There were major concerns earlier this year that a number of confirmed COVID-19 cases at the Mexican camp where asylum-seekers kicked out of the U.S. by the Trump administration have been living would spark another humanitarian disaster on top of the existing one, but swift action from volunteers appears to have prevented that. “Remarkably, as COVID-19 has rampaged around the globe, there have been only five cases of migrants who have tested positive at the camp,” The Dallas Morning News reports.
It’s clear that Americans face far more risk from their fellow Americans than asylum-seekers, yet the administration has used the pandemic as an excuse to block families. Asylum-seekers living at the Matamoros camp were getting kicked out long before under the inhumane and illegal Remain in Mexico policy, but now further administration restrictions have only stomped on families’ remaining hopes for relief. “We are waiting for a miracle here,” one asylum-seeker told The Dallas Morning News’ Dianne Solis.
Solis reports that few of the tens of thousands of asylum-seekers sent to Mexico since 2019 to wait out their cases under the policy have ultimately won protections: “Of 15,600 asylum cases that have been handled at the Brownsville bridge courts under the program, only 128 people have been granted asylum or some sort of legal relief, according to Syracuse University-based research center Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Many thousands of cases are on appeal.”
Volunteers have tried to ease the lives of the up to 1,000 asylum-seekers currently living at the Matamoros camp. International NGO Global Response Management helped implement the safety measures as COVID-19 was hitting the camp and has continued to operate a day clinic there, Solis reported. Among the humanitarian groups that have assisted with necessities like food have been Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which constructed a tented “dining hall” where families can sit together and eat in dignity.
“But anxiety runs rampant among the immigrant families stuck in Mexico while legally seeking refuge in the U.S.” Solis continued. As Roll Call reported in May, the wait that asylum-seekers have already made could turn “into one that lasts for years, immigration attorneys say.” Sister Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley told Solis that families ”have been there for over a year, and they are desperate.”
And continuously in danger. A court ruling earlier this year blocking the policy “cited multiple examples of Central American asylum seekers who feared kidnapping, threats and violence in Mexico,” The Washington Post reported. Just days after that vital court ruling, the administration was exposed in stunning audio fully admitting that Remain in Mexico is in fact dangerous. But on the same day as news of that admission broke, the Supreme Court despicably allowed the administration to continue enforcing the policy.
In a report this year, Human Rights First tracked over 800 reports of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, and other violence against returned asylum-seekers. “Asylum seekers returned to Mexico are targeted for kidnapping and assault in shelters,” the report said, “in taxis and buses, on the streets while looking for food, work, and shelter, on their way to and from U.S. immigration court, and even while seeking help from Mexican police and migration officers.” This is what the U.S. government has aided in.
As we’ve noted, a federal judge has ordered the administration to stop detaining asylum-seeking children at hotels as part of its policy quickly expelling them from the U.S., ruling they’re being deprived of vital protections under a decades-old court settlement and must be transferred to licensed facilities. But while this practice of using hotels as baby jails is abhorrent, Miller’s expulsion policy remains, which means children will continue to be quickly—and unlawfully—kicked out.
