Joe Biden and Donald Trump Had A Similar Border Policy

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A frightening new report reveals how the U.S. continues to send legitimate asylum seekers the harms way.

September 16, 2021

| 5:00 AM

A Border Patrol agent watches as a group of migrants walk across the Rio Grande on their way to crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas, on June 15, 2021. (AP Photo / Eric Gay , File)

Despite making noise to the contrary, the Biden administration’s policy on the southern U.S. border is more similar to Donald Trump Phase 2. Like their predecessors, Biden officials denied refugees the right to appeal for to asylum-and deport them immediately, putting tens of thousands of desperate Central Americans and others in grave danger. A new study by Human Rights First (HRF), an advocacy group based in New York and Washington, DC, found that there were more than 6,000 reported kidnappings and violent attacks against asylum seekers after the US returned them to Mexico – all in the seven months since Joe Biden became president.

The HRF report annoyingly uses unusually strong language to argue that Biden’s border policy “Endangers Lives, Wreaks Havoc.” Yet America’s mainstream press ignores the Biden administration’s push. While Biden, in general, is a very different president than Trump, he has also deployed the same frightening policies on the US-Mexico border.

In March 2020, Trump used the COVID-19 pandemic to spin a section of public health law in the United States called Title 42 to deny fleeing Central Americans their right to seek asylum, and threw them back on the border. The Biden administration made several reformist declarations – and is expected to repeal the law – but then kept Title 42 in effect. It even began, with the embarrassing cooperation of the Mexican government, putting asylum seekers on planes and they fly to the far south of Mexico and to a remote forest town in Guatemala.

In partial defense of Biden, U.S. courts are forcing his administration to reinstall another element of Trump’s anti-refugee program: the “Stay in Mexico” policy, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols . But Kenjii Kizuka, an HRF lawyer, indicated that “most deportees in these times have been pushed back under Title 42, the health measure.

Here is some background: A few years ago, I was in the state of Vera Cruz in Mexico, listening to brave local journalists risking their lives in a region led by evil drug cartels and corrupt politicians. Vera Cruz is next to the Gulf of Mexico, and on a major northern route to the Texas border, one is followed by thousands of Central Americans who have fled horrific levels of gang violence in their countries.

So why don’t Middle Americans stay in Mexico, protected by their physical resemblance to Mexicans? As Noé Zavaleta, the local reporter for the respected Mexico City weekly Proceso, told me, “From the minute Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans started talking they announced their origin. The accent of Central Americans are uniquely identified by any Mexican right away where they come from. ”Drug cartels have spread to a lucrative sideline-abducting Central Americans and forcing them to call family members in the United States to -wire ransom Many of the refugees already have relatives in the U.S. The refugees are a reminder -and they are trying to protect themselves.

In 2014, a Honduran girl named Esperanza Ramirez explained to me after she and her three -year -old daughter arrived safely in McAllen, Texas, that she wrote down her sister’s phone number on Long Island in a small hidden piece of paper —So if the narcos caught him, he could pretend he knew nothing north of the Rio Grande.

The narco kidnappers have an easier time now that the Biden administration is sending thousands to temporary camps south of the border, where they have remained stranded for months. Drug gangs place detectives, called halcones, or “hawks,” just outside the camps. Kizuka said refugees are kidnapped if they walk a block out of the camps to buy food.

Kizuka is the coauthor of HRF’s comprehensive 34-page report, published Aug. 24. HRF staff interviewed 65 refugees in person, and spoke to more than 50 more by phone. , to commit an alarming number of “6356 kidnappings, sexual assaults, and other violent attacks against persons intercepted at ports of entry or expelled by the Department of Homeland Security from Mexico since President Biden took office. “The report said the U.S. Border Patrol” continues to evacuate hundreds of migrants and seek asylum every night… Often after 11 pm “across the Rio Grande to Reynosa, Mexico. The deportees arrived unharmed shoe lining, confiscated by the Border Patrol when they were apprehended on the American side of the border.The HRF report warns that “the practice of evicting people in large groups using their shoe lining is clear which marks them as migrants, making them more vulnerable to attack. “

Further, the HRF charges the Biden administration with violating both international law for the protection of refugees and U.S. law. “Keeping people in the U.S. by using Title 42 is the misuse of a public health law,” Kizuka said. “And denying them the right to request asylum violates the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980.” The report ignored COVID-19’s reasoning by saying the U.S. could “adopt fair measures that have long been recommended by epidemiologists and public health experts to safely resume asylum processing.”

This is an issue that is rarely covered in the national press. Fortunately, however, the eastern Texas border towns in the Rio Grande Valley have been blessed with excellent local newspapers, including the Herald in Brownsville and The Monitor in McAllen. Valerie Gonzalez, a fascinating reporter at The Monitor, crossed into Mexico recently for her in-depth report from the Reynosa camp, where 2000 people huddled under tents and “thin plastic bags. tarp “in a central plaza. He found a widespread fear of kidnapping among the fugitives. Some showed him “videos of migrant families kneeling next to people standing off-camera holding guns to their heads.” He learned that many children had attempted suicide. People are afraid to leave what has become an open prison because “the criminal organizations that surround and infiltrate the area are kept locked up,” Gonzalez wrote.

Sister Norma Pimentel of Missionaries of Jesus runs the Catholic Charities Resinces Center in McAllen, which has been welcoming refugees for seven years. Anyone who meets him is surprised by his kind manner and optimistic outlook. I met Sister Norma in June 2014, when I visited the border to report on the beginning of the crisis.

The Washington Post recently published his open letter to President Biden, which partially appealed to him as “a fellow Catholic.” He told her about the “dire conditions” in the Reynosa camp, and he urged her to stop deporting asylum seekers to countries where an uncertain fate awaits them. “It is immoral and despicable,” he wrote, “to hinder people who are legally and peacefully seeking safety in the United States by deliberately exposing them to the dangers they hope to escape.”

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