[News] New Report Documents Nearly 500 Cases of Violence Against Asylum-Seekers Expelled by Biden

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2021/04/21/asylum-seekers-violence-biden-title-42/ New
Report Documents Nearly 500 Cases of Violence Against Asylum-Seekers
Expelled by Biden
Ryan Devereaux - April 21, 2021
------------------------------

*Pressure is mounting* on the Biden administration to end its use of a
Trump-era law that stifles asylum access at the southern border, as new
evidence points to human rights abuses and violence against individuals and
families seeking refuge across the U.S.-Mexico divide. A joint human rights
report
<https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/FailuretoProtect.4.20.21.pdf>
published Tuesday, based on more than 110 in-person interviews and an
electronic survey of more than 1,200 asylum-seekers in the Mexican state of
Baja California, documented at least 492 cases of attacks or kidnappings
targeting asylum-seekers expelled under a disputed public health law, known
as Title 42, since President Joe Biden’s January inauguration.

The victims of violence represented 17 nationalities, from Latin America
and the Caribbean to Africa and the Middle East, and described cases of
assault, kidnapping, and rape in northern Mexico border towns in recent
months. Black asylum-seekers, in particular, stood out as targets, with
more than 60 percent of Haitian asylum-seekers in Baja reporting that they
were the victims of crimes. Out of a sample of more than 150 asylum-seekers
interviewed between March and April, the researchers found that none were
given an opportunity to apply for asylum before being summarily expelled
from the U.S.

“Despite his frequent pledges to reverse President Trump’s cruelty at the
border, President Biden is continuing a policy that is wreaking havoc: it
endangers children, drives family separations, and illegally returns asylum
seekers to danger,” said advocates with Human Rights First, Al Otro Lado,
and Haitian Bridge Alliance. While acknowledging that the administration
inherited an asylum system that was decimated by Donald Trump, the report
argued that those challenges do not excuse the deplorable and deteriorating
conditions asylum-seekers continue to face: “Sacrificing adherence to U.S.
refugee law and adopting a Trump-administration policy that treats human
lives as dispensable are not the answer.”

Pressed by Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller over the objections of
public health professionals, Title 42 — an obscure Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention law from the 1940s — went into effect last spring
with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to the
administrations of both Trump and Biden, the law allows Border Patrol
agents to swiftly expel individuals and families encountered on U.S. soil
without a hearing, regardless of whether they are attempting to exercise
their right to seek asylum, while also broadly barring asylum access for
most people at ports of entry.

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol,
has carried out more than 630,000 expulsions in the past year. As The
Intercept detailed in an investigation
<https://theintercept.com/2021/04/18/biden-border-patrol-asylum-title-42/>
published last weekend, Border Patrol agents have used Title 42 as a basis
to drop asylum-seekers in Mexican border towns in the middle of the night —
a practice that’s been largely prohibited for years under agreements
between the U.S. and Mexico. The agents have also relied on Title 42 to
expel individuals and families through remote ports that were previously
not used for removals, into communities dominated by organized crime and
without transportation services. The law is under challenge in the courts,
with critics arguing that what’s been presented as a public health measure
is in fact being used as a means to deny people their rights under domestic
and international law. Hundreds of thousands of travelers continue to pass
through the nation’s ports every day; it’s asylum-seekers — and virtually
asylum-seekers alone — who are rebuffed at those locations.

“Our staff and our volunteers have increasingly received reports from
asylum-seekers whose family members or themselves have been kidnapped by
organized crime and held for ransom.”

“In Tijuana, under Title 42, our staff and our volunteers have increasingly
received reports from asylum-seekers whose family members or themselves
have been kidnapped by organized crime and held for ransom,” Nicole Ramos,
director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project, told reporters in a press
call Tuesday. “Our staff receives videos of asylum-seekers with guns
pointed at their head, children held over the mouths of barking dogs, all
being threatened that if their families do not pay the $5,000, the $10,000,
they will be killed and the parts of their bodies scattered, never to be
recuperated or identified.”

Ramos added that while the U.S. reportedly stopped the practice of
expelling unaccompanied children in November — after the Trump
administration carried out at least 13,000 such expulsions — that halt has
not applied to unaccompanied Mexican children. “They’re still turning back
the Mexican minors in much the same way that we’ve seen previously,” she
said. Nicole Phillips, legal director at Haitian Bridge Alliance, said on
the call: “It feels like Stephen Miller is still here.” In addition to
expulsions into Mexico, Title 42 has been used to send 27 flights to Haiti
since February, the report noted, unloading more than 1,400 adults,
children and asylum-seekers into violently unstable conditions
<https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/surge-violence-rattles-haiti-poverty-fear-deepens-77115520>
in which Department of Homeland Security officials have privately
acknowledged they “may face harm
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/us-deporting-haitian-immigrants-despite-dangers>
.”

“This particularly cruel right now because of the state Haiti is in,”
Phillips said. “There’s a political instability like Haiti has not seen
since the 1980s under the Duvalier regime.”

Muhamed, an asylum-seeker from East Africa who arrived in Tijuana with his
family one month before Title 42 began and was just granted entry into the
U.S. this month, described what it is like to be a Black asylum-seeker in a
foreign city where violent and extortionist targeting of migrants is
entrenched. “Apart from the racism of the society, the police extortion was
also a very huge challenge to us,” he said, adding that he was extorted by
police on three separate occasions. Earlier this year, Muhamed began
volunteering at a camp for asylum-seekers
<https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/apr/20/left-nothing-biden-administration-migrant-families/>
hoping for an opportunity to make their case in the U.S. “These people are
not criminals,” he said. “They are migrants. They are human beings who are
sleeping on the streets under the sun and rain, just to fulfill their dream
of seeking asylum in the United States of America.”

The implementation of Title 42 is creating a new vocabulary of immigration
enforcement. Alexandra Miller, managing attorney of the Border Action Team
at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, told
reporters of the emergence of what advocates are calling “delayed Title
42”: cases where Title 42 is used to expel individuals in ICE detention in
the interior of the U.S., not at the border. “Over the past five months, on
any given day, there’s been around 100 individuals in ICE custody, who will
not have access to due process, who will have limited access to counsel,
and who will ultimately be removed to their country of origin, despite
asserting fear claims,” Miller said. Marisa Limón Garza, deputy director of
the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, described the challenge of
responding to “lateral flights”: operations in which individuals and
families are flown to El Paso and booted across the bridge into Ciudad
Juárez, a city that has earned an infamous reputation for violence and
targeting of migrants.

Limón said that while advocates in the region have contended with Title 42
for more than a year, conditions have worsened in the past two months, with
nearly 5,000 men, women, and children flown to the border cities and
expelled. Typically, flights arrive carrying 135 passengers, she explained,
U.S. officials choose 35 individuals to stay, and the rest are sent to
Juárez. Embedded in the process is what advocates are calling “the
borderlands betrayal
<https://theintercept.com/2021/03/24/asylum-biden-border-title-42/>,”
wherein families are told they are being flown to another U.S. city, only
to be expelled into Mexico.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the benefit of waiting. Every day is another
100 people. Every day is another family.”

“We have hundreds of empty beds right now ready to welcome people. We know
that our partners in South Texas also have beds ready to receive
people,”Limón said. “And yet the United States government continues to
apply the use of Title 42 incorrectly, inappropriately at all of our
collective expense.” Limón added that she and her colleagues have called on
the administration to end its use of Title 42 and that the response they
continually receive is to wait. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the benefit
of waiting,” she said. “Every day is another 100 people. Every day is
another family. Every day is another person that is attempting to cross
between ports of entry because we have cut off asylum at our southern
border.”

[image: WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 15: An L.E.D. truck displaying messages
expressing concern over the continuing mass deportations of Black
immigrants drives past the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) prior to a #BidenAlsoDeports rally on February 15, 2021
in Washington, DC.. The rally was held to raise the alarm over continued
mass deportations of Black immigrants. Advocates say that unraveling the
Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) does not protect Black immigrants and
that the US government is using Title 42 to weaponize the Covid19 public
health crisis by “expelling”/ deporting Black immigrants. Groups who
rallied included Haitian Bridge Alliance, Black Alliance for Just
Immigration, African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA),
Black Immigrant Collective (BIC), Black Immigrants Bail Fund, Migration
Matters, and Refugee African Communities Together. (Photo by Jemal
Countess/Getty Images for UndocuBlack Network)]

A truck displaying messages protesting the continuation of mass
deportations of Black immigrants drives past the office of U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement prior to a rally against Title 42 in Washington,
D.C., on February 15, 2021.

Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images

*The human rights* report comes just one day after a binational coalition
of 92 Mexican and U.S academics who study the border issued a series of
recommendations
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20652475-migration-and-human-rights-on-the-us-mexico-border>
to the governments of their respective countries in order to “avoid a
humanitarian crisis.” At the top of the researchers’ list was the phaseout
of Title 42 and the beginning of processing for families seeking asylum.
The signatories, which included many of the region’s top experts, noted a
pattern that’s emerged in recent weeks of families choosing to separate
<https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/20/border-family-separation-mexico-biden-477309>
themselves upon learning that the U.S. is still accepting unaccompanied
children. Allowing families to seek asylum together “will decrease the need
for facilities dedicated to unaccompanied minors, as families are able to
travel to their final destinations upon release and require less immediate
support” following their initial interview in the asylum process, they
argued.

The border and immigration scholars advocated for expanded use of so-called
filter locations, such as hotels
<https://www.borderreport.com/hot-topics/immigration/international-agency-local-officials-set-up-filter-hotel-for-migrants-in-juarez/>,
as a measure to prevent the spread of Covid-19. “The creation of ‘filters’
and the ‘filter hotel’ have proven to be efficient venues for the control
of the pandemic prior to transferring migrants to other spaces such as
shelters where they receive support,” they noted. “However, it is important
to increase capacity, both in terms of the number of spaces and in the
application of PCR tests,” they wrote, referring to testing for Covid-19.
The researchers added that filter locations could be used to administer
one-shot vaccines and said that “more dignified holding conditions should
be built for unaccompanied children, adolescents, and families on the US
side while they are processed and transferred to their final destination.”

Responsible and coronavirus-conscious admission of asylum-seekers is not
without precedent, the experts said, pointing to the recent admission of
individuals who were enrolled in the Trump administration’s “Remain in
Mexico” program as an “orderly, efficient and safe” model of success. The
Trump-era program forced more than 71,000 asylum-seekers to wait out their
cases in Mexico, triggering an explosion in violence and human rights
abuses against those populations. Biden ended the notorious program on his
first day in office, and his administration has moved forward with the phased
entry
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/19/politics/migrants-phased-entry-remain-in-mexico-biden-administration/index.html>
of individuals formerly enrolled in the system.

One thing the governments of the U.S. and Mexico should stop doing, the
border and immigration researchers argued, is relying on Mexican security
forces, with their long and well-established record of human rights abuses
and corruption, to interdict asylum-seekers making their way north. Just
two days after Biden’s inauguration, a U.S.-trained Mexican special
operations team massacred 19 migrants
<https://apnews.com/article/police-mexico-victoria-massacres-texas-ea8622410ccdc3fc9b0eb11dd974b8a8>
in northern Mexico; last month, a Mexican soldier shot and killed
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-guatemala-immigration/mexican-soldiers-held-by-angry-villagers-after-shooting-of-guatemalan-migrant-idUSKBN2BM200>
an unarmed Guatemalan migrant in southern Mexico. Less than two weeks
later, the Biden administration announced that it had secured agreements
with the governments of Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to deploy thousands
of troops to their respective borders.

“There is a strong correlation between violence against migrants in the
form of kidnapping, extortion and even massacres with increased immigration
enforcement in Mexico,” the researchers said. “Mass detention will drive
people to hide in dangerous and risky conditions, which will cause greater
humanitarian costs.”
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