EL PASO — One recent day, about a hundred people from across the country arrived here in a packed bus and were quickly marched to the international bridge, where they were told to walk back to Mexico because they were being ejected from the U.S.
Among them was Luis, a man in his late 40s, originally from Mexico, who had lived in California nearly three decades before being detained while camping with his family. He said he had been held for 10 days, shuffled around the country to immigration lockups, never allowed to call an attorney and never tested for the coronavirus.
Luis, who asked that his last name be withheld to protect family still in California, was shocked and angry as he walked across the bridge over the Rio Grande. A man in a wheelchair grinned at him, saying, “Welcome to Mexico.”
But Luis, who has labored as a roofer, window replacement worker, handyman and gardener for many years, had nowhere to go. He was being kicked back to a country he hardly recognized.
“One day you’re essential and next day, you’re nothing,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been affected by hundreds of new immigration restrictions imposed by President Donald Trump during his years-long crackdown on legal and illegal immigration.
Now unauthorized immigrants are being rounded up for rapid removal under a 1944 public health law that critics say enables an end run around the immigration courts. Nearly 200,000 times from mid-March through September, U.S. authorities forced someone out of the country through a “Title 42” expulsion, and they continue.
This newest tool in Trump’s anti-immigration arsenal may be the most powerful of all because it appears to provide immigrants with little or no access to lawyers and due process.
“The Trump administration has been trying to end asylum at the border for four years, but the Title 42 policy is the most extreme policy yet, because it wholly bypasses the entire immigration system,” said Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union’s lead attorney in a class action challenging Title 42 in U.S. district court for the District of Columbia.
The lawsuit argues that the use of the public health law is an attempt to “bypass the entire immigration statutory scheme” and that other measures in immigration law cover significant public health concerns.
U.S. authorities' rationale
Although Customs and Border Protection generally is not testing immigrants for the coronavirus unless they say they think they are infected, CBP insists that these latest expulsions are to keep Americans healthy.
“The virus does not know borders, nationality nor age,” a CBP spokesman told The Dallas Morning News in a written statement. “It would take just a small number of individuals with COVID-19 to infect a large number of detainees and CBP personnel and potentially overwhelm local healthcare systems along the border.”
CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another agency within the Department of Homeland Security, both have enforcement duties. ICE generally handles interior enforcement. There have been reports of ICE sending COVID-positive immigrants back to countries such as Guatemala.
An ICE spokesperson in El Paso wouldn’t address the unusual circumstances of Luis' apprehension and removal. Luis said that when he was picked up, he was more than 150 miles from the border, got no immigration court hearing and was not allowed to call his attorney. His wife and U.S. citizen sons had no idea where he was until he phoned them from Mexico.
It’s becoming a near-daily occurrence to see the hundreds of migrants picked up from around the U.S. make the long walk across the narrow pedestrian bridge to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a historic migration passageway during times of revolution, economic optimism and, now, a pandemic.
The migrants form lines to consult with Mexican immigration authorities, who try to assist them. One man said he had lived in Utah as a farmworker. Another said he had lived in California and Arizona for 40 years, working as a jack-of-all-trades. Another said he had picked apples in the Yakima Valley of Washington state.
All said they had family on both sides of the Rio Grande. Some said they were considering crossing again. “We’re looking at all options,” Luis said.
Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S., Martha Bárcena, acknowledged that Title 42 is now driving an increase in “repatriation,” a term that covers all sorts of removals, from conventional deportations to fast-track exits that bypass the immigration courts.
She also said that, in many cases, it is simply creating a revolving door, as immigrants forced out of the country head back to their families in the U.S.
“The numbers may be higher than usual because of the new process, as you see people trying to cross two, three, four times,” Bárcena said. “We’re seeing an average of 30% of people who will try again. This means the same person may be trying to cross several times more.”
CBP says 37% of unauthorized immigrants who attempt to enter the U.S. and are turned around under Title 42 are repeat offenders.
Meanwhile, some Mexican shelters along the border don’t accept migrants returning from the U.S., fearing they might spread COVID-19.
The CBP spokesman defended the use of Title 42: “The order is working just as it was intended: to keep Americans safe and stop the spread of COVID-19.”
A dark history
This isn’t the first time public health fears have driven U.S. immigration measures. More than a century ago, screenings and quarantines of 14 days or longer were used at Ellis Island on the East Coast and Angel Island on the West Coast.
El Paso has often been a scene of crackdowns on Mexican immigrants, said Dr. S. Deborah Kang, a historian at the University of Texas at Dallas.
A hundred years back, “there was a typhoid epidemic and local officials in El Paso used the epidemic as an excuse to try to bar Mexican immigrants from coming into the country,” Kang said. “You didn’t see other groups of immigrants being treated the same way.”
That led to the use of poisonous disinfectants, Kang said. It also led to what historians call the Bath Riots, near the Santa Fe bridge between El Paso and Juárez, where Mexican housekeepers refused to submit to disinfecting sprays. “These procedures very much reflected the nation’s racist views with respect to Mexican immigration,” Kang said.
During the Trump presidency, many policies have taken anti-immigration efforts to modern extremes. For example, migrant parents were separated at the border from their children in a startling numbers in the summer of 2018. Refugee resettlement plunged to about 12,000 this past fiscal year, from a high of 85,000 in the last year of the Obama administration. Asylum changes now mean those seeking refuge must wait in dangerous Mexican border cities.
The ACLU has filed more than 400 legal challenges against administration policies since Trump took office in January 2017. More than half of those have dealt with immigration issues.
The Title 42 lawsuit focuses on unaccompanied migrant children, including an unnamed 16-year-old lead plaintiff who entered the United States through the Rio Grande Valley. Immigrant advocates charge that Title 42 deprives immigrants of due process, especially affecting those who have a legal right to make an asylum claim because of persecution in their birth countries.
“The lawsuit focuses on children because they are the most immediately vulnerable, but we do not think that asylum-seeking adults can lawfully be expelled under Title 42” either, the ACLU’s Gelernt said.
The rapid exits appear to be having a dramatic effect on the entire civil immigration system. Because people are simply picked up and expelled, the removals bypass the clogged immigration courts, which during the pandemic have limited schedules and a backlog of 1.2 million cases.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection appears to be emptying out its shorter-term facilities. CBP had more than 3,400 people in custody in March, at the start of the pandemic, but is now holding a tenth that many. ICE detention centers, typically used for longer custody periods, are far below capacity, too.
Ghosts in the machine
More than 800 miles from Juárez in Matamoros, a Mexican border city of about 520,000 across from Brownsville, returnees arrive nearly daily. The scene plays out near a tattered camp of several hundred asylum seekers from countries like Honduras and Guatemala.
Under 2019 restrictions put in place by the Trump administration, those people are made to wait in Mexico to be summoned back to the U.S. to have their asylum cases heard.
“Every day, you can see the returnees from the U.S.,” said Rolando, a Honduran asylum seeker who didn’t want his surname given for fear of retaliation by local gangs.
Some are placed on buses by Mexican immigration officials, Rolando said. He said new migrants aren’t allowed into the fenced camp for asylum seekers near the Rio Grande where he has lived for more than a year.
Tania Guerrero, a border lawyer for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, said of those given swift exits: “Too often, these returnees are unseen. They’re invisible. They’re ghosts.”
At the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, about 70 miles from the Rio Grande, director Eddie Canales for seven years has pursued the grim task of finding migrant remains for families with the assistance of forensic specialists and, at times, the U.S. Border Patrol.
He said he’s getting more calls these days from Mexico and Central America, where families worry about loved ones who have gone missing since Title 42 expulsions began. More migrants are crossing with smugglers through rougher terrain, Canales said. “They are going through more remote areas to get through.”
“A lot of people are getting thrown back right away within an hour,” Canales said. They’re collected and removed as quickly as possible.
Coyotes frequently give clients two or three tries at an illegal crossing for a set price, which in Matamoros can reach $1,500.
And more people are going missing, Canales said.
Frequently, phone calls from families across the river contain this dreaded phrase: Lo dejamos muerto — the smugglers said they left him for dead.
Staff writer Dianne Solís reported from Dallas. Staff writer Alfredo Corchado reported from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Cutting off immigration
President Donald Trump has transformed the U.S. immigration system like no other president. More than 400 immigration restrictions have been tracked by the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute. Here are some of the top changes:
- Children were separated from their immigrant parents at the southern border in 2018 at an unheard of rate. At least 4,100 children were affected through that summer, said MPI. After a global outcry, the Trump administration announced the policy would end.
- The public health law known as Title 42 is being cited for fast removals because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly 200,000 expulsions have taken place, with immigrants deprived of an immigration court hearing.
- The Migrant Protection Protocols have required about 67,000 immigrants, mostly asylum seekers, to wait in often high-crime areas of Mexico to be summoned to the U.S. for their cases to be heard. In the past, they waited in the U.S.
- The limit on the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. annually has declined sharply, and actual admissions fell below 12,000 in the fiscal year that ended in September. The recent high was 85,000, in the last full year of the Obama administration.
- The Trump administration tried to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a program that covered about 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. But a fight continues in the federal courts. A ban on new applicants remains in place.
- New rules generally prohibit granting asylum to people fleeing domestic or gang violence. The measures are condemned by some because of their impact on women seeking safety. The number of people affected is unclear.
- Many immigrants will no longer be eligible for the green cards of legal permanent residency because of changes to who is considered a “public charge” — a potential financial burden on the U.S. The complex changes are aimed at people who receive or are deemed likely to receive public benefits.
- Temporary Protected Status, granted to immigrants affected by disasters or violent events, has been ended for people from six countries: Sudan, Nicaragua, Nepal, Haiti, El Salvador and Honduras. A legal fight has stalled deportations for people from most of these countries. About 300,000 people are affected, many of whom have been allowed to stay in the U.S. legally for years or even decades.
- A special program to assist children fleeing violence in Central America ended in 2017. It was called the Central American Minors Refugee and Parole Program. The program covered a few thousand children.
- An executive order known as the “travel ban” suspended refugees' entry to the U.S. for 120 days while the administration reviewed refugee applications for potential security threats. Refugees historically have been extensively vetted before they enter the U.S.
— Dianne Solis
