The link is: https://www.thedailybeast.com/on-the-border-in-trumps-twilight-zone-for-migrants-where-no-ones-in-charge?ref=author
On the Border in Trump's Twilight Zone for Migrants
Eileen Markey
14 Feb 2020
Thousands who fled war-like conditions now linger on the
brink of survival near the banks of the Rio Grande. Neither Mexico nor the
U.S. take responsibility.
Published Feb. 14, 2020 4:38AM ET
Behind barbed wire, within view of Texas, 2,200 migrants live in a netherworld between U.S. and Mexican responsibility. No one's in charge and amateurs are rushing in to help. Desperate conditions and an abiding despair are forcing awful choices. Some people think that's the point.
MATAMOROS, Mexico—In the year since the Trump Administration instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the Remain in Mexico policy, a sprawling encampment has grown in Matamoros, just a shout across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. The people here are under the jurisdiction of the United States, although they sleep at the very edge of a country neither their own nor the one they seek.
The camp exists between Mexican and U.S. authority and
outside international law. It's not an official refugee camp, though it
certainly looks like one. Dozens of tents are pitched in rows on the tennis
courts and soccer pitch of a city park and covered in black garbage bags to
keep out the rain.
Men lug plastic hardware-store buckets to collect water.
They have built tables out of logs and the flat boards of shipping pallets
lashed together with rope. Women pat masa into tortillas and
cook on grills over wood fires (park trees chopped down for the purpose).
The camp is a waiting room for the U.S. immigration
courts, which operate out of a warren of white tents on the Texas side of the
river. But the wait is long. Many have hearings set for March or April, five
and six months after they first presented their asylum claims.
The camp teems with children, young, skinny Central
Americans with indigenous faces. On Feb. 1, UNICEF issued a statement saying
the agency had begun developing places for the children to play, some basic
health screening and organization of water and sanitation services. But these
are minimal and belated. Migrants seeking asylum in the United States have been
sleeping in Matamoros since July.
In the absence of official international system
management, social service workers, attorneys, activists, crisis junkies,
Silicon Valley millionaires and organized and freelance do-gooders have filled
the vacuum. Some have experience responding to crisis. Some have no idea what
they are doing. No one is in charge.
An Italian tourist is running a photography class for
kids. A self-described redneck anarchist is managing logistics and operations:
what to do with 100 camp stoves donated by a philanthropist, where to locate
the garbage barrels a charity is buying. An evangelical pastor associated with
Franklin Graham who runs a hip-hop church in Matamoros is helping organize a
council of camp residents to make joint decisions. A clutch of acupuncturists
is extolling the trauma-relieving properties of their art.
There is no vetting. The volunteers who walk into the
camp with some idea of doing good receive no screening or training on the risks
that the migrants face. Some take pictures and post to social media long
accounts filled with details of migrants' asylum claims. A knot of
GoFundMe and Kickstarter pages without accounting safeguards collect donations
for a mushrooming variety of initiatives, some well-grounded, some not.
Not that there haven’t been efforts to organize and
control the chaos. They just haven’t been effective. Since December, Catholic
Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, a U.S. group called Angry Tias and Abuela,
and others have met weekly with the Mexican immigration authorities.
Bria Schurke, a physician's assistant from northern
Minnesota, is on her fourth stint in a makeshift health clinic run by Global
Response Management, a tiny nonprofit that also has clinics in Yemen, Syria,
and Iraq. She worked in refugee camps in East Africa, and is alarmed by the
rookies, the lack of ethical protocols governing humanitarian relief in
Matamoros.
"Because it's accessible a lot of people are showing
up, well intentioned or not," Schurke said.
Most of the patients Schurke sees in the clinic have
respiratory infections or intestinal illnesses, scabies or lice. There is
malnutrition, but the most severe malady is fear. The camp inhabitants are
popular targets for the drug cartels and human trafficking operations that hold
power in Matamoros. Migrants are subject to kidnapping, torture, and rape,
according to “A
Year of Horrors,” a new report by Human Rights First. It tallied 201
cases of kidnapping and attempted kidnapping of children under the Migrant
Protection Protocols.
A Feb. 12 report called "No Way
Out," from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans
Frontières, is equally dire. In October 2019, the report notes, of the patients
MSF cared for in one border town, 75 percent had been kidnapped recently.
An MSF psychologist and two other workers have been
serving migrants in the city of Matamoros since September. At the beginning of
February they began working inside the migrant camp with a doctor two days a
week. In addition to infections and injuries from exposure, hunger and walking
hundreds of miles, MSF staff see truama from abuse suffered along the migrant
root and also inside U.S. detention centers.
The report called the levels of violence that migrants
are fleeing in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “comparable to that in war
zones where MSF has been working for decades” and “a major factor fueling
migration north to Mexico and the U.S.”
But admittance into the United States may never come.
Returning home is not an option. Conditions are desperate enough that
some parents have sent their children across the bridge into the U.S. alone,
deciding they are better off in detention centers than the precarity of camp.
These are choices parents shouldn't be compelled to
contemplate, said Jennifer Nagda, policy director for the Young Center for
Immigrant Children's Rights, who visited the camp in January. “There shouldn't
be a camp,” Nadga said, punching each word. “This is a completely new and
unprecedented effort—in contravention of international treaties and
obligations. It's an explicit effort to make it impossible for people to
exercise their legal rights.”
On the Brownsville side of the river, a clutch of
protestors sits in a small park in vigil. They will stay, they say, until their
country recants its crimes. They believe the camp and the desperation it breeds
are intentional designs of a government intent on dehumanizing a hated
population.
Drawing comparisons to the treatment of Jews in the years
before the Holocaust, Joshua Rubin, a retired computer programmer from
Brooklyn, who is Jewish, says he feels compelled to be a witness, to not look
away when his country is doing something wrong. He organized the protest called
Vigil at the Border. He and the others will remain, he said, holding their
"Let Them In" and "History is Watching" signs until the
U.S. reverses the Remain in Mexico policy. "I don't have a lot of hope
that that will happen, but I don’t have much choice," Rubin said.
"You can't close your eyes and make it go away."
Back in Matamoros on a Friday afternoon in late January a
hundred people walked into a tent—large and white like something for a wedding
except this was about separation not union—sat themselves in rows and listened
as two attorneys from the Young Center gave a briefing:
Here is the process that will confront your children if
you send them over the bridge by themselves. They will be collected. They will
be sent to a prison-like detention center. They will be assigned a case number.
They will get a calendar date. They will be under the authority of federal
agents. They may spend months or years in this facility. They may be sent to
foster care. The people with whom they live may or may not speak Spanish. They
may be able to connect to your brother, your aunt, your cousin in New York, in
Michigan, in California. They may not. You might never see them again.
The Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans
listened in weary attention. In the front row, a toddler breast-fed
luxuriantly, in the way of toddlers, full, entitled, the fingers of his hand
splayed proprietarily on his mother’s side. She wiped her eyes repeatedly and
blinked hard.
Leaning forward, heads inclined and faces stoic, the
migrants listened to the lawyers' words. They were not hopeful.
Gladis Molina Alt, director of the Young Center's Child
Advocacy Program, was herself once a migrant. Her father fled Morazán, El
Salvador in the early years of that country’s war, swam the river and got
himself to Los Angeles. He sent for her and her brothers and mother later. She
arrived in the U.S. at age 10. Became a citizen at 27. Went to law school and
now, pulled by history, works as a legal advocate for other migrant children.
Today is different though.
Ordinarily she works the hard cases of children in
detention. Today she is at the other end of the story, speaking to parents in
the camp who may have received some very bad advice.
An American woman visiting the camp has told families she
can get their children into the United States, that within a week they will be
with those family members waiting in Maryland or Iowa or Oregon.
The woman has no way of ensuring this. No expertise or
authority. But families have trusted a heart-sick gringa. They sent
their children to stand on a small bridge across the Rio Grande and throw
themselves on the anemic mercy of Customs and Border Patrol. It is difficult to
learn where those children are today. The federal detention, supervision and
child management system is vast and anything but transparent. Still, after the
briefing a quiet line forms, then encircles the attorneys, women and men wanting
more information.
The breast-feeding mother is among them. The next day,
climbing out of the tent she shares with her husband and children, holding the
happy toddler on her hip while her older child plays soccer in the dust, she
explains. The little one is too small to send, but she is worried for the fate
of her nine-year-old son in the camp. The kind of people they fled El Salvador
to avoid are active here. She knows they'll prey on the boy.
It feels like psychological war being kept here, she
says: the waiting, the uncertainty. Yet if they return to El Salvador she is
sure they will be killed. "I have to think of sending him," she says,
crying now. "There is no life here."
She and her family are among tens of thousands of Central
Americans who’ve fled north in the past decade: 35,000 people from Guatemala,
El Salvador and Honduras sought asylum at the U.S. border in 2017, the last
year for which Department of Homeland Security data was readily available. An
additional 75,000 people from those three nations sought asylum when faced with
deportation the same year. Asylum claims from the northern triangle of Central
America jumped 800 percent between 2012 and 2017 according to DHS’ Annual Flow
Report on Refugees and Asylees from March 2019.
The migrants are driven from nations deformed by
brutality, where the social and psychological wounds of wars committed a
generation ago festered into drug, gang and government violence today that
leaves few families safe. Last week Human Rights Watch released a report
documenting cases of 138 Salvadorans who were killed after being deported back
into their country.
The parents who circled the lawyers after the briefing in
Matamoros had similar fears and questions: How long, really, before they get
out of detention? My children are gone, how will I find them? What if their
claim of asylum has already been rejected? Does that count against them? How
will it affect my own case? Is there a way to do something to make it more
possible that I might see them again? There is no life here. I cannot take them
back to Honduras/El Salvador/Guatemala. We will be killed.
"It's Sophie's Choice, but you don't get to keep one
of them," another lawyer with long experience and red eyes said after she
stepped away from a conference you might call a sidewalk conference, but for
the fact there was no sidewalk.
Only cracked, very dry ground.
