EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The Biden administration must give asylum-seekers free access to U.S. ports of entry and rescind rules disqualifying those who traveled through other countries to get here or who present their claims at the border wall instead of booking online appointments, immigration advocates say.
The current rules may account for a steep drop in migrant encounters, as the administration claims, but they are also forcing vulnerable migrants to wait for online appointments under dire conditions in Mexico, the advocates said on Thursday.
One group said its researchers spoke with more than 300 migrants waiting for their CBP One appointments in five Mexican cities and found many are unaware they could be found ineligible for crossing multiple borders without requesting protection there first. They also found women who have been raped while waiting for appointments, people who have been kidnapped and robbed, including by Mexican police, and mothers who tie themselves to their children at camps for fear they will be taken away while they sleep.
“The Biden administration’s asylum (travel) ban violates U.S. laws. The UN Refugee Agency also has detailed it violates international law as well,” said Eleanor Acer, director of refugee protection at Human Rights First. “Two months since its implementation, the ban keeps vulnerable people waiting in places where they are targets of kidnapping, violent assault and has deported many without meaningful cause and despite potential eligibility for asylum under U.S. law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have filed lawsuits against the administration’s travel rule and expect a judge to rule as soon as next week on a motion for summary judgement in one of the cases.
“Under U.S. law, asylum-seekers are permitted to ask for asylum no matter how or where they enter the country. The rule bars people from asylum for reasons that have nothing to do with (the merits) of their asylum claim. That is very clear,” said Katrina Eiland, managing attorney for the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project.
She said U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar of the Northern District of California indicated at a Wednesday court hearing he would rule on the summary judgement petition next week.
Christina Asencio, director of research and analysis for refugee protection at Human Rights First, was one of the researchers who recently interviewed asylum-seekers stuck in Mexico.
“We spoke to a Venezuelan family who was kidnapped and tortured in Reynosa by members of an organized criminal group; a Honduran woman who was raped while sleeping at her tent in the encampment in Matamoros having waiting three months for a CBP One appointment,” Asencio said. Matamoros is across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Reynosa lies south of HIdalgo, Texas.
The researchers also heard first-person accounts of robbery, extortion and kidnapping of migrants while in Mexico. They published their findings earlier this month.
“Parents described to me that at night they would tie cable wires around themselves and their children for fear that, while they were sleeping, their children would be taken from them. And these were parents sleeping in vulnerable conditions in encampments without minimal humanitarian requirements such as shelter, safety, water, sanitation and hygiene where they have been forced to wait,” Asencio said.
The immigration activists speaking at a conference call arranged by the Welcome with Dignity Campaign said they recognize the administration has reestablished some venues for lawful migration after the Trump administration shut many of them down. But they said the travel ban is no way to manage migrant activity at the border and that foreign citizens fleeing persecution have a legal right to approach U.S. ports of entry.
