The Trump administration continues to decimate the U.S. right of asylum via fiat, announcing that U.S. officials will now deport some Mexican nationals who are seeking asylum in the U.S. to Guatemala to seek protection there instead, BuzzFeed News reports.
Officials are already sending some asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala under a so-called safe-third-country agreement that doesn’t offer much safety. Under this new expansion, some Mexican nationals will now be deported there too, even though Guatemala “produces thousands of asylum seekers itself,” immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice noted.
U.S. officials themselves have previously acknowledged that this plan is deadly, and as has been the case with other anti-asylum policies from this administration, it’s facing scathing internal blowback in addition to the outcry from immigrant rights advocates. “Mexico is dangerous; Guatemala is even more so,” an asylum officer who asked to not be identified told BuzzFeed News.
The administration has tried to frame this policy as a positive, claiming that some Mexican nationals “may now be eligible to be transferred to Guatemala and given the opportunity to seek protection there.” Sounds like they really care, right? This is in fact nothing but a plan to block asylum for just about everyone and throw away the most vulnerable of human beings like a piece of trash—or at least make asylum as hard as possible to win.
In just another example, under the expansion of the illegal and deadly Remain in Mexico policy, asylum-seekers who ask for protection in Arizona will be returned to the Mexican state of Sonora to wait for immigration court dates that will be held hundreds of miles away. The U.S. will not be providing these families with transportation to these dates, leaving them to get “through cartel-controlled territory” alone, immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told CBS News.
What the administration hopes is that families currently involved in the miserable process, such as those waiting in camps along the border, will just give up and return home, and that others still in their home countries but desperate to leave due to violence and other factors won’t even bother. What these families view as a setback, the administration views as a positive. Once again, some officers tasked with carrying out these policies see the administration’s maneuvering too.
“Asylum in the US is now practically available only for people wealthy and privileged enough to get visas, shutting out many of the most vulnerable groups asking for help at our borders,” the unnamed asylum officer told BuzzFeed News. “Michael Knowles, a spokesman for the National CIS Council, the union representing asylum officers, said the policy was meant to prevent migrants from coming to the United States as opposed to ensuring their safety,” The New York Times reported.