The New Yorker: The Long Wait for Tijuana’s Migrants to Process Their Own Asylum Claims

Under a blue tent in a Tijuana plaza, a few hundred feet south of the U.S. border, two men in windbreakers sat behind a plastic foldout table, huddled over a gray hardcover ledger. It was around seven-thirty on Tuesday morning, and people with I.D. cards and folders full of papers lined up to give their information. While one of the two men inscribed each person’s name and country of origin in the ledger, the other handed back a four-digit number scrawled on a small slip of paper, which corresponded to a spot on a waiting list of roughly five thousand people seeking asylum in the U.S. I was standing at the back of the tent with a twenty-six-year-old former policeman from Michoacán, who had first come to the plaza to put his family’s name in the ledger a month before. He was tall, with upright posture and a wispy beard, and he wore a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Because he’d been involved in law enforcement, a cartel had threatened to kill him, his wife, who is pregnant, and their two small children, ages two and five; they were now staying in a migrant shelter across town, waiting for their number to be called. “There are more people here than usual because of the caravan,” he told me. “It makes us nervous. Some people are here just to check their place in line, to make sure nothing’s happened.”

The men managing the ledger weren’t government officials, or even immigration lawyers. They were fellow asylum seekers who had come with their own documents several weeks before. When their numbers are eventually called, and they’re summoned to the border for a preliminary interview with U.S. immigration agents, another group of volunteers will take their place. There is a specific reason for this ad hoc arrangement. The Department of Homeland Security “meters,” or limits, the number of people who can seek asylum in the U.S. on any given day, and Mexican authorities coöperate by controlling the flow on their side of the border. Neither government wants to acknowledge its involvement in the backlog, especially the Americans, and so they have outsourced the process of dealing with it to the immigrants themselves. For the past year, as the U.S. government has further restricted the entry of immigrants at the border, getting on the ledger has become the only way asylum seekers can legally cross into San Diego, the most heavily trafficked port of entry in the Western Hemisphere. The creation of such lists, a practice which began here in Tijuana, has, in the last several months, spread to other border crossings from Arizona to South Texas.

In the tent, a group of Mexican immigration officers in khaki vests and orange sweatshirts milled around, chatting amiably with the immigrants. These officials are the intermediaries. They keep the list overnight and slyly hand it off to the volunteers the next day; they also relay the day’s allowance set by U.S. officials: a number somewhere between thirty and ninety people, who are then allowed to move ahead to a credible-fear screening, in San Diego. About seventy-five per cent of them typically pass, and, from there, many will move to detention centers while their cases make their way through yet another queue, this one in the American immigration courts.

Of nearly eight thousand migrants who arrived in Tijuana earlier this month with the caravan, about twenty-five hundred of them have entered their names on the list. The rest either hadn’t yet learned about it, or were discouraged by the idiosyncrasies of the process. The former policeman, who also helps with the list, told me that many members of the caravan were angry when they learned that this apparently informal arrangement was the only way forward. Two days earlier, not far from where we were standing, a few hundred members of the caravan evaded a police barricade and tried to rush the border. The U.S. government responded by firing tear gas into the crowd, and then temporarily closed the main port of entry. Many of the asylum seekers who were awaiting their turn on the list now worried that the caravan’s arrival would cause further delays.

Shortly after nine o’clock, the volunteers conferred with the Mexican immigration officials and made an announcement for everyone to gather around. The day’s allowance was eighty, and the counting would resume with the number 1,140. In the ledger, there are ten names listed under every number, meaning that eight groups (numbers 1,140 through 1,147) were going to be called. Most families can be covered by a single number. But someone pointed to a nearby curb occupied by an extended family of thirty people from the Mexican state of Guerrero; in their entirety, they took up three numbers in the ledger. One of the volunteers started calling names, followed by countries of origin, and the crowd parted to make way for asylum seekers emerging with looks of elation and relief. (I was told that those who didn’t show have a three-day grace period.) An elderly man in a cowboy hat cheered every time someone from Guatemala was called. “Arriba Guatemala!” he cried.

The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s incoming President, takes office on December 1st. On the campaign trail, López Obrador vowed to fight the Trump Administration and champion the cause of migrants. Yet late last week, the Washington Post reported that a deal was being finalized between the incoming Administration and the United States in which the Mexican government would agree to an unprecedented American plan called “Remain in Mexico.” Migrants seeking asylum in the United States would stay in Mexico while they waited for American immigration judges to weigh their cases, which could take months, if not years. Members of López Obrador’s inner circle later denied entering into any such agreement, but the incident exposed a startling reality: the two governments were having talks to effectively normalize a border crisis in which Mexico is becoming a holding station for migrants whom the U.S. is refusing to take.

For the last two years, the Trump Administration has been trying to dismantle the asylum system altogether. By law, the U.S. must give migrants fleeing for their lives a chance to petition for refuge in the country, but anti-immigration stalwarts in the government have been working assiduously to make that a practical impossibility. Limiting access to the ports of entry plays into the broader strategy: asylum seekers are being told to wait indefinitely in Mexico, with no guarantee that American immigration agents will ever process their claims. When the migrants, in their desperation, attempt to cross in between official checkpoints and claim asylum on U.S. soil, as they’re legally allowed to do, the U.S. government has punished them severely—by detaining people indefinitely, separating parents and children, and, most recently, attempting to ban asylum completely for anyone who enters the country “illegally.” The over-all effect is a bottleneck of migrants in northern Mexico that has now become dangerously unsustainable.

More than five thousand people from the Central American caravan, including large numbers of women and children, are currently staying in a squalid refugee camp in the northern part of the city, where the conditions are foul, and worsening by the day. Trash is heaping up, and the air is dense with the stench of human waste and soiled clothes. People are sleeping outside, in tents, and under tarps. Relief workers are warning about the spread of illness and disease, and those with the means have begun wearing face masks to keep from getting sick. The local government, led by a conservative mayor, who has loudly criticized the caravan, has made plain that the migrants are on their own. (“Tijuana is a city of migrants, but we just don’t want them this way,” he said.) Shelters across the city are overrun.