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Migrants will not go back

2023-02-20T10:43:47.698Z


The closure of the reception of refugees at the southern border of the United States has caused even more death and violence; Closing legal pathways does not end the survival instinct, it only increases irregular immigration and strengthens criminal gangs


When living in Mexico, in the shadow of the US border fence, death is an inseparable thread in the fabric that forms daily life.

Some deaths are unexpected, such as those killed by bullets in shootouts between criminal gangs and the ubiquitous Mexican soldiers, whose presence only seems to add to the violence.

Others occur on a regular, constant basis, such as those of migrants who fall from the top of the 10-meter border fence;

those of those who drown trying to swim around the fence, which reaches the ocean from the west;

those of those who are dragged by the treacherous and strong currents of the river that forms the border to the east, and those of those who perish crossing the inhospitable and implacable desert that constitutes the central border region.

The so-called Title 42, which protects a policy that used covid 19 as an excuse to close the border to refugees, promoted a new type of death for migrants: that caused by waiting.

It is the type of death that I know best, because I became an accomplice in it.

In 2022, US border authorities asked a few border NGOs, including my own, to identify vulnerable refugees to cover a small number of “humanitarian waivers,” under which refugees could legally enter the United States seeking protection.

This meant that each day we had to select a few dozen refugees from the thousands who had been waiting since that policy had closed the border two years earlier.

Schindler's list.

My colleagues and I carried the weight of those lives cut short long before we should have, especially that of Juan, a seven-year-old boy who died the same day he and his family were scheduled to cross the border.

His mother, who had tried in vain to have her son cared for in Mexico, stayed in that country to retrieve his little corpse from the morgue while the rest of the family finally entered the United States, where Juan could have been saved if we had scheduled his Check in a few days before.

In 2023, legal access to the US for refugees seeking protection has become even more dystopian.

The US border authorities have stopped forcing NGOs working at the border to choose who lives and who dies and have created a mobile application, which does not work very well, with which refugees should be able to make an appointment to present themselves at points of entry legal.

In practice, it acts like a perverse and deadly lottery that punishes the most vulnerable.

Every morning at dawn, thousands of refugees wake up to push a button at exactly the same moment, hoping to land one of the coveted appointments, which sell out in a matter of minutes.

Most of those with old phones or those waiting in crowded shelters or camps without good internet access receive error messages or simply can't use the app due to technical issues.

As this is the only system to request protection at an official point of entry, those unable to access it often risk crossing the deadly cross-border routes that have already claimed so many lives.

When have we become a society willing to practice this ritual human sacrifice on the altar of border security?

Perhaps it's because the deranged fantasies of white nationalism espoused by the anti-immigrant right are now commonplace, to the point where it's hard for the average citizen to tell what's real and what's not when it comes to the border.

Congressional Republicans do not stop presenting the refugees as drug traffickers, despite the fact that official statistics show that almost all the drugs that enter the United States illegally are transported by its own citizens.

A highly politicized and neo-fascist Border Patrol claims absurd things, such as that President Biden has “opened the border”,

despite record seizure numbers and a budget that has doubled in the past decade.

These lies fuel the fires, incite violence against immigrants, and make the people of the United States not care that our government has openly abandoned the idea that their country should offer protection to those fleeing persecution at home.

Ironically, after enforcing some of its most brutal policies, such as family separation and Title 42, the US has seen the largest increase in refugee entry across its border.

This is because that number has much less to do with US policies than with the conditions that cause people to flee their homes.

It is clear that closing the legal means of access to protection does not end the human survival instinct, it only increases irregular emigration and strengthens criminal gangs that charge increasingly exorbitant sums to exploit the desperate.

What policies designed to repel and kill those seeking protection fail to understand is that the refugees have already decided that what they are fleeing from is worse than what awaits them at the border.

Erika Pinheiro

is a lawyer with the organization Al Otro Lado, specialized in assisting asylum seekers on the Tijuana / San Ysidro (California) border.


Translation by

Jesús Cuéllar Menezo.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-02-20

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