The Supreme Court has allowed Texas to enforce one of the toughest immigration laws enacted by any US state in recent memory.

The post Supreme Court says Texas can arrest and jail migrants first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

We wish we didn’t, but we live in historic times.  Look at who’s leading this nation at a time when our enemies are consolidating and our presumptive president needs sleep.  It’s starting to feel like the worm is turning.  The gaffs, the mumbling, the pratfalls, and now something really important. There’s something we haven’t been told.

The usual suspects are out in force, doing interviews and telling us that the impeachment inquiry is nothing but a conspiracy theory with no facts to back it up.  Those three or four pesky loudmouths are playing rough with no evidence, they claim.  But things are falling apart on every front.

Can you stand to see what’s going on at the border?  It’s a stomach turning exercise, particularly after the play by play manhunt that went on this week ending in the capture of an illegal, wanted for murder in Brazil, convicted of murdering his girlfriend gruesomely.  He was just another sad sack who’d made his way to the land of opportunity.  How much did the manhunt cost?  How much is the incursion at the border costing?   What on earth is going on?

At no time in human history has anything like this taken place. The details are too idiotic to go into. Our national debt is admittedly out of hand, and we act like the well will never go dry. The truth of many untenable situations is obvious to anyone paying attention, but the networks tell us otherwise.

That may be about to change, insurance policy for the ages or not.  

We’re having electric cars waved in front of our faces day and night.  Why?  Has a panel discussion taken place somewhere that convinces us that electric cars are the future?  The news today is that auto workers are on strike at several factories.  They’re worried that electric cars will be built in such a way that they’re no longer needed.  They also want a big raise.  Where does the power that charges electric vehicles come from?  

Do you remember the news worrying whether the power grid would hold up during inclement weather?  Maybe the demands are greater, but we never worried that there wouldn’t be sufficient wind to generate what we needed.  Texas is on board with saving the planet.  Well, we’ve got windmills anyway, the life expectancy and power generated is a taboo subject.  Things are being done on the basis of feelings rather than brass tacks.  You’d think this would all be explained logically, but that’s not the case when it comes to saving the planet.  China and India think it’s nuts.

Word has it that we’re about to be legally bound by W.H.O. regulations. 

They’ve got to convict Donald Trump of something!  Otherwise the destruction might be turned around, and no self-respecting liberal can stand for that.  How dare we love the United States?  We hate seeing what is being done, and even worse, why.  The idea of the nation being saved, being turned back to the traditions we were founded upon, is reprehensible to the “new” values that we’re being spoon-fed on a daily basis.  

The values this nation was founded upon were enduring. These buffoons have tried everything and they’re almost there! If they could just stamp out those of us who remember that God’s blessings are beyond anything these do-gooders can come up with. We’d like to preserve them. The Feast of Trumpets falls tomorrow, and pictures the return of Jesus Christ to this earth. We celebrate it every year as the Bible dictates. Some things we’re never going to stop doing, no matter what.

Mark

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – September 15, 2023 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Edward: “For us, Title 42 ends the dream of many, because in all immigrants’ dreams, asylum is a right, and Title 42 takes that right away from us.”

Vanessa: “We’ve been here for almost a year in Tijuana. We’ve been in a shelter for five months, and we’ve been in a rented apartment for five more months, and it has been very difficult. I hope they give us support and let us enter the U.S. And we hope things there will be different, because here in Tijuana there is also a lot of danger.”

Source: https://www.democracynow.org/2022/5/24/headlines/refugees_at_us_border_protest_title_42_expulsions

The post Refugees at U.S. Border Protest Title 42 Expulsions first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

President Biden is struggling with a Gordian knot on immigration that there’s little he can do to untangle: The nation’s broken system is making it harder than it should be to manage the Afghan refugee crisis — and the Afghan refugee crisis is making it harder to fix the system.

By the numbers: If the military’s task of adding 50,000 spots to bases by mid-September to temporarily house Afghan refugees sounds like a lot, consider that there have been more than 1.2 million undocumented border crossings since last October.

• Meanwhile, pandemic protocols and disruptions have fueled so many backlogs that officials estimate that in the fiscal year closing at the end of this month, 100,000 green cards allotments could go to waste.

The big picture: The crisis around the U.S. withdrawal, fall of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban is just the latest in a string of migration emergencies that have fallen on President Biden and brought into focus the shortfalls of the system.

• COVID-19, poverty and violence in Central America, an earthquake that rocked Haiti, actions by the Trump administration and in federal courts, and agencies that are understaffed and underfunded have left the administration jumping from one fire to the next.

What they’re saying: “Our resources are indeed stressed,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Friday, adding that what they have managed to accomplish for Afghans being brought to the U.S. “speaks to the extraordinary talent and dedication” of agencies’ workforces.

• “The Biden Administration is committed to rebuilding the broken immigration system it inherited after four years of chaos,” a White House spokesperson told Axios, adding that the administration has been “continuing to call on Congress to make long overdue reforms to U.S. immigration laws.“
• ”Asylum and other legal migration pathways should remain available to those seeking protection. But those not seeking protection or who don’t qualify will be returned to their country of origin.”

Details: DHS has taken responsibility for evacuating and welcoming vulnerable Afghans to the U.S. But its agencies are also in charge of enforcing the U.S.-Mexico border, authorizing parolees and other migrants for work in the country, approving temporary visas and running immigrant detention centers.

• The number of migrants and pending applications has only grown since Biden took office.
• The same Department of Health and Human Services agency that has had to scramble to fund and build emergency sites for unaccompanied kids is also charged with funding services for refugees — including resettled Afghans.
• The U.S. has brought in tens of thousands of Afghans using a special mechanism called parole — they join other migrants who have also been paroled into the U.S., including many who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
• Paperwork, including work authorization for Afghans and Central American asylum seekers alike, all flow through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which has long struggled with backlogs and funding shortfalls.
• The long, tedious Special Immigrant Visa process likely contributed to leaving many allies stranded in Afghanistan.

An unknown number of unaccompanied Afghan kids will join the record numbers of migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents or guardians. Unaccompanied minors will be placed in shelters overseen by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters.

• But more than one in five migrant kids have tested positive for COVID-19 in recent weeks, according two government sources familiar with internal data. And HHS has lost contact with one-in-three migrant kids released from shelters.
• As military bases prepare to house tens of thousands of Afghans, one base, Fort Bliss, has already been criticized for holding hundreds of unaccompanied minors in unfit conditions.

The pandemic, with its travel restrictions and consulate closures, already has disrupted the green card process, as the Wall Street Journal has reported.

• Tens of thousands diversity visa lottery winners —including hundreds from Afghanistan — risk losing their one-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Biden has also faced legal roadblocks to keeping his immigrations promises.

• The Supreme Court recently ruled that the administration must restart the Remain in Mexico program and courts have also blocked Biden’s deportation moratorium.
• More than 45 families separated under the Trump administration have been reunified under Biden. But many have arrived in need of housing and other financial assistance.

The bottom line: The administration is working on new regulations to expedite asylum, has sped up the SIV processes, has set up dozens of emergency shelters, has used parole to quickly bring Afghans to the U.S. and has begun offering vaccines to vulnerable migrants.

• But the emergencies keep coming, hitting a system in need of long-term fixes — one neglected by multiple administrations and Congress.

Source: https://www.axios.com/afghanistan-us-immigration-crisis-24ff0c58-acc7-4172-87a6-cf92fcff7972.html

The post Afghanistan feeds U.S. immigration crisis first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Biden’s focus on ending the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) – under which 65,000 migrants were sent back to Mexico – fulfills a key election campaign promise, but it leaves thousands of migrants not in the program unsure of their fate, migrants, attorneys, and activists told Reuters.

Some of those migrants not in the program have been waiting along the U.S.-Mexico border longer than those who were enrolled in MPP after they were caught crossing the border illegally. Now, migrants with active MPP cases are eligible to claim asylum in the United States. The exact number of non-MPP asylum seekers along the border is not clear because there is no single record of them, but advocates say there could be thousands.

The president’s focus on MPP is not surprising – it was one of Trump’s most controversial immigration policies, and Biden denounced it on the campaign trail.

Trump said the program aimed to curb the release of thousands of migrants who had entered the United States to claim asylum. But migrant groups said many of those people were forced to live in squalor in Mexico and were vulnerable to violence, including kidnappings and extortion.

In the rush to get rid of the program, attorneys and activists say one unintended effect is that non-MPP asylum seekers who have spent months and even years at the border have been left in limbo. Advocates are now pressing the U.S. government to allow these asylum seekers entry into the United States to make their claims.

The issue highlights the challenges facing the Biden administration as it seeks to reform immigration policies, while also emphasizing that not everyone who comes to the border will be granted asylum.

Republicans and critics have coalesced around the message that Biden has implemented an open-border policy. Biden officials, however, are discouraging migrants from making their way to the United States, stating that the majority of people who arrive will be turned away.

The White House referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which said in a statement that the “system to process individuals with active MPP cases is the first phase of a program to restore safe and orderly processing at the southwest border.”

It declined to elaborate on when or if asylum seekers without active MPP cases would be allowed to claim asylum in the United States.

‘THE LIST’

Angeles, a Nicaraguan mother of two who asked that Reuters use her middle name for her safety, is one of the asylum seekers not in MPP.

She has been waiting with her family in the Mexican city of Tijuana for 15 months after fleeing her country for political persecution.

Afraid of kidnappings, the family rarely goes outside their home and struggles to buy basic necessities like food. Her husband works as a mechanic in exchange for a room for his family. Angeles’ children, aged 15 and 7, are not in school, and her eldest son is sleeping poorly.

Despite her family’s difficult situation, Angeles says she wants to enter the United States legally. In November 2019, she added her family to “La Lista,” – The List – an informal, handwritten book maintained by migrants on the Mexican side of the border. Administrators recorded the names of thousands of migrants and gave them numbers as they waited their turn to make asylum claims to U.S. officials.

She and her family got two numbers – 4,465 and 4,466 – on two scraps of paper. For more than a year, that has been their only clue about when they could enter the country.

La Lista was borne out of another policy embraced by Trump called “metering,” which limited how many migrants could seek asylum each day at U.S. ports of entry. The Strauss Center, a University of Texas research organization, estimates that 9,600 people were on La Lista in Tijuana alone up until it closed in March 2020, though it is not clear how many of those people are still at the border.

But Angeles’ family never got called. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the United States sealed the southern border to the vast majority of asylum seekers. Angeles doesn’t know whether her family’s numbers mean anything anymore.

“I just want an answer, for them to tell me, ‘Look, come present yourself on this day,’ even if they interviewed me and gave me a number and told me to come back,” Angeles said. “But I have nothing.”

“There’s basically almost no access to asylum for people who are not in the MPP program,” said Ginger Cline, a lawyer who represents migrants in Tijuana with Al Otro Lado, an immigration nonprofit group. “It’s an issue because there are now thousands of people who are waiting in dangerous border cities who don’t have access to basic needs.”

BLACK MIGRANTS FACE UNCERTAINTY

Tijuana also has a large population of Haitian migrants as well as migrants who traveled from Africa. They are particularly vulnerable to extortion and racism, migrants and advocates say. They, too, have been left in limbo as MPP was mostly limited to Spanish-speaking asylum seekers.

“The situation is really difficult for those of African descent,” said Katerine Giron, an organizer with Espacio Migrante, a migrant community organization in Tijuana.

The Biden administration “has not done anything for Black immigrants except continuing the cruel and inhumane system that existed before Trump but heightened under Trump,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an activist group that provides humanitarian assistance to migrants along the border and in the United States.

The group estimates there are about 5,000 Black immigrants in Tijuana, and 10,000-15,000 border-wide.

The White House and DHS did not respond to questions about how its approach to unwinding MPP is affecting Black migrants.

In the absence of clarity from the U.S. government, hundreds of asylum seekers have begun camping near the port of entry in Tijuana, hoping to make their asylum claims.

The camp has swelled to about 1,500 people since mid-February, said Alex Mensing, a Tijuana-based immigration advocate with Innovation Law Lab who is part of a coalition that has been trying to help migrants coming to the port of entry.

The expansion of the camp comes as U.S. officials have declared that the swift processing of MPP claimants has allowed Mexico to close the sprawling Matamoros camp on the border that was the most visible symbol of Trump’s crackdown on migration from Central America.

Mensing’s group had counted 241 tents at the port as of Tuesday. Many people camping out do not have active MPP cases but have spent more than a year at the border.

“There’s almost universally this idea that it doesn’t make sense to let some asylum seekers in and not others,” Mensing said. “They do not see that as fair.”

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More than 43,000 of the apprehensions last month turned into summary expulsions, which U.S. border authorities have been authorized to make during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data released Friday. More expulsions were made in August than in any other month since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an order in mid-March green-lighting them.

The arrests recorded by CBP — the main metric used to gauge border crossings — shows that unauthorized migration to the U.S. continued to increase in the summer, despite the ongoing pandemic and the Trump administration’s policy of swiftly expelling most migrants, including asylum-seekers and unaccompanied children, without allowing them to seek humanitarian refuge.

Apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border have been increasing since April, when they plummeted to 17,000. But they continue to be substantially less than the number of arrests CBP made during the same time period last year, when hundreds of thousands of families with minors and unaccompanied children journeyed north from Central America.

Most migrants apprehended in August were single adults. Unaccompanied children and members of families accounted for 3,088 and 2,693 arrests, respectively. During a press conference Friday in Laredo, Texas, President Trump’s top official at CBP, Mark Morgan, said “the majority” of unaccompanied children processed by his agency last month were expelled under the emergency coronavirus policy.

Morgan, the senior official performing the duties of the CBP commissioner, praised the CDC directive, which the administration says is designed to prevent potentially infected migrants from spreading the coronavirus inside border holding cells and the broader U.S. population. He said the arrest figures are becoming “less relevant” because most migrants are being turned back rapidly under the public health order, many of them within two hours of being encountered.

While the figures released Friday show that unauthorized border crossings are increasing, they are not representative of the exact number of migrants apprehended, as some are processed and expelled more than once. Morgan said CBP has recorded a high recidivism rate of border crossings among single adults, particularly Mexican nationals. He repeatedly faulted migrants for journeying to the U.S. southern border during a global pandemic — which he said places them and CBP officials at risk of contracting the coronavirus.

Human rights groups and immigrant advocates have harshly criticized the CDC order, which they say weaponizes public health to achieve the long-sought Trump administration objective of walling off the asylum system for border crossers, whom officials say are chiefly economic migrants who are not eligible for humanitarian protection.

The use of the CDC order to expel migrant children, who are held in hotels before being sent to their home countries through deportation flights, has alarmed advocates the most. U.S. law protects unaccompanied children from rapid removals and requires border officials to transfer most of them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees a network of shelters and housing facilities for minors.

But Morgan said migrant minors can also pose a public health risk.

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The border crisis hasn’t ended; it just moved 2,000 miles south.

During a visit to Tapachula, in southern Mexico, we found the small city coping with the kind of overcrowded detention centers, dangerous crossings and police actions associated with the U.S.-Mexico border. Shortly after we left, Mexican authorities rounded up and deported hundreds of people in brutal scenes that echoed the anguish on the Rio Grande in recent years.

“We’ve been locked up here for hours,” said one Honduran woman on a recording sent to us from a makeshift dormitory in what our source told us was a Tapachula immigrant shelter. “They say that buses are coming to take us to Tabasco, but there’s been nothing so far.”

More than 2,000 people from the same caravan that came north together were eventually deported, many in flights from Tabasco to Honduras, according to a press release from the Mexican immigration service.

The number of immigrants showing up at the U.S. border has fallen by tens of thousands in recent months, but that’s partly because Mexican authorities are now doing the work for Trump administration has pressed it to do. Threatened with U.S. tariffs in the late spring of 2019, Mexico agreed to increase deportations, and detentions, and to slow the distribution of transit visas.

In early January, Tapachula felt like a giant waiting room. Everywhere we went, we recognized immigrants by the plastic folders they use to carry their paperwork. They waited on park benches around the central square, they waited in the hallways of boardinghouses, they waited in long lines outside the detention center and even longer lines outside the refugee office. They waited for their number to come up, waited for the situation at the U.S. border to change, waited for the U.S. presidential election.

One baking-hot afternoon, hundreds of people queued outside the main Tapachula immigration office, some seated with their backs against the center’s wall, most standing in the shade, all facing the barricades at the end of the cul-de-sac.

The only movement in the line came when a police vehicle rolled down the street, parting the stragglers and iced-drink vendors. The people in the crowd came from Haiti, from Honduras and El Salvador, from Uganda, and from Cuba, all bearing their plastic folders of paperwork.

At 2 p.m., Mexican marines advanced to the barricades with their helmet visors down and riot shields raised. Between the marines’ shields, immigration officials read out names from the headers of stapled-together papers — the elusive transit papers. The crowd surged forward as people strained to hear the names being called. Two groups of Haitians, one on either side of the barricades, yelled at each other.

“Are you a journalist?” said a voice, in English.

“Yes. Does this happen a lot?” we asked, nervously.

The woman laughed.

“It’s an everyday event,” she said. “Monday to Friday.”

This was uncanny: The young woman sounded like she came straight out of the American Midwest, and yet there she was, listening for her name to be called. The only stranger part? She had come straight out of the American Midwest.

Jackie Ortiz is 28 years old. She was born in El Salvador but was raised in Wichita, Kansas, where she spent about 18 years until she was deported.

Like Dorothy, Ortiz was picked up by a whirlwind and dropped in an unrecognizable land to start a surreal journey. Now, she is waiting. She has filed for asylum in Mexico, hoping to work in Cancun or Tijuana, where her English skills will come in handy. She should have been a shoo-in for Mexican residency, but immigration officials denied her initial application when they saw her tattoos. They conflated the stars and other decorative images on her body with the brands of the maras, the very gangsters she was fleeing in El Salvador. Now, she waits in the daily scrum to see if her appeal will be accepted.

“I can’t go back and I can’t go forward so I’m stuck in the middle,” said Ortiz.

Her story is one among thousands of immigrants who make up an increasingly large percentage of Tapachula’s population of about 300,000.

Up until last year, immigrants had to wait about three weeks in Tapachula, the main processing site for people crossing from Guatemala, to issue a transit visa. These “salvaconductos,” as they are known in Spanish, were — and, in most cases, still are — Latin American governments’ way to keep the immigrants moving, for a small fee. Using tariff threats, President Donald Trump struck a deal with Mexico in June 2019, extracting a promise to slow the movement of people.

As a result, immigrants now have to wait for as long as nine months in Tapachula to get transit visas. It’s a strange, suspended state of existence.

Behind, within view of the central square, is an archetypal triangular volcano, part of the Guatemala highland. Ahead, signs for “Mexico,” as the national capital is known here.

After crossing the Suchiate River on Mexico’s southern border, immigrants must wait to get permission to travel through Mexico.

We entered Mexico at the nearby border town of Ciudad Hidalgo, crossing a bridge over the Suchiate River. Adolfo, who transported us on a bicycle rickshaw, pointed out the improvised truck-tire rafts crossing just east of the bridge as we jingled across. Most of the passengers on these rafts were now local Guatemalans with permits to go back and forth, he told us, but the rafts had long been the primary way for overland immigrants to enter Mexico. He also showed us the spot, just west of the bridge, where truck-tire rafts were stacked on the banks. Here, he said, was where the immigrants now crossed, in la madrugada — the dead of night.

It was the dry season, and the Suchiate River was low, with almost half of its silty bed exposed in places. On the way back, we saw people wading across. If it were not for the banana leaves and thick vegetation on its banks, it could have been the Rio Grande somewhere in West Texas.

A week after we left, on January 21, an immigrant caravan tried to cross the river on foot at that the same spot. On that attempt and on other occasions, they were blocked by the Mexican National Guard. Footage sent by our sources shows immigrants flinging rocks at National Guard troops, and the troops flinging them back.

The clashes and deportations are not the only sign of the border fight moving south. Honduran Ezequiel Aguilar said he swam the Suchiate River to get into Mexico.

Aguilar, 30, said he owned a cellphone store in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He fell behind on his protection payments to the maras and returned to the store one day in early October to find the front of it riddled with bullets. He decided to leave and says he didn’t hang around to gather money or paperwork.

He crossed into Guatemala and made his way to Tecun Uman on the Mexican border. At first light, he swam the river. He scaled a wall on the opposite bank, entering Ciudad Hidalgo. There, he hid behind a banana plant. Aguilar had not eaten in the 24 hours since he fled Honduras. He asked a woman with a food cart called Dona Juanita Perez for help, and she took pity on him. Now, when he’s done with his shift on a local farm, he sometimes brings Perez flowers.

Immigrants like Aguilar receive temporary work permits through a program organized by the municipal authorities of Tapachula. Mostly, the city employs the immigrants to sweep the street or gives them permits to sell water on the street. Speaking Spanish seems to be key for these jobs as we only met Cubans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans working them.

As Jackie Ortiz and other Central American immigrants acknowledged, the many African, Haitian and South Asian immigrants have it even tougher than they do in Tapachula, thanks to the language barrier and institutional racism.

Many of these “extra-continental” immigrants also had to trek through the Darién jungle in Panama on the way to Tapachula, and many who spoke with us were still processing that nightmarish labyrinth, where it’s not unusual to stumble upon unburied bodies or armed robbers.

Few of the local businesses in Tapachula seem to employ immigrants. Disturbingly, one help wanted sign specified that applicants must present Mexican citizenship identification, the (somewhat) polite version of “no immigrants need apply.”

“We have no money but we’re not allowed to work,” said Casiona Fiorista, a Haitian immigrant seeking papers for herself and her family, which includes a newborn child. “It’s impossible.”

“They’re in limbo,” wrote a pamphleteer in a Mexico City publication called En El Camino – “On the Road.” “The Mexican government doesn’t allow them to finish their voyage to the U.S. … At the same time, it doesn’t offer them a real alternative of employment or even a return to where they’ve come from.”

A small but growing minority of the immigrants in Tapachula, including Aguilar and Ortiz, have given up on the American dream, and now seek asylum status in Mexico. The wait is slightly less tortuous, at about six months. Even with a resident’s card, however, there’s little hope of a comfortable life. One Salvadoran man told us he made about $100 a week working a grueling job at a Guadalajara recycling warehouse.

Like many other choke points on the long road through Central and South America to the U.S., the city of Tapachula has been transformed into a kind of landlocked port. Interspersed with the rotisseries, pharmacies, shoe shops and hardware stores that typify midsize Mexican towns, there are many small, bare-bones hotels catering to the immigrants. We visited a multistory boardinghouse where Cuban immigrants were packed in as many as six to a room, in conditions reminiscent of the Gangs of New York-era tenements. The property manager, who appeared to be Cuban himself, reclined on the couch in the lobby and waved us up, grinning at his texts. A girl in her 20s sat on a stoop outside the hotel, looking at her own phone and crying.

There were two agents waiting in vain for customers in the Xiinbal travel agency, which sells airplane and bus tickets to northern border towns. Business is dead, said the owner, whose partner quit recently.

“There’s no movement,” said the man. “Many come inquiring; very few have the documents.”

One of only two humanitarian immigrant shelters in town, the Albergue Buen Pastor, was founded about 30 years ago on the outskirts of town by Olga Sanchez. Sanchez initially opened her own home, where she carried immigrants injured while jumping “La Bestia,” the freight train that used to run through Tapachula and still leaves from nearby Arriaga. Now Sanchez and two other administrators give room and board to hundreds of immigrants in the facility, which is about the size of a rural American elementary school. There were about 400 people there when we visited and it seemed overcrowded, with throngs of people gathered in the entrance courtyard. It’s hard to imagine the conditions in early February when an official there emailed us to say the number of residents had grown to 700.

There are roughly two dozen bus-ticket offices in the streets near the open-air market at the center of town. None of them advertised the Mexican tourist destinations, like Oaxaca and Huatulco, destinations that are served by a more up-market bus station on the edge of town. The posters at these offices advertised bus rides to cities like Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez and Nuevo Laredo, towns along the U.S. border 48 hours by road to the north.

It costs about $100 for a bus ticket to Nuevo Laredo, but, according to one Salvadoran woman, smugglers were now charging $10,000 for the same trip.

Up until the deal with the U.S. in June, business was brisk, the bus agents told us. The immigrants would jump on these buses after the three-week wait for transit visas. One Bangladeshi man told us that, instead of waiting around Tapachula for months, he had tried his luck boarding a bus without the visa in December. He didn’t even get out of the bus station before the immigration police nabbed him. It was back to the detention center for his third monthlong stint.

Conditions in the Siglo XXI (21st century) detention center sound grim; The Associated Press has reported on chronic overcrowding there.

“It’s not detention, it’s a prison,” said Hassan Twimhe, a 31-year-old Ugandan man we met outside the detention center. He said he had to share a cell with seven other men. The only way he could get extra servings of the paltry rations in the detention center, he said, was to pretend he was Cuban. Twimhe said his transit visa expired while he was being treated for a medical condition in Tapachula. He had returned to the detention center to seek an extension on the visa but was convinced that he’d be locked up again while they processed his request.

For the immigrants, the whole city of Tapachula is something akin to a prison. And this is no accident. This is the outcome of what the U.S. asked Mexico to do in the June 2019 agreement. It’s a bureaucratic form of the deterrence policy that saw families separated on the Rio Grande.

The signs posted on the lampposts around Tapachula would work just as well in El Paso, Dallas or Washington, D.C.: “When did you forget that you are an immigrant?”

Rob Curran is a writer in Denton.

Andrew Nelson is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas.

They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Source: https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/02/23/the-border-crisis-continues-only-now-migrants-wait-2000-miles-south/

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