TIJUANA/REYNOSA, Mexico: More Mexicans and Central Americans are lining up to make asylum requests at the US-Mexico border as word spreads of a US crackdown on families crossing illegally and the threat of brutal gangs lying in wait if they go it alone.
Officials at shelters in border cities as well as migrants from Mexico and Central America said there was a rising number of people waiting, often for weeks, to make asylum pleas to immigration authorities at official border crossings.
Many of the dozens of migrants interviewed by this agency said they decided to present an official asylum request after hearing about parents being separated from children when crossing the US border illegally, and about friends making successful requests.
Following an outcry at home and abroad over his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week to end the family separations. But over 2,000 children are yet to be reunited with their parents.
The migrants, many with children in tow, told harrowing tales of kidnapping, extortion and murder by gangs in Mexico and Central America. That threat was enough to inspire the perilous journey in hope of receiving asylum in the United States.
“They don’t go through the mountains or deserts anymore, they go to the front door,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a migration expert at San Diego State University.
But their chances of asylum may be diminishing.
On June 11, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned a grant of asylum to a Salvadoran domestic abuse victim, potentially excluding immigrants seeking refuge from sexual, gang and other forms of violence in their homelands.
Those threats were the basis of a “credible fear” argument that could prevent them from being returned.
That risk has yet to deter migrants.
Shelters run by charities in Reynosa, Tijuana and Nogales - Mexican cities separated by hundreds of miles along the border — all reported an uptick in migrant asylum seekers.
Marla Conrad, a coordinator at the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, said that so far this month, she had seen about an extra 100 people lining up for asylum compared with May.
At the border in Tijuana, 26-year-old Jose Cortes from El Salvador, traveling with his 5-year-old daughter, said the waiting list to request asylum was now 1,150 people long. When he arrived two weeks ago, it had 1,000 names on it.
Migrants manage the waiting list, a task currently with Cortes. When his turn comes to cross into the United States for an asylum interview, he will pass the list to another migrant.
It is growing even as 30 to 60 people are called up daily to plead their cases with US border agents.
Mexican Jacqueline Moreno, 43, said that as recently as December, her daughter managed to cross and successfully request asylum on the same day. Now, fleeing violence in her home state of Michoacan with her son, 13, Moreno said she had been waiting three weeks. — Reuters
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