2023-05-13 01:11:10
By Paula RAMON in EL PASO and Moisés AVILA in BROWNSVILLE
The United States opened a new era of immigration this Friday by applying a heavy hand to migrants who arrive by avoiding “legal channels” and, in parallel, Mexico suspended transit permits with which asylum seekers moved north.
Migrants arriving at the US border must have made an appointment through the CBP One mobile application or have applied for asylum in a transit country to the United States and been denied.
Because otherwise, with few exceptions, they could incur a presumption of ineligibility for asylum, according to a new rule that came into force early Friday morning.
The domestic policy calendar has had a lot to do with the tightening of asylum conditions. And it is that the Democratic president Joe Biden is heading to the 2024 presidential elections with migration as one of his weak points, which the Republicans intend to take advantage of.
– “Only God knows” –
Migrants do not give up.
Agustín Sortomi, a Honduran, tried to turn himself in to border authorities Thursday in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with his wife and two children.
«I already turned myself in twice and I did not receive it. I don’t know what to do,” said an AFP journalist.
“We jumped into the river but (the guards) threw us out. We are not going to conquer that dream, only God knows when we are going to conquer it, “she declared, waiting to see” what solution the new rules have “.
If the migrants “do not have a base to stay, we will expel them very quickly (…) We have been very, very clear that there are legal, safe and orderly ways to seek help in the United States and if someone arrives at our southern border, it will face harsher consequences,” Secretary of Internal Security Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN television.
It refers to using Title 8, a rule that allows expulsion with a ban on re-entry for 5 years and possible prosecution.
Mayorkas acknowledges that the situation is “challenging”, although according to the Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, “the flow is decreasing” and there are no “confrontations or situations of violence on the border.”
Mexico, whose President Andrés Manuel López Obrador spoke this week by phone with Biden, appears to have coordinated with his neighbor.
During Ebrard’s press conference, a sheet was presented in which it is read that the National Institute of Migration (INM) surely to all its offices “does not grant Multiple Migratory Formats, nor any other document that authorizes transit through the country.”
Those documents allowed migrants to travel from the south to the north of Mexico.
An AFP collaborator verified that a center that granted these safe-conducts in the city of Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, was closed on Thursday.
And this complicates life for migrants, the vast majority of whom are Latin Americans, who flee poverty, risking their lives on dangerous journeys until they reach Mexico, a country with security problems and drug trafficking in some regions.
At the El Chaparral border crossing, in Tijuana, the five members of the Díaz family, originally from the southern state of Guerrero, arrived this Friday for their appointment to request asylum. They got it in 10 days after requesting it through CBP One.
Patriarch Amadeo Díaz, 62, told AFP that he was kidnapped by members of the Familia Michoacana cartel that is “hitting very hard.”
The director for the Americas of Amnesty International, Érika Guevara Rosas, accuses Mexico of “complicity” in the “inhumane and cruel policies” of the United States against people fleeing massive human rights violations in their countries.
This Friday the US government woke up to two bad news.
A Honduran teenager, Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, 17, died at a refugee center in Florida. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose Office of Refugee Resettlement oversaw the care and accommodation of the unaccompanied migrant children, claimed the death but gave no further details.
– Judicial setback –
Washington has also had to accept a judicial setback that complicates its plans.
A Florida judge has prevented him from releasing some migrants on US soil while they wait for their immigration cases to be resolved, as the government planned to do given the limited capacity of detention centers.
The magistrate disagrees because he considers that it amounts to releasing them in an uncontrolled manner, without being subject to “deportation proceedings and with little or no investigation and without monitoring.”
In recent days, US agents have intercepted some 10,000 migrants a day, according to US media citing official sources.
Some say they try to use the “legal avenues” but they don’t work.
At the Tijuana border crossing, a Guatemalan woman who calls herself Paola advanced Thursday with her daughter in her arms to the crossing just as the sanitary rule known as Title 42, which practically prevented applying for asylum, was expiring.
An agent explained to him in Spanish that he couldn’t get through and it was helpful for him to download the CBP One app.
“I’m going to try, I said, to see what happens,” said the young woman. I tried in the past several times. In vain.
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© Agencia France-Presse
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