see if we could use that to let them stay in the United States, and I was told, flat-out, ‘no.’” A shocked Witt asked how this could happen. “Wait. Were you given a reason? Were you just told, ‘nope’?” Stephens replied, “I was just told no. I was not really surprised. The interviews as they’re structured are clearly designed to make individuals fail and send everyone back without really giving them a fair shot. So the fact that I was told we couldn’t apply a particular part of the law so they could stay wasn’t terribly surprising.”
What exactly are U.S. officials sending parents and kids to? Mexican cities and regions where rape, kidnapping, and other violence are common, some of it perpetrated by corrupt officials: “A Central American family with three children were abducted by men wearing Mexican police uniforms after being returned by DHS to Ciudad Juárez in August,” a report from Human Rights First said. Other parents waiting in squalid camps have become so desperate, they’re sending their kids back across the border alone, in yet another form of family separation.
“[D]ozens of parents have watched as their children, sleeping outside in the cold, have become sick or despondent,” The Washington Post reported. “U.N. officials say they were told months ago that the migrants would be moved by the Mexican government to better conditions. It hasn’t happened.” One 8-year-old had reportedly spent two months waiting in Mexico before his dad sent him across the border alone.
To date, the administration has forcibly sent over 60,000 asylum-seekers to Mexico under the policy. Those who managed to make it back to the U.S. for their court dates have found themselves facing sham justice in kangaroo tent courts, advocates have said. There is yet another humanitarian disaster happening along the border, and the administration hopes that by keeping these families on the other side of it, Americans won’t notice or get outraged.
Stephens is refusing to let the administration get away with that. Before quitting, he drafted “a memo outlining why he believed the Remain in Mexico policy violates the law. He sent it to everyone in the CIS office in San Francisco, as well as agency supervisors, the union and a U.S. senator.” In publicly announcing his resignation, he told the Los Angeles Times that the policy is “literally sending people back to be raped and killed. That’s what this is.”