Indian Health Services
New Mexico
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Dr. Eleanor Emery writes in USA Today:
opinion
Asylum seekers I meet flee something even worse than Trump’s unethical immigration agenda
Our immigration policies seek to discourage border crossings by making life difficult for migrants. But almost nothing could be worse than going home.
Updated 8:38 am EDT Sep. 24, 2019
The Trump administration recently announced it intends to end the Flores settlement, an agreement that has been in place since 1997 and sets minimum standards for the treatment of children in detention. Under Flores, the detainment of children is restricted to a maximum of 20 days in order to limit their exposure to the harsh conditions and negative health impacts of detention. Overturning this agreement would allow children to be detained with their families indefinitely.
As a physician who works with adults seeking asylum in the United States, part of my role is to understand the magnitude of violence that a person has experienced and that has motivated their journey to our country. The stories I hear, and the physical and psychological scars that these asylum seekers bear, are a vivid portrayal of the forces driving migration.
The Trump administration has rationalized their decision to overturn Flores using the concept of deterrence. Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, explained the decision this way:
“This is a deterrent, because they know that instead of rushing the border, which is what’s been going on for a number of years now, by using the massive numbers coming to the border and overwhelming our facilities and our capacity to hold folks and our court rulings, which is what the Flores rule was, that now they can and will to the extent we’re able to do so, hold them until those hearings happen.”
In other words, if migrant families know they face prolonged detainment in the United States, they might reconsider making the journey at all. This flawed logic exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the context of migration to our southern border today.
‘Push’ and ‘pull’ — but especially ‘push’
Migration is driven by a combination of “push” and “pull” factors. In economic migration, migrants are being pulled to the USA by promises of better jobs or educational opportunities in the destination country.
But much of the record level of migration from Central America here has been driven, not by the allure of better opportunities, but by an epidemic of violence in the home countries — by push factors. In fact, a recent Doctors Without Borders report found that nearly 40% of migrants cited direct attacks or threats to themselves or their families as the main reason for fleeing their countries. The majority of these people originate from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — the Northern Triangle — one of the most violent parts of the world today.
Latinos have no excuse: I asked Latinos why they joined immigration law enforcement. Now I’m urging them to leave.
The principle of deterrence is based on the idea that any act has associated positive and negative outcomes. If you are able to increase the associated negative outcomes, then you may ultimately reach a tipping point where it is no longer in the actor’s best interests to perform the act.
In the case of migration, if you can increase the negative consequences of crossing the border without legal status, then at some point the harm of doing so outweighs the potential benefit. But as I listen to the histories of asylum seekers — to the accounts of torture, of gang rape, of family members, including children, being murdered in front of you — deterrence seems not only morally dubious but futile. When this is the push, is there anything in the world that could deter you from running?
How cruel are we willing to be?
I recently met one asylum seeker fleeing years of imprisonment and brutal sexual violence by a gang in her home country in the Northern Triangle. After a harrowing escape and journey leading to our border, she presented herself to Customs and Border Patrol Protection agents and requested asylum. She was taken into custody and sent to a detention facility in California, where she had been awaiting her asylum hearing for months.
After sitting with her for hours, hearing her story and examining her scars, I asked her how she felt about being in detention. She shrugged. When she arrived at the U.S. border seeking safety, she certainly hadn’t expected to be put in jail. But she also told me that the detention center wasn’t all that bad — no one rapes her there.
Our immigration policies hurt Americans: An illegal immigrant killed my daughter. Trump’s right — we must complete the border wall.
Many of the asylum seekers I have met give a similar, stark assessment of the pros and cons of migrating to the USA. I have led clinics in New York, Massachusetts and California that conduct forensic medical evaluations for people seeking asylum, and the terror that they are fleeing is consistent.
Through my work with the Los Angeles Human Rights Initiative, I met another young woman who had been imprisoned by a gang and subjected to torture and gang rape before escaping and coming to the United States. She told me she would rather die in detention than be deported home to the Northern Triangle to face her former captors who awaited her there.
A third woman in California, who was applying for asylum on the grounds of domestic violence, was resolute when she spoke with me about her heart-breaking decision to leave her son behind with family when she fled her ruthless husband, a police officer in her town. When I asked whether she ever regretted her decision, she said no. Leaving her son had felt like dying, but the abuse her husband had subjected her to was worse than death.
Apart from being unethical, the human rights abuses generated by the Trump administration’s immigration policies will simply not accomplish their objective of stemming the tide of migration. The bleak reality is that, to deter people from seeking safety in our country, we would have to do so much worse than locking them up with their children indefinitely. Unless we are willing to be more cruel than what they are fleeing, deterrence is not an option.
Dr. Eleanor Emery is a member of the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network and a program officer at the Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy at Cambridge Health Alliance. She lives and practices internal medicine with the Indian Health Service in New Mexico. Her views do not reflect the views of her employer.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
Originally Published 6:00 am EDT Sep. 24, 2019
**Updated 8:38 am EDT Sep. 24, 2019**
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Unfortunately, I think that Dr. Emery has underestimated the racism-fueled intentional cruelty of the Trump Administration as well as the cowardice and fecklessness of many Federal Judges, particularly at the appellate level.
Sending asylum applicants to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, some of the most dangerous country in the world, plagued by corruption, and without functional asylum systems takes lawlessness, cruelty, complicity, and open mockery of our justice system to a new level!
I agree with her that it probably won’t be enough to stop refugees from coming. But, it might well be enough to stop them from using our legal system and to just take their chances with the smugglers and the extralegal immigration system that Trump and his courts have been working so hard to expand and enable.
As I have said numerous times, Trump and his immoral scofflaw DHS & DOJ sycophants are the “best friends” of professional smugglers, cartels, gangs, rapists, kidnappers, and extortionists. By diverting attention and resources from real law enforcement to punishing individuals who are trying to use our legal system, Trump and his cronies and enablers have been an amazing boon and “profit center” for criminals.
PWS
09-25-19