Immigration Reporter
LA Times
Source: LA Times website
Andrea Castillo reports for the LA Times:
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=b5d4d78a-33fb-4da8-9a0c-cdc6120dbb7d
Asylum seekers must wait for appointments in U.S. for everyone, or leave some behind.
By Andrea Castillo
WASHINGTON — Inside a tent near the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Jeyson woke up before 3 a.m. every day for a month to fill out applications to request asylum for his family of four through a U.S. government mobile app.
The 25-year-old from Venezuela eventually secured appointments for himself and his wife, but the slots filled up so quickly that he couldn’t get two more for their children. They weren’t worried, though — they had heard about families in similar situations being waved through by border officials.
Instead, he said, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent told them recently that because each member of the family did not have an appointment, “you two can enter, but not your children.” Jeyson asked The Times to withhold his last name out of fear for his family’s safety.
Now, many families like Jeyson’s have found themselves confronted with a seemingly impossible decision: Wait indefinitely for enough appointments for the whole family, or split up. It is unclear how many migrants have been put in this position.
. . . .
“We already risked it all,” he said. “What can we do? We are hopeful that we can get three appointments. Three, in the end, is less than four.”
Advocates said some parents have decided to leave their children with extended family or friends in order to keep their appointments.
Jeyson said a couple from his encampment did just that, leaving their five children at the border bridge and entering the U.S. after managing to get only two appointments.
Children who are unaccompanied by a parent are exempt from Title 42. Those in the care of adults who are not their legal guardians — even if they are extended family — are separated until a guardian can be properly vetted. Jeyson said he watched as the children walked up to a border agent and were taken into custody.
Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, director of the Sidewalk School, a nonprofit that offers education, medical care and other assistance to migrants in Mexican border towns, has organized sessions with parents at various shelters and encampments in Matamoros and Reynosa to explain what will happen if they send their child across the border unaccompanied.
“We don’t want them to think you cross and then your child crosses and will come back to you a day later,” she said. “We were surrounded by parents who were showing us, one after the other, [who] have an appointment but their child does not.”
Rangel-Samponaro recommended to parents that they cancel their appointments and restart their search. But some parents told her they would separate from their kids anyway.
“Family separation has never stopped,” she said, referencing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy that led to thousands of migrant children being taken from their parents. “The only difference here is that CBP One is now doing it instead of the other ways it’s been done since 2018.”
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Read Andrea’s complete article at the link.
Let’s start with one undisputed fact: The number of appointments available on CBP One is pathetically, ridiculously inadequate for the KNOWN number of potential applicants waiting in Mexico! Why would this be after the Administration has had over two years to work on this perhaps challenging, yet very solvable problem?
Unnecessary delay is just another form of “bureaucratic deterrence through incompetence” used by the Trump Administration and, inexcusably, continued under Biden.
Just how bonkers is this DHS-created problem? Dependents are included on a primary asylum seeker’s application. Consequently, in most cases one application covers the entire family.
And, dependents don’t have to “prove” independent eligibility for asylum. Therefore, anything beyond biographical information and perhaps proof of relationship is unnecessary.
There is absolutely no reason for requiring a separate “appointment” for each family member. The current system is “pure harassment and deterrence through bureaucratic incompetence.”
In Immigration Court, a family of five required only ONE asylum hearing slot — NOT FIVE!
Most legal asylum seekers at the border want to “do things the right way” — present themselves to DHS and submit an application. It’s neither profound nor “illegal.”
The BEST way of getting applicants to use the ports of entry is to work with experts and NGOs to establish a user-friendly, generous, timely system that prioritizes the many strong claims and grants them promptly at the Asylum Office rather than feeding them into a backlogged and dysfunctional EOIR.
In other words, if you BUILD a fair, credible, user-friendly legal application system at legal ports of entry, applicants will USE it. That the Trump White Nationalists destroyed our legal, statutory refugee and asylum systems was well-known at the time. Indeed, Biden and Harris campaigned on a pledge fix the system and restore legal asylum!
Instead, the Administration failed to utilize the skills and experience of experts to have a planned fix ready on “day one.” Since then, over more than two years, they have inexplicably ignored expert advice, wasted time, squandered resources, and bobbled through a bewildering series of mindless “Stephen Miller Lite deterrence gimmicks,” including “dedicated dockets,” prioritizing the wrong cases, “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” on steroids, a “Miller Lite holdover” BIA known for hostility to asylum seekers, ignoring the need for pro bono representation, failing to train and deploy enough Asylum Officers to the border, and not working with advocates, NGOs, and asylum seekers to prescreen cases, start granting asylum and moving qualified refugees (and their families) through the system and into durable legal status prior to the lifting of Title 42.
The CBP One screwup is just the latest in a string of “unforced errors” by the Biden Administration that abuse asylum seekers without any systemic benefits to anyone — “random acts of cruelty and stupidity!” This app was obviously designed by non-users for use by USG “gatekeepers” without any idea of what its like to be an asylum seeker stuck in Mexico.
Indeed, it appears that the app’s developers have little idea of how the legal asylum system works. Talk about “amateur night at the Bijou!”
PHOTO: Thomas Hawk
Creative Commons
Amateur Night
“Family separation” has never stopped; now it has been “automated” — by a Dem Administration that has abandoned humanity and betrayed its campaign promises! Inexcusable!
🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!
PWS
02-27-23