The Trump administration has now forced nearly 38,000 asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico under policy that isn’t just inhumane, but is also illegal, dozens of current and former officials, legal experts, and advocates tell the Los Angeles Times. “They say it violates the United States’ decades-long legal obligations to not return people to persecution.”
Nearly 150 asylum-seekers have become victims of violence after being sent back to Mexico, Human Rights First said in a report, and the administration sent them back knowing the dangers full well: “In July, U.S. officials began returning asylum seekers from the rest of Texas to Nuevo Laredo and then Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas,” the LA Times reported. “The State Department gives Tamaulipas a level 4 ‘do not travel’ warning—the same as Syria.”
In other cases, the damage has been irreversible. In July, 20-year-old Vilma Mendoza drowned trying to cross the border, after being forced to wait for weeks in Mexico for her court date. “Meanwhile, some federal asylum officers who are convinced they are sending asylum seekers back to their deaths told The Times that they have refused to implement the Remain in Mexico policy at risk of being fired.” Some have quit, refusing to implement state-sanctioned cruelty.
Others are being intentionally reckless, however. Some officers are writing “known address,” or something close to that, instead of an actual, legally required address on asylum-seekers’ paperwork, The Times notes, meaning that if their court date changes while they are waiting in Mexico, they’re screwed. “By missing court hearings, applicants can then be permanently barred from asylum in the U.S.”
In one immigration court exchange, Judge Lee O’Connor scolded an administration attorney, asking, if he “were to issue an in absentia order, where would it even be served?” He’s seen dozens of cases in which it was the same thing over and over again. “It seems like an awfully big coincidence that for 70 different people, they give the same address,” he continued. “It gives me severe pause how this program is being implemented.”
Barbarically, for one. “Against its own guidelines, those sources say, Homeland Security officials also are returning children, people with disabilities and other medical conditions, and pregnant women.” While it’s not a part of the policy, late last month border officials tried to block a pregnant asylum-seeker suffering complications, until a U.S. senator who had been visiting families at a Mexican shelter swooped in behind her to intervene. “They don’t want them to drop any babies on U.S. soil,” an asylum officer plainly stated.
“Under the Remain in Mexico policy, the United States has turned its back on its domestic and international legal obligations by forcing men, women, and children to await resolution of their U.S. asylum cases in parts of Mexico plagued by violence,” two dozen Democratic senators wrote in a letter calling for an end to the policy. “It is imperative that the United States end this reckless course of action and reaffirm its commitment to the principles of due process on which this country was founded.”
But so long as Trump is in office, and White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller is at his side, the U.S. will keep stomping on those principles. While a federal judge temporarily blocked the policy in April, “in May, a federal appeals court ruled that the policy could continue until hearings on its legality in October,” and the administration has taken full advantage of it: “In less than three months, the number of removals quadrupled.”