US migration policy at the southern border

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/harris-visits-us-mexico-border-amid-criticism-republicans-2021-06-25/

Vice President Kamala Harris visited a border patrol facility near the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday and urged a focus on children and practical solutions to migration, in a trip meant to blunt Republican criticism of White House immigration policies.

The visit - her first since becoming vice president five months ago - came amid a rise in migrants caught crossing the border, which has sparked outrage from Republicans who favor the stricter immigration policies implemented by former President Donald Trump.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, tasked Harris with spearheading his administration's handling of the broader issue of people fleeing Central American countries for the United States. She visited Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month.

"This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We're talking about children, we're talking about families, we're talking about suffering. And our approach has to be thoughtful and effective," Harris said at the conclusion of her short trip.

U.S. authorities have made more than 1 million arrests of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border so far in fiscal year 2021, according to preliminary figures shared with Reuters.

Republicans have criticized Biden for rolling back restrictive Trump-era immigration policies even as arrests of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border have reached 20-year highs in recent months. They have also criticized Harris for not visiting the border sooner.

Harris was accompanied in El Paso by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin and Democratic Representative from Texas Veronica Escobar, who called the El Paso area the new "Ellis Island," a reference to the famed area in New York Harbor that processed millions of immigrants as they entered the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Immigration, and particularly the arrival of asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border, has been a hot-button issue for decades. Multiple attempts to reform U.S. laws and create a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrants living in the country illegally have failed in Congress.

Democrats and activists have pressed Biden to further scale back enforcement and ensure humane treatment of migrant children and families arriving at the border.

During the trip, Harris also met with advocates who urged her administration to end a Trump-era policy that allows U.S. authorities to rapidly expel migrants to Mexico or their home countries, according to one of the participants, Fernando Garcia, the executive director at the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights.

Harris, who visited the border as a senator and attorney general from California, was assailed by Republicans when she visited Mexico and Guatemala as part of her efforts to reduce migration from the region into the United States.

Harris's trip on Friday appeared to have been hastily put together days before a planned border visit by Trump.

A White House official said Harris's schedule was not dictated by Trump's moves. "I can assure you we don't take our cues from the former president," the official said.

"I said back in March I was going to come to the border, so this is not a new plan," Harris told reporters after landing in Texas. "Coming to the border ... is about looking at the effects of what we have seen happening in Central America."

Republicans criticized Harris for choosing El Paso rather than the area they point to as a hot spot for increased border crossings.

"While it’s certainly positive that she is taking this step, I am disappointed that she is not going to the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) – the very epicenter of this crisis," acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf under Trump said in a statement.

Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank, said many Republicans have embraced Trump's hardline immigration policies as they gear up for U.S. congressional elections in 2022, thinking it will win them voters.

"They believe that is something that can win them seats in 2022, so of course they're going to play it up," she said. "They're going to try to make it an issue."

 

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/thousands-migrant-kids-stuck-us-border-patrol-custody-again-2021-08-03/

The number of migrant children in Border Patrol facilities has been steadily rising, an analysis of U.S. government data shows, as record numbers crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in July, renewing a politically sensitive issue for President Joe Biden.

On Aug. 1 there were more than 2,200 unaccompanied children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody, more than double the number just a month earlier, according to daily statistics provided by the government since March and compiled by Reuters.

A CBP spokesperson said that number includes Mexican children who are quickly returned to their home country, as well as Central American children who are transferred to U.S. federal shelters.

The average time unaccompanied children are spending in CBP custody is around 60 hours, according to one source familiar with matter, which is just within the limits set by a long-standing court settlement.

The recent rise is alarming migrant advocates, who say the facilities are not appropriate for young children, even though levels are still below those seen in mid-March when CBP held more than 5,700 unaccompanied kids at border stations.

"Everyone is worrying about the numbers and how it is going to be for the kids moving through the system," said Jennifer Podkul, from the nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense, which provides legal representation for migrant children.

Record numbers of unaccompanied children, more than 19,000, were likely encountered by border patrol agents in July, said David Shahoulian, a top U.S. Department of Homeland Security official, in a court declaration filed on Monday.

At the same time, overall apprehensions, including of families and single adults, are on pace to be the highest ever recorded this fiscal year, he said. The numbers include individuals who may cross multiple times.

The situation is straining resources, Shahoulian said, with Border Patrol facilities filled way over capacity limits set during COVID across the southwest border and more than 10,000 people in custody in the Rio Grande Valley alone as of Aug. 1.

Children traveling on their own are supposed to be transferred from CBP custody to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shelters, where they wait to be released to U.S. sponsors, often parents or other family members.

There are now more than 14,400 kids in HHS shelters, the daily government data showed.

CBP said its ability to transfer unaccompanied children out of its facilities depends on HHS capacity. HHS said in a statement that the agency is "not currently experiencing any delays that prevent prompt identification of an appropriate placement within our shelter network."

Earlier this year the Biden administration came under intense pressure from advocacy groups and fellow Democrats to transfer children more quickly from overcrowded CBP border facilities not designed to hold them. The government set up more emergency shelters and the number of kids in CBP border facilities quickly dropped.

But some large convention centers converted to house children have shut down since then and there are now only four emergency shelters left, along with an existing network of state-licensed facilities and foster homes.

Several whistleblowers raised complaints about one of the emergency sites still open at Fort Bliss in Texas, saying "organizational chaos" and bad management by private contractors resulted in conditions that endanger children. HHS' Office of Inspector General said on its website on Monday that it will investigate "case management challenges at Fort Bliss that may have impeded the safe and timely release of children to sponsors."

Over the course of two nights last week, hundreds of mostly Central American migrants, including families with young children and kids traveling unaccompanied, arrived on rafts after crossing the Rio Grande river near Roma, Texas, according to a Reuters witness.

They turned themselves over to border agents, who were handing out masks, forming long lines for processing. Most carried no belongings and some were from countries like Haiti, which is experiencing renewed political turmoil.

Under a Trump-era public health policy that Biden has kept in place, many face immediate expulsion. However, Biden exempted unaccompanied children from the policy. Families are still subject to the policy - on paper, but in practice most are allowed in to pursue immigration cases in U.S. courts.

Images posted on Twitter over the weekend showed hundreds of people crowding under a bridge in Mission, Texas, where agents were holding migrants outside. With concerns rising about the rapid spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, the accumulation of migrants in custody is worrying local officials.

The Texas Border Coalition, which groups mayors, county judges and economic development commissions along the Texas-Mexico border, said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that absent more immediate attention, "there is growing potential for the situation to spin out of control."

 

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/05/migrant-detention-border-biden-politics

Alexander Martinez says he fled from homophobia, government persecution and the notorious MS-13 gang in El Salvador only to run into abuse and harassment in America’s immigration detention system.

Since crossing the US-Mexico border unlawfully in April, the 28-year-old has bounced between six different facilities in three states. He said he contracted Covid-19, faced racist taunts and abuse from guards and was harassed by fellow detainees for being gay.

“I find myself emotionally unstable because I have suffered a lot in detention,” Martinez said last week at Winn correctional center in Louisiana. “I never imagined or expected to receive this inhumane treatment.”

He’s among a growing number of people in immigration detention centers nationwide, many of whom, like Martinez, have cleared their initial screening to seek asylum in the US.

The number of detainees has more than doubled since the end of February, to nearly 27,000 as of 22 July, according to the most recent data from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the federal agency.

That’s above the roughly 22,000 detained last July under Donald Trump, though it’s nowhere close to the record in August 2019, when the number of detainees exceeded 55,000, Ice data shows.

The rising detentions is a sore point for Joe Biden’s pro-immigration allies, who hoped he would reverse his predecessor’s hardline approach. Biden campaigned on ending “prolonged” detention and use of private prisons for immigration detention, which house the majority of those in Ice custody.

“We’re at this really strange moment with him,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, which advocates for ending immigration detention outright.

“There’s still time to turn things around, but his policies so far haven’t matched his campaign rhetoric.”

In May, the Biden administration terminated contracts with two controversial Ice detention centers – one in Georgia and another in Massachusetts – receiving praise from advocates who hoped it would be the start of a broader rollback.

But no other facilities have lost their Ice contracts, and Biden has proposed funding for 32,500 immigrant detention beds in his budget, a modest decrease from 34,000 funded by Trump.

A White House spokesman said Biden’s budget reduces the number of Ice detention beds and shifts some of their use to processing immigrants for parole and other alternatives.

The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a recent congressional hearing that he’s “concerned about the overuse of detention” and pledged to continue to review problematic facilities.

The rising number of asylum seekers detained for prolonged periods is among the most concerning developments, said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center campaign organization.

The number of detainees who have passed their initial asylum screening has leapt from about 1,700 in April to 3,400 in late July, making up about 13% of all detainees, according to the most recent Ice data.

“By Ice’s own policy, these are people that shouldn’t be in detention any longer,” Altman said, citing Ice’s process for paroling asylum-seekers until a judge decides their case.

Ice officials declined to comment.

Martinez cleared his initial screening in May, which determines whether an asylum-seeker has a “credible fear” of persecution in their homeland.

But his lawyers said Ice is keeping him detained because it wrongly believes he’s a member of the MS-13 gang.

Martinez says he fled El Salvador after he and his family received death threats because he testified against the gang in the killing of one of his friends.

He says investigators tried to get him to testify in other gang-related murders but he was reluctant because he had not witnessed those crimes.

“I was very scared,” Martinez said. “I told the investigators that I was going to leave the case. I didn’t want to go through the process anymore because I don’t want them to hurt my family, let alone me.”

Ice officials in New Orleans declined to comment on Martinez’s case and specific concerns about treatment at the Winn prison, citing federal confidentiality rules for cases dealing with victims of violence and other crimes.

Winn, one of the nation’s largest Ice detention centers, has long angered civil rights groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center in June called on the Biden administration to cancel its government contract, citing abuse, medical neglect, racism and other mistreatment at the facility in rural Louisiana.

An agency spokesperson said Ice generally is committed to ensuring detainees are in a safe, secure and clean environment, are provided comprehensive medical care and have their concerns and complaints addressed by staff in writing.

Immigration opponents argue that a more troubling trend than the rise in detentions is an apparent drop-off in Ice enforcement in cities and towns.

As of last month, more than 80% of detainees had been apprehended by federal border patrol officials, and less than 20% by Ice agents, the Ice data shows. Last July under Trump, 40% of detainees were picked up by the border patrol, and 60% by Ice.

That means most of those in detention were apprehended trying to enter the country illegally, not from local immigration enforcement, said Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.

Meanwhile, detainees and advocates call for closing detention facilities in favor of monitoring paroled immigrants with GPS devices and other measures, although these methods are also controversial.

Ice detainees at the Bergen county jail in New Jersey, among others, filed an administrative complaint last month with the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights office seeking an investigation into allegations including poor sanitary conditions and medical neglect.

“At the end of day, we’re detainees, not inmates,” said Jean Claude Wright, a 38-year-old native of Trinidad and former US air force officer named in the complaint.

Meanwhile, Martinez says he’s taken the extreme measure of requesting solitary confinement, fearing for his safety following harassment and threats.

“I just want what everyone wants,” Martinez said, “to get out, be free and help support my family.”

 

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/11/us-migrant-flights-un-refugee-agency-concerns

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has expressed concern about a new US practice of transferring asylum seekers and migrants expelled under public health orders by plane to southern Mexico.

Those being expelled may have urgent protection needs and risk being sent back to the very dangers they have fled in their countries of origin in Central America without any opportunity to have those needs assessed and addressed, UNHCR said.

“These expulsion flights of non-Mexicans to the deep interior of Mexico constitute a troubling new dimension in enforcement of the Covid-related public health order known as Title 42,” Matthew Reynolds, the UNHCR representative to the United States and the Caribbean, said in a statement.

Title 42 is a coronavirus policy dating from the presidency of Donald Trump – and continued under Joe Biden – which allows the immediate deportation of undocumented migrants, including those who arrive seeking asylum.

At the end of July, US authorities began deporting some migrant families on flights to Central America as part of an expedited system to remove people who arrived without authorisation via Mexico.

Expedited deportations have been a tactic used by both Republican and Democratic administrations in an effort to deter illegal border crossings, and comes amid a surge in arrivals.

The Department of Homeland Security said the families were sent back to their home countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, but did not provide a number of people.

“Removal from the US to southern Mexico, outside any official transfer agreement with appropriate legal safeguards, increases the risk of chain refoulement – pushbacks by successive countries – of vulnerable people in danger, in contravention of international law and the humanitarian principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” said Reynolds.

He said the expulsion flights would also further strain the humanitarian response capacity in southern Mexico and heighten the risk of Covid-19 transmission across national borders.

He also said they would run counter to the steps being taken to share responsibility among countries of the region in addressing the root causes of forced displacement and migration.

“UNHCR reiterates the May 2021 appeal by UN high commissioner for refugees Filippo Grandi for the United States government to swiftly lift the Title 42 public health-related asylum restrictions that remain in effect and to restore access to asylum for people whose lives depend on it,” said Reynolds.

 

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pressed-by-us-mexico-hastens-migrant-expulsions-with-flights-south-2021-08-15/

Under pressure from the U.S. government to contain illegal immigration, Mexico has been quietly flying thousands of undocumented migrants to the south of the country to expedite their departure, according to officials and migrants.

The government said in late May it had carried out four return flights of migrants as it began a so-called "air bridge" south, without saying how many people were on them.

Mexico has now sent roughly 13,000 people from northern cities to its southern border on about 100 flights, complementing U.S. efforts to return migrants to Central America, two Mexican officials familiar with the matter said.

Some 1,200 people were flown south in the past week alone, they said. The figures have not been previously reported.

Mexico's National Migration Institute declined to comment. The foreign ministry said in a statement it supported a humane migratory system that respected national and international law, and was working with Washington to tackle the causes of migration.

The migrant flights come as the Biden administration faces increasing criticism over its management of the issue.

"This is all being done to accommodate the Americans, who are very worried about migration," said one of the Mexican officials. "Efforts are being made to speed up expulsions."

Mexico, meanwhile, is pushing for the United States to lift restrictions on non-essential travel across their shared border that were imposed during the pandemic.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this month, the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden began flying Central American and Mexican families to southern Mexico to deter migration - resuming a practice seen under his predecessor Donald Trump.

The migrants put on the Mexican domestic flights were from all over the world and had either been detained under Mexican law, or expelled from the United States under measures such as Title 42, a mechanism used to expedite removals in the pandemic under the Trump administration, one of the officials said.

Apprehensions of undocumented migrants on the U.S. southern border with Mexico have leapt in 2021, piling pressure on Biden, and with it, the Mexican government to stem the flow.

Since October of last year, U.S. agents have conducted 1,276,000 apprehensions or expulsions of migrants crossing the U.S. border illegally, including nearly 200,000 in July alone.

On Tuesday, a flight carrying dozens of migrants, including children, landed in the southern city of Tapachula, according to a Reuters witness and observers from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), an advocacy group.

Mexican authorities then loaded the migrants onto buses, drove them about a half an hour to a remote border crossing, and instructed them to walk across the pedestrian bridge into Guatemala, according to the witnesses.

A member of Mexico's National Guard in Tapachula said that when the planes land, the migrants are transported on immigration agency buses to crossing points in Talisman and Ciudad Hidalgo, from which they enter Guatemala.

Guatemala's government did not respond to a request for comment.

Among those on Tuesday's flight was Antonio, a 26-year-old Honduran, who broke down in tears after he and his young son found themselves in the tiny Guatemalan town of El Carmen.

Declining to give his last name, Antonio said that he and his boy were apprehended by Mexican immigration authorities in the northern city of Monterrey and made to board the southbound plane, despite hoping to seek asylum in Mexico.

Arturo Viscarra, staff attorney with CHIRLA, which has documented the Mexican flights, argued the process was denying migrants asylum rights, leaving them "dumped in the middle of the night in Guatemala," vulnerable to deprivation and crime.

Antonio echoed that concern.

"I don't have a single peso," he said, weeping. "And my son hasn't even eaten since yesterday."

Mexico's government in its statement said it was committed to protecting the rights of migrants and asylum seekers.