President Joe Biden moved last week to restrict access to the asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In an executive order that went into effect at 9:01 p.m. local time Tuesday evening, Biden said his administration would begin quickly expelling border crossers without giving them the chance to apply for asylum. Border officials will not ask them if they fear returning to their home countries, which officials previously were required to do. Agents are still supposed to pass along migrants for screenings if they insist, unprompted, they are in danger if they return, but those screenings will use a legal standard that is more difficult to meet.
Local organizations who support asylum seekers on the U.S. side said they haven’t noticed much difference since the policy went into effect.
“So far the numbers have essentially been the same as the week before,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which organizes staff and volunteers to wait at the trolley station where Border Patrol drops off released migrants.
In recent weeks, San Diego and Tuscon have been the busiest Border Patrol sectors, with May crossings in San Diego fluctuating from around 6,000 per week to over 8,000 per week, according to data posted by the sector chief, Patricia McGurk-Daniel. The number of crossings usually goes down in the summer months, so it may be difficult to determine how much any upcoming changes are caused by the order and how much is seasonal fluctuation.
Alexandra Mendoza of The San Diego Union-Tribune reported Sunday small groups from Guatemala, El Salvador and Venezuela have been expelled to Mexico. Mexican immigration officials then sent them to an immigration facility in Tabascoa state that borders Guatemala. Mendoza’s article suggests that officials are using the same agreement that was in place last year with a different expulsion policy, which limited expelled nationalities to those from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti.
The order is intended to force asylum seekers to wait for appointments with the CBP One application. According to local advocates, the wait times for migrants in Tijuana can be six to eight months. But because the application is essentially a lottery for slots, the waits can vary widely.
On Friday, a group of asylum seekers stood in the Chaparral plaza on the south side of the San Ysidro Port of Entry PedWest crossing, waiting for their appointment times. They sat under a cluster of trees or leaned against a Jorge MarÃn sculpture that depicts four migrants – two men, a woman and a child – standing on a small raft. Some said they had gotten appointments in as little as 12 days while two men from Cuba said they had waited more than six months.
“We practically became Mexicans,” one of the Cubans joked about his time waiting in Mexico City for an appointment.
As Gustavo Solis of KPBS reported, Tijuana shelters are worried that the increased reliance on CBP One appointments will once again fill their spaces past capacity.
Under Biden’s new policy, there are exceptions for unaccompanied children, victims of severe forms of trafficking as well as people facing “exceptionally compelling circumstances” such as an acute medical emergency or imminent danger.
The order in many ways mirrors the logistics that made up the Title 42 rule – a pandemic era policy created by the Trump administration that led to mass expulsions of asylum seekers. Under that program, which lasted until May 2023, asylum seekers often reported that agents ignored them if they said they were afraid to return home, and people who were fleeing imminent danger were routinely turned away from the border.
Parental separation concerns: Unaccompanied children were also exempted from Title 42, which led to many migrant parents making the difficult decision to send their children across the border alone after they were expelled as a family.
In a press call last week, a reporter asked a Biden advisor why the administration had structured this order similarly and whether he was worried about parents choosing to separate from their children.
“We don’t think that will happen,” said Tom Perez, senior advisor and assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
The policy will remain in effect until there are less than 1,500 apprehensions at the border daily for a week, and it will go back into effect if the number of daily apprehensions rises to above 2,500. As Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America pointed out, crossings have exceeded this limit in 110 of the past 296 months.
Who am I?
As you may have noticed, dear reader, I am not Sandra Dibble. I am Kate Morrissey, and I’ve been covering immigration news in San Diego and Tijuana for nearly eight years. I am joining Sandra to co-write this newsletter going forward. We’ll be taking turns in the coming months. When it’s my turn, you’re likely to see more of a migration focus, and Sandra will catch you up on all things Tijuana and Baja.
In Other News
La Presidenta: Mexicans elected their first woman president earlier this month, giving a clear victory to Claudia Sheinbaum, who represents the Morena party of the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Their party was also given a clear victory in Mexico’s legislature. KPBS and the Union-Tribune reported on in-person voting at the Mexican Consulate in San Diego. So many people showed up that the line continued until polls closed, and many were turned away. Sheinbaum will be inaugurated on Oct. 1.
Transferred away from legal help: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been quietly conducting mass transfers of detainees from Otay Mesa Detention Center even though they have attorneys on file and upcoming final court hearings. I wrote about this recent development for Capital&Main.
At the intersection of migration and homelessness: The UT’s Blake Nelson looked into an issue that has long been bothering advocates who support arriving asylum seekers – trying to figure out how many of them have no place to go or are unable to travel to their sponsors and end up living on the streets of San Diego. Nelson didn’t reach a final number, but he learned that migrants make up about 8 percent of requests to the Homelessness Response Center and a little less than 20 percent of the current residents at Alpha Project facilities.
An agent exposed: A humanitarian aid volunteer has complained that a Border Patrol agent showed her photos of his genitals when she approached him for help with a migrant who needed medical attention at an open air holding area in Jacumba, according to inewsource’s SofÃa MejÃas-Pascoe.
World Refugee Day: The annual celebration is coming up on June 20, and the San Diego Refugee Forum is planning an event on Saturday, June 22 at Cuyamaca Community College.
Thank you for reading. I’m open for tips, suggestions and feedback on Instagram @katemorrisseyjournalist and on X/Twitter @bgirledukate.
I will look forward to columns by both Kate and Sandra Dibble (whom I always read anyway). Thanks for carrying this!
Ahh, yes, Cryin’ Kate. Never met an illegal she didn’t like.