“We were just horrified,” says Director Binford of the clinical law program at Willimante University. “It was just horrendous, the stories that we were hearing.” A few thousand migrants have arrived at the U.S./Mexico border, fleeing from gang violence, persecution, and poverty. More than 55,000 people are living in camps scattered across the border of Mexico, sitting on the nine-month, 11,000 people long waiting list for asylum. The original limit of migrants allowed to claim asylum the day of their arrival was one hundred people per day; that number has fallen to twenty. If someone doesn’t make the cut, they have to go back into Mexico, where the threat of being killed, kidnapped, robbed, or raped resurfaces. According to Vice News, one man was kidnapped just five hours after arriving back in Mexico.
Family members are often being purposefully separated, according to USA Today, 20% of migrant children that are separated from their parents for the average year are under the age of five. Asylum seekers are five times more likely to receive asylum if they have an immigration or asylum attorney, however, only 22% actually have access to lawyers.
The quality of life in these camps is horrendous: there are a few portable toilets for thousands of migrants, and many do not have proper hygienic supplies (toothbrushes, diapers, clean clothes, etc.). Many people have little to no access to medical care, and in a statement to The Washington Post, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said; “As DHS and CBP leadership have noted numerous times, our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis.” The agency official quickly added that “CBP works closely with our partners at the Department of Health and Human Services to transfer unaccompanied children to their custody as soon as placement is identified, and as quickly and expeditiously as possible to ensure proper care.” Director Binford, however, begs to differ. Binford reportedly saw a fourteen-year-old carrying her 2-year-old sister without a diaper. The little girl urinated at the table they were sitting at. The eldest of the two “simply shrugged because she did not know what to do.”
The Trump Administration has taken numerous steps to find loopholes in asylum laws, from increasing metering to heightening security and raising the bar for “credible levels of persecution or violence” which do not, in fact, include gang or domestic violence which the Administration called, “private violence”. “Trump is doing everything he can to make it as hard as possible, for migrants to even get to the door; that way they get scared away. Or maybe they die in the process,” says Hassan Minhaj, host of the political talk show The Patriot Act. There is bipartisan disagreement with these new policies. When asked how he felt about current conditions in Immigrant Detention Centers, Rep. Micheal McCaul of the Republican party stated that they were the “worst he has ever seen in his state.”
“…We have to pass humanitarian aid to take care of these children. That is the nation we are. We have to take care of these kids,” he stated to anchor Margret Brenan. When asked if he would be loyal to the detainees or to his party he responded, “If my choice on the minority side is to vote up or down on a compassionate, humanitarian package, that’s what I’m going to do because it’s the right thing to do.” Similarly, during the hearing of the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s oversight subcommittee, Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the Democratic party stated that the “zero tolerance” policy is “state-sponsored child abuse, and I would go as far as to say kidnapping of children.” Many Democrats have agreed that this policy implemented by the Department of Homeland Security is a “stain on the conscious of the U.S.” We used to say that immigrants were what makes our country so great, but now, under a new administration, our values seem to have shifted.
Article by Abby Nega of Herbert Hoover Middle School
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons