EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
FROM SPLC:
The message was loud and clear: “Do not come.” This would be the Biden administration’s initial attempt to deter migrants who fled danger in their home countries from seeking protection in the U.S.
First, President Biden in March discouraged migrants from trekking north to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. He suggested they stay in their home countries – where many face violence and persecution – as the administration addressed an increase in the number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the southwestern border.
Then, the administration continued to rely on the contested Trump-era Title 42 order by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reject migrants at ports of entry and expel those who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization, thereby denying their legal right to seek asylum.
And in June, the administration delivered another warning to would-be asylum seekers from Guatemala: “Do not come,” said Vice President Kamala Harris during a news conference alongside Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”
Sarah Rich, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, said the vice president’s comments were strikingly similar to rhetoric employed by the Trump administration.
“Seeking protection from violence and persecution is a fundamental human right, and the right to seek asylum is protected by U.S. and international law,” Rich said. “These remarks fly in the face of the right to seek asylum in the U.S. and indicate a disturbing continuity between the Trump administration and the Biden-Harris administration.”
For many migrants in peril, waiting in their home countries for a better time to seek asylum in the U.S. is not – nor could ever be – a viable option.
“I fled my country because I wanted to survive,” Emiliana Doe, whose name has been changed in this story to protect her identity, told the SPLC in Spanish. “I want to live. I want to be somebody. Nobody wants to die.”
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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Speak out against the Biden Administration’s continuation of Trump’s illegal, inhumane, anti-asylum policies at the border! Demand that AG Garland replace unqualified “Miller Lite” anti-asylum Immigration Judges, who happily furthered the past regime’s xenophobic, anti-due-process policies, with far better qualified progressive experts! Demand a BIA that will be a courageous leader in granting legal protection and reducing backlogs through best practices and full due process! Demand that Garland stop dragging his feet and finally fulfill the original EOIR vision of “guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” Demand an Attorney General with the backbone and integrity to tell Biden, Harris, & Mayorkas that their continued abrogation of asylum laws and international obligations, not to mention Constitutional protections, is grossly illegal and must end NOW!
By contrast with Garland’s timid, dilatory, and often apparently indifferent approach to the rule of law for migrants, not to mention human lives, Jeff Sessions had absolutely no problem intervening, without invitation, in any agency’s programs and policies to advance his White Nationalist, nativist, xenophobic mis-interpretations of the law!
🇺🇸⚖️Due Process Forever!
PWS
07-25-21