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InAlienable
Daily Dispatch
November 18, 2019
On the This American Life podcast this week, in an episode entitled “The Out Crowd,” the reporters share stories of the Remain in Mexico program (formally called, in the most outrageous distortion of words, Migrant Protection Protocols).
Some of the episode is organized around interviews conducted with migrants in Nuevo Laredo, one of the Mexican cities to which thousands have been sent awaiting further processing of their cases, and with the asylum officers who conduct credible fear interviews. If the goal is protection of migrants, finding a less safe place to send them than Nuevo Laredo would be difficult. As nurse and humanitarian aid worker Helen Perry describes the situation:
When I first saw it, I was literally just dumbfounded, because I've seen refugee situations like this. I've been to Bangladesh. I've seen Cox's Bazar. I've been to Iraq. I've seen the IDP camps. I've seen the refugee camps from Syria.
I'd say this was the worst. Yeah, I would definitely say that this is the worst, if at a bare minimum for a lack of humanitarian accountability for what's happening to these people.
Not only is there next to no data about who is in these camps and when they come and go, but they lie inside of territory controlled by cartels that regularly kidnap migrants and hold them for ransom. Indeed, in one segment, Emily Green, one of the reporters, describes and plays back pieces of calls with kidnappers who have abducted one of the families she has interviewed.
If the destinations along the border seem not to prioritize protection of migrants, the process itself is also abusively bewildering. An asylum officer called “Ursula” in the story describes the MPP interview process from the point of view of the first family, this one from El Salvador, that she interviewed under these protocols:
You're put into a cell. You're separated from your kids and your wife. You have no idea what's going on, because you thought today you were going to be interviewed about El Salvador and you were going to get to enter the United States.
A couple hours later, they lead you into this freezing cold cell where they chain your hands to a table in handcuffs, and someone is sitting across from you who doesn't speak your language, and starts talking to someone in the phone who starts translating to you that you're going to talk about Mexico. You smell like shit, because you've been living in a shelter, you know, without any running water for a month and half, plus you've traveled all the way across Central America to get there, and you don't understand why someone is talking to you about Mexico.
This interview goes on for an hour and a half, and the person keeps pausing it so they can talk to someone on the computer, which they say is their supervisor, and another guard leads your wife in that you haven't seen in the last 12 hours into the interview room, and you can, you know, brush her hand as she passes by. You're so happy to see her because you've been separated, and you have no idea what's going on.
So, where are my children? I don't know, sir, I'm sure they'll be fine. Your wife goes through a similar interview, but she keeps being confronted about the answers she's giving because they're different from yours, and the officer can't understand why this story varies so differently between two people who experienced it.
Half an hour passes before her children are brought into the room, and then the officer has to talk to a 10-year-old boy about whatever his parents said, and then confront the 10-year-old boy on inconsistencies between his story and his parents' story. And then, the wife is like, when am I going to see my husband again?
One segment humanized in this reporting is the corps of asylum officers, called to carry out this policy with which many are in fundamental disagreement. As Molly O’Toole reports:
All three of the asylum officers I talked to said that the presentation left them with lots of questions, including the biggest one, how is this legal? These officers knew better than almost anyone how dangerous Mexico is, and this policy seemed designed to send tons of people back to Mexico.
It seemed to be in direct contradiction with U.S. asylum law, which says that, at the very least, we can't send people back to a situation where they'd get harmed or killed. We can't violate the principle of non-refoulment. […]
The three officers I spoke with are not alone. A union representing the asylum officers and USCIS employees filed a brief and a lawsuit against the administration arguing that MPP was illegal, and a ton of officers are quitting. I've heard this from a bunch of people in the asylum corps, and at Citizenship and Immigration Services, the parent agency.
Several used the word, exodus. And if officers can't quit, they're calling in sick-- anything they can do to avoid MPP interviews. We tried to get some numbers from the government.
They wouldn't tell us how many people had left. They did say that, by the end of the year, they hoped to have 771 asylum officers, but as of a month ago, they had something like 550, meaning they're roughly 200 people short.
Another asylum officer, who is called Anne in this reporting, admits that the program seems to have achieved the goal of the current administration:
They want negative decisions. They don't want asylum seekers in this country. They don't want people to get positive decisions or determinations for asylum. They have felt that the standards for screening interviews were too low, and they wanted those standards changed and those standards raised, and they've succeeded.
While Anne admits the success in achieving this goal of the administration, her personal feelings are another story. As reported here:
Anne throws up in the shower almost every day. She has recurring nightmares. She says she can't focus, can't sleep. She thinks about the people she's returned to Mexico all the time. It's nearly 100. But there's one family in particular that she can't stop thinking about, a father and son.[…]
What's my moral culpability in that? I interviewed that case, and my signature is on that paperwork, and that's something now that I live with. So yeah, I feel-- I feel in some ways that this administration's made me a human rights abuser.
Anne is just one of hundreds of asylum officers struggling from within a system that sickens them. But I'm reminded that our taxes fund this system and it sickens me too. And if I miss any opportunity to oppose and dismantle this system – a system that willfully increases human misery – might I be a human rights abuser too?
Click here to listen to the full podcast, which profiles several other disturbing features of the treatment of migrants seeking asylum.
If you are looking for something to do right now, check out the #SaveAsylum campaign being led by the Latin America Working group this week.