NOGALES, Sonora – Asylum seekers stranded in Mexico and devout leaders in southern Arizona organized a binational demonstration to protest U. S. government policy that blocks all asylum resources on the U. S. -Mexico border because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
An organization of about 90 people met on Monday morning on both sides of the border fence west of the DeConcini access port in the border towns of Ambos Nogales, who talked about the uncertainty faced by migrants, as well as the dangers associated with a global pandemic and the security hazards in Mexico.
The organization on the Mexican side, about 70 people, was basically made up of migrants from Mexico and Latin America who implemented or planned to apply for asylum in the United States. He suspended the appeal of asylum seekers indefinitely.
Approximately 20 other people gathered in the Arizona aspect of International Street, including representatives of various religious teams and migrant advocates who asked Preaspectnt Donald Trump management to respect their foreign obligations and resume processing asylum applications.
“Defying our legal and ethical culture as a nation, our fashionable representations of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus are trapped in conditions of persecution and danger rather than being allowed to enroll for families and communities hoping to obtain them,” the bishop said. Edward Weisenburger of the Catholic Diocese of Tucson said in a reading prepared during the meeting.
Monday’s demonstration was led and organized through Latin American asylum seekers whom the Department of Homeland Security sent to Nogales under migrant coverage protocols, also known as “Stay in Mexico”. According to the program, the U. S. government has returned more than 60,000 migrants to Mexico for the duration of its asylum applications.
In January, DHS began sending asylum seekers to Nogales, the city’s main border along the Mexico-Arizona border, but all of its court appearances under the program take place in El Paso, more than 370 km away.
In March, when COVID-19 cases began to accumulate in the United States, DHS announced that it would postpone all remaining audiences in Mexico to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.
Initially, officials began postponing hearing dates as the branch extended border restrictions month after month. In July, DHS and the U. S. Department of Justice have been able to do so. But it’s not the first time They jointly announced that they would suspend all hearings indefinitely until states on both sides of the border had contained the spread of the This task has been confusing due to giant epidemics in border states such as Arizona and Texas, and because of the lack of readiness in Mexican states like Sonora, whose hospitals have been hit and some inflamed patients have been rejected.
Asylum advocates, such as the Kino Border Initiative, a binational migrant aid organization in Ambos Nogales, said the U. S. government’s resolve to suspend hearings without a constant end date has a higher point of uncertainty after migrants return to Nogales under migrant coverage protocols.
“This sense of depression is harsh and the precariousness in which other people have to live is not sustainable,” said Sara Ritchie, the group’s communications director.
During Monday’s demonstration through migrants, some 60 asylum seekers and potential asylum seekers dressed in white shirts marched on the Mexican side to the DeConcini border crossing and then to the binational rally west of the port of entry.
It is unclear how many asylum seekers sent to Nogales by the MPP remain in the city, Ritchie said. Many migrants have moved to Ciudad Juarez to be closer to hearing dates. More have chosen to give up and leave.
“Many have to return to the very violent places from which they originally fled, and have been forced to make this difficult resolution about whether this danger or danger, or this precariousness or that,” Ritchie said, adding that the number of migrants feeding and supply facilities has declined.
But the migrants the Kino Border Initiative still sees at its newly built migrant aid center for longer periods of time, he added.
This includes women like Antonia Castillo, a Honduran member of the first migrant organization sent to Nogales under the MPP in January, she and her teenage daughter share the room with two other women from Honduras awaiting the resumption of MPP hearings.
The women fled violence and concern about the protection of their children and met in January as they illegally crossed the Arizona border in search of asylum. They were sent together to Nogales. The eight months they spent in Nogales, a town they had never set foot in. before, they were difficult, he said.
“We can’t do it anymore. We feel like we’re wasting all our strength,” Castillo said in Spanish.
The women traveled to Juarez in early April, risking COVID-19 by taking an eight-hour bus for their first asylum hearing, DHS postponed its hearing and postponed it to a new date in June; however, this hearing also postponed, but this time without a new date.
The 3 women cannot paint in Mexico due to a mixture of considerations about COVID-19 and the protection of their underage children, they have the Kino Frontera Initiative for food and other types of assistance. living in the United States to rent an apartment shared by the six women and young people.
“I think the most we can hold out like this is two months, until October, November. After that, I don’t know what would happen to us,” Castillo said. “We threaten our lives if we return to our country. “
The Trump administration’s border restrictions on the processing of asylum applications also have an effect on potential asylum seekers from Mexico, as well as migrants from Central and Latin America who are not enrolled in the “Stay in Mexico” program. .
Nogales had one of the longest waiting lists among Mexicans on the U. S. -Mexico border for migrants who wish to legally file their claims at a port of entry, as the Trump administration had encouraged them to make.
Border restrictions launched through DHS in March froze the waiting list, which had approximately 1,000 people. As a result, the number of official U. S. migrants treated at the DeConcini crossing has increased by a handful per day, as part of the United States” counting the policy “to zero, advocates said.
Eleuteria Ibarra, a Mexican asylum seeker who helped organize and lead Monday’s protest, said it was only two days before she called her number when the United States stopped processing asylum programs at the border.
She has been in Nogales for nearly 10 months, with her husband and four children, who fled death threats in their local Warrior, threats they took even more seriously after gunmen killed their stepfather in March, she said.
The circle of relatives had never been to Nogales before and did not plan to spend so much time waiting for his possibility of applying for asylum, while Ibarra said he had had terrifying encounters, the recent high occurred last week when he headed to the border of Kino’s Charity Dining Initiative to collect food for his family circle.
As he walked, he said he saw a boy following her and then approached her.
“The guy told me my name, where I come from and where I live,” he says, not knowing who or what he expected from her. He walked away, but she tremble.
“I got scared, I got scared because I didn’t know who array what idea or what idea he was making me,” he added.
Ibarra said she is willing to wait as long as it is obligatory to be able to apply for asylum because she believes returning to Guerrero is not an option.
She helped organize Monday’s demonstration to help protect women and families in the same situation, she said. Some families, such as Castillo’s, were worse off than hers because at least Ibarra’s husband and eldest son were able to locate paintings to help themselves, he said. .
“If there’s a way to show me for those marches and events, then I’m willing to do it with my other teammates,” she said. “We don’t commit any crime, we don’t do anything abnormal. Array. We can’t do”. anything that hurts us afterwards. “
Monday’s event is part of a series of monthly events organized through the Kino Border Initiative and migrants on the 21st of the month, who chose the date symbolically because that’s when DHS extended its border restrictions month after month.
The occasion included a call to action for governments on both sides of the border, with the aim of maintaining pressure on the Mexican government to deliver the paintings and security it promised migrants when it began accepting them under immigration coverage protocols.
On the U. S. side, the organization called on Americans to put pressure on their representatives and the United States to respect the right to asylum.
“Our government officials are brazenly ignoring sanctioned foreign and American laws,” said the Rev. Herbert Nelson, who runs the Presbyterian Church in the United States, in a statement. “They employ tough police forces to abuse and violate the rights of immigrants and refugees. We are citizens of this country. We will have to hold our leaders accountable for protecting the rights of immigrants and refugees.
Do you have any recommendations or concepts for articles about the U. S. -Mexico border?Contact the reporter at rafael. carranza@arizonarepublic. com or with him on Twitter at @RafaelCarranza.
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