Nogales Is an “Invisible Refugee Camp”
The Biden administration's use of Title 42, rooted in the longstanding deterrence strategy, leaves asylum seekers in the same dangerous, inhumane circumstances as ‘Remain in Mexico,’ but without hope
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Today’s post is an assessment of one year of the Biden administration and the border, but from the on-the-ground perspective of the people most impacted. I was able to go to Nogales, Mexico, last week and talk with people in apartments, makeshift encampments, and shelters throughout the city as they faced off against the new administration’s border policies, a mixture of both new (the continuation of Trump policies) and old (prevention through deterrence). Please read on to see how one of the best insights about where we stand now in 2022 comes from an asylum-seeking two-year-old. My story today follows Melissa’s post on Tuesday that details the opening of a new migrant resource center in Sonoyta, Mexico last month, and how people in the borderlands are coming together and preparing to serve people who are stuck at the border long-term.
Also please save the date because The Border Chronicle is happy to announce that we will have a new discussion thread on smart borders on Thursday, January 27 at 11:30 PT/12:30 MT/1:30 CT/2:30 ET. That is one week from today. We will be joined by a group of people who have done extensive work on border technology and its impacts including the Deputy Director of the Immigrant Defense Project Mizue Aizeki, Geographers Geoffrey Boyce and Samuel Chambers, and journalist J. Weston Phippen. Beginning this month, we’ll be offering these discussion threads with invited experts for paid subscribers only. We are committed to offering as much of The Border Chronicle as we can free of charge. But as two working freelance journalists we rely on paid subscriptions to continue our reporting. Please consider supporting The Border Chronicle with a subscription for just $6 a month or $60 annually (a deal!) and help us become sustainable in 2022. We appreciate ya!
Nogales Is an “Invisible Refugee Camp”
The Biden administration's use of Title 42, rooted in the longstanding deterrence strategy, leaves asylum seekers in the same dangerous, inhumane circumstances as ‘Remain in Mexico,’ but without hope
Across the border at 100 yards’ distance, a surveillance camera stood mounted on a tall steel post painted desert-brown. It seemed to stare directly into the apartment where Guadalupe and her five children were temporarily staying, on the Mexican side. The family had come six months earlier, fleeing death threats in their home state of Guerrero, in southern Mexico. Below the camera, a green-striped U.S. Border Patrol vehicle cruised behind the 20-foot bollards of the rust-colored border wall that snaked up and down through the hills. This seemed a good place to reflect on the Biden administration’s first year and its promise to create a fair and humane immigration system.
After all, Guadalupe’s temporary apartment was one of many such apartments, shelters, makeshift encampments across the city of Nogales, in the Mexican border state of Sonora, which has become an “invisible refugee camp,” as Chelsea Sachau, of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, put it to me. Sachau is the managing attorney of FIRRP’s Border Action Team, which provides legal assistance to and advocates for asylum seekers like Guadalupe.
Right out of the gate, in early February 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order to rescind the Donald Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)—a policy that forced people to wait for their asylum hearing in Mexico. Yet even after that, people like Guadalupe and hundreds if not thousands of others have been forced to remain in Mexico in a precarious limbo. But this de facto “Remain in Mexico” policy should come as no surprise. Over the last decades, the border has been designed to create precarity, vulnerability, hardship, and danger (“mortal danger,” as the 1994 Border Patrol memorandum put it when announcing its deterrence strategy) for undocumented people, border crossers, and asylum seekers. In December, Biden announced that MPP would be reinstated and expanded, and advocates have heard that the program could start in as little as two weeks in Nogales but no one I spoke with has received definitive information from border officials. It seems that the administration is not only maintaining Trump’s policies but also continuing a decades-long, bipartisan deterrence strategy.
Guadalupe’s two-year-old, Gabriela, clung to her legs when she told me that, like many from the Chilpancingo region in Guerrero, the situation became dangerous for her and her children after an armed group attempted to forcibly recruit her 16-year-old boy and the family began to receive death threats. “There were shootouts, there was persecution, there were many kidnappings,” Guadalupe told me.
When they arrived in Nogales in August, they were met with the imposing border wall and shelters filled to capacity. The family lived through some dangerous moments in the streets of Nogales before finding the apartment where we talked, with the help and support of the U.S.-based humanitarian aid organization Voices from the Border. Three months ago, Guadalupe went to the official port of entry to plead for asylum, but she was “rechazada,” rejected. When she asked why, the officials mentioned the pandemic-justified Title 42 (implemented by Trump in 2020), a policy that blockades the border and ports of entry to undocumented people, including asylum seekers.
Guadalupe, in gray sweatpants and a dark shirt, wrung her hands, then looked out the window. You could see and feel her thoughts being pushed and pulled tortuously in multiple directions. When they fled, she told me, her 18-year-old daughter had to leave her studies in a nursing program. Her daughter wanted to go back to Guerrero to finish, but she couldn’t. “I am a mother,” Guadalupe said, “and I have to protect my children.” She had a nephew in Texas who was waiting to receive them if they got past the border. At the same time, her parents were ill and needed care in Guerrero, as well as money to help pay for medicine. On top of that, her father just got Covid.
People like Guadalupe are “ordinary parents in extraordinary circumstances,” as Joanna Williams, the executive director of the Nogales-based Kino Border Initiative—an organization that works closely with asylum seekers and deported people—wrote in a poignant op-ed. They make decisions in complex, ever-changing, ever-evolving circumstances. They look for hope even when there are no options.
From the perspective of Guadalupe’s household, it seemed that the Biden administration was far from moving in a fair and humane direction a year after the president’s inauguration. When I asked Sachau from FIRRP about Guadalupe and her family’s situation of being stranded at the border and if strangely MPP could help them, she told me that because the family was Mexican, they would be “stuck as long as Title 42 exists.” Asylum-seeking Mexicans, in other words, don’t qualify for MPP. She continued, “That is why it is important to understand how they [MPP and Title 42] intersect. There’s a lot of attention around MPP, as there should be, but that is not where all the attention should be placed because Title 42 leaves people in the same dangerous, inhumane circumstances, but without any process whatsoever. It leaves them in basically an invisible refugee camp in Nogales.” Just yesterday the Biden Administration forcefully defended Title 42 in court, arguing that it remain in effect due to COVID. In one year, there have been one million expulsions under Biden using the authority.
Later that day, I met Erica from Guatemala and her six-year-old daughter, Celeste, where they were staying a couple of blocks from the border. A dirt lot around a small transportation service was converted into a makeshift camp for people in the same sort of precarious border limbo as Guadalupe. At that moment, 13 families were staying there. As Erica talked, I looked at the dripping clothes hanging to dry on crisscrossing lines behind her. A man walked by hauling a plastic bucket filled with water. Kids were racing around, including several crouched down in a circle, playing marbles.
Unlike Guadalupe, Erica and Celeste crossed the border in the remote desert near the small town of Sasabe, about 30 miles to the west, when they arrived five months before. The Guatemalan woman and her daughter walked for only 30 minutes before the U.S. Border Patrol arrested them. “They didn’t treat us well,” Erica told me. “First we were locked up most of the day in a trailer like that,” she said, pointing to a long truck nearby. They were there for hours without being offered food, she told me. Then agents transferred Erica and Celeste to the station where they were detained in a cold holding cell. “They didn’t offer a sweater to my daughter, who was freezing.” After the deportation to Mexico, and finding no room in the shelters in Nogales, Erica and Celeste ended up in the camp where we stood. Erica told me that they had withstood many things, but now after months the resources were getting thin, and that could be the last straw.
Like the border policies that have forced crossers into remote and desolate deserts for decades now, border policy continues to create the very multifaceted precarity that Erica described. The challenges and vulnerabilities for people created by MPP and Title 42 include finding a place to sleep, finding work, and figuring out how to feed families on one hand, and being exposed to threat, attack, robbery, or extortion on the other. On top of that, there were people who didn’t have access to medications, and there was discrimination against LGBTQ people and those who spoke only indigenous languages. For Erica, unlike Guadalupe, if MPP were reinstated in Nogales, she would qualify. According to Sachau from FIRRP, however, as it stood where MPP has already been rolled out in El Paso and San Diego, the ports of entry are still closed. “The only way to access MPP is to still cross not through a port of entry but to cross through the border. … This forces asylum seekers to take dangerous, perilous journeys so they will have access to asylum.”
The government still maintains that it lacks the facilities and resources to safely process people during the pandemic. “We strongly disagree with that,” Sachau told me. “We think it is possible. It is also their job. For decades, ports of entry have processed asylum seekers.” She then stressed, “So long as Title 42 is in place, you will have hundreds of asylum seekers, if not thousands … who are displaced at the border with zero access to a process.”
Back at Guadalupe’s temporary apartment, we stood facing the border wall and the brown hills beyond it in the United States. It was Gabriela, Guadalupe’s two-year-old, who gave the best on-the-ground one-year assessment of the Biden administration. She looked at the wall and asked her mother why they couldn’t jump all the way over the wall from the apartment’s balcony and land over there in the mountains. She was referring to the majestic Santa Rita mountain range in Arizona, which was just 30 miles from where we sat. But Guadalupe had to tell her no. We can’t. That wall is there to stop us. Title 42, MPP, and the deterrence policies all reinforce each other. They are both new and a continuation of the old. And until these policies are done away with, the U.S. immigration system will be neither fair nor humane.
Also wanted to share this very relevant comment from the National Immigrant Justice Center on continued immigrant family separations under the Biden administration https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/biden-administration-routinely-separates-immigrant-families
Great article Todd! I appreciate the personal stories that you so artfully tell, which helps us all to understand the impact of US border policies on real people. Keep up the great writing!