On Building Human Rights in the Borderlands: A Q&A with Nicole Ramos
Historically, the U.S.-Mexico border region has suffered under both political parties, she says. "I don't see a lot of difference."
It’s Election Day. The day we’ve been anticipating, dreading. Tucson finally has cooler weather, which means I will be taking long walks today, and deep breaths while we wait for the results. And if you missed it, Todd and I had an interesting conversation on the last Border Chronicle podcast about Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and their border and immigration policies. We covered everything from robodogs and surveillance to the binational effort to shut down asylum.
The takeaway from our podcast was that whatever happens in the election, people migrating and communities in the U.S.-Mexico border region have suffered historically under both parties. So there’s a lot of work to be done to restore human rights in the borderlands. Today’s Q&A with Nicole Ramos is about this very topic, and about how to set your compass on the seas of uncertainty. Ramos, who lives in Tijuana, is director of the Border Rights Project for the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, which started as a binational volunteer effort during the Obama era. After Trump took office, Ramos and Al Otro Lado were surveilled and harassed by the U.S. government, along with other border advocates and border journalists.
In 2017, Al Otro Lado sued Trump’s Department of Homeland Security for turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry. In doing this, DHS claimed that there were no more daily asylum slots available. This is a practice called “metering,” which is contrary to U.S. asylum law. Seven years later, in October, Al Otro Lado and the asylum-seeker plaintiffs finally prevailed when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court that metering is illegal. Ramos talks with The Border Chronicle about what’s next after the court’s ruling, how she’s weathering the election, and what she sees on the horizon for 2025.
We’ve had several readers asking us about the metering lawsuit and what it means for the future. How is it going to impact asylum seekers at the border?
Right now, we are monitoring what is happening at ports of entry in terms of people being turned away. We imagine that CBP [Customs and Border Protection] is probably not going to be allowing access and will tell everyone they need to apply through CBP One [a government smartphone app], which would appear to be a violation of the court’s decision in this case, which finds that they are required to process people upon arrival.
We filed a separate lawsuit last July, arguing that CBP One is the same as metering, forcing people to wait in dangerous border cities [in Mexico] where they don’t have any shelter, immigration status, work authorization, or access to medical care, and where they are expected to wait for indeterminate periods of time, which the court found was not acceptable in the metering lawsuit. Our position is that CBP One is just a digital metering policy. We think the recent court ruling puts us in a good position for our CBP One litigation.
It does feel like since you filed the lawsuit in 2017, it’s become layer upon layer of more restrictions to asylum.
The point of access to asylum has become smaller and smaller. And then with Title 42, it was virtually nonexistent. Anytime an organization like Al Otro Lado, ACLU, or Raices gets a win on asylum access, the U.S. government creates another policy to evade their obligations under that decision.
It’s also interesting how Texas has added another layer to those restrictions already applied by the federal government. Now you have a state government basically usurping the federal government in Texas, pushing people back and not allowing them to access asylum.
We don’t have those same sets of issues here [on the California-Mexico border]. We do have incidents of CBP officers pushing people back and not through formal processes such as a removal order or an expulsion order. They are pushing people back by threat of violence, and sometimes violence itself.
You used the term “pushback,” a term they use in Europe but not here in the United States. It’s a term used when asylum seekers and refugees are forcibly returned, often using violence, without any formal process or acknowledgment by governments. I wonder if we shouldn’t start using the term here too, since this type of aggression is unfortunately becoming more common here.
We are regularly in contact and conferencing with organizations in Europe around pushback and turn-back issues, which is where we have gotten that language from. We call it a pushback if it is along the borderline and not at a port of entry. If it’s at a port of entry, we call it a turn-back.
What are your thoughts on the election, and what are your biggest fears? Do you have any hopes?
I have no hope. And that’s just because I’ve been at the border since 2014. This is my third administration, second Democratic administration. There is no difference. They’re all looking to use immigrants and asylum seekers as an easy chit to call in for political points. So I don’t see Kamala Harris winning and revamping border processing or the asylum system or the immigration system in a way that’s fair or favorable to immigrants and their human rights. And as far as if Trump is elected, unfortunately, what will happen is that probably a lot of philanthropic foundations will throw a lot of money at the issue. They withdrew when Biden was elected, because they assume that there’s a difference in the policies, not realizing that the Biden administration defended many of the Trump policies in court in order to not repeal them. So I don’t have a lot of hope. I don’t see a lot of difference.
It was the same with media coverage. Once Biden took office, a lot of the national media left the border. Just like the foundations. Then the vacuum was filled with Fox News and far-right content creators, who built this whole narrative about us being under invasion, which has now pushed the Democrats even further to the right.
I also feel like people don’t understand the reasons why people are coming. Many are coming because of conditions that we helped put in play through our foreign interventionist policy and support of international corporations extracting all the resources, and destabilizing governments. It’s astounding how we can be so angry about receiving what are the victims of our own foreign policy.
Are there examples of other countries or policies where you feel like they are doing it right or building a humanitarian infrastructure for people who are displaced? Anything out there that you find encouraging?
I can’t say that there is. It just feels like countries in the Global North are hell-bent on locking the gate so that anyone from the Global South can’t enter. All their policies are leaning more toward detention, monitoring, and limiting movement than about integration and providing support.
You live in Mexico. It seemed like the security situation wasn’t discussed much during the Mexican presidential election, which I found surprising. Is it getting any better?
It continues to get worse. There is not a week that goes by where there is not some kind of news of, you know, a narcomanta [a threatening banner put up by drug gangs], a car full of bodies. There’s a lot of people disappeared. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of shootings. It’s very difficult sometimes to navigate here [in Tijuana]. There’s a lot of security concerns just about going out and doing normal things.
It’s also not normal that we are receiving, every single day, dozens and dozens of people fleeing Michoacán and Guerrero, which I think at this point are the two highest sending states. It should be an alarm bell for everyone when you have communities just emptying out and fleeing to the border.
The federal government has not, in all the years that I’ve been here, figured out a way to make these regions more peaceful, because people don’t want to leave. It’s beautiful there. They have land, they have their traditions. They don’t want to come to the border or go to the United States.
How difficult is it for Mexicans to receive asylum in the U.S.? And really, they’re the ones who are being turned back under the latest executive order from Biden, right?
It’s incredibly challenging. A lot of judges assume that Mexico is a very big country and that it’s easy to just relocate internally. But that ignores the fact that if organized crime wants to harm you, it’s very easy for them to get information about you, because the systems are vulnerable to hacking. There are also government workers who are on organized crime’s payroll and will give out that information. You have to live completely outside of the system, off the grid, if you want to hide, because every place that you’re working, enrolling your kids in school, or you’re participating in the public health care system, you’re providing your INE [Instituto Nacional Electoral number], which makes you easy to find.
What do you see on the horizon for the kinds of things that you’ll be tackling next year?
The work is always evolving. Regardless of the presidential administration, the trend is to restrict access and make it more difficult to seek asylum. And so every time a new policy is rolled out, we have to shift or expand. So we anticipate that is what we will have to do, whether we have Kamala Harris as president or whether we have Donald Trump, our work has increasingly expanded to also include humanitarian aid, helping asylum seekers get their children enrolled in school, making sure they have access to the health care system. Also, identifying individuals among the asylum seekers that we are serving who have serious medical vulnerabilities and trying to get them across on humanitarian parole. Until we get some kind of ruling on whether CBP One is legal, we’re going to be attending to the basic needs of asylum seekers who are now waiting here [in Tijuana] for up to 13 months for an appointment.
(Correction: In a previous version of my post I wrote that Al Otro Lado started during the Trump administration. It actually started during the Obama administration.)
E lOtro Lado’s work is in many ways exemplary. The layered and purposefully overlapping immigration policy strategy at the border is politics by another name. Despite what the person described as major media leaving the border and that vacuum being filled by Fox and other right wing sources, that is only partially true. The perspective of national media is to repeat the Washington consensus of an administration’s stated policy goal as their starting place, and because they are stringers and do not live in the border region and do not see through that smokescreen, almost all reporting is in reaction to that framing, not from another more informed view or views; so a rather shallow and superficial analysis is thus turned into a pre-deterministic one.
Left unexamined here are the degrees of suffering based on discrimination against social groups; for example, LGBTQ and Indigenous. For example DHS attempted to consult Indigenous language interpreters and advocates on an Indigenous Language Plan, and they produced one this late spring. However no news organization is investigating its implementation. Human rights are not just the gross level of the curtailment of legal rights to asylum, but also the social groups most affected by the secondary repressive strategy to force asylum requests vis a vis an application, CBP 1. For indigenous who have no internet access in their community of origin this can be a dangerous prospect. This has been partially recognized for rural Mexicans fleeing Cartel in Guerrero and an exception made to the mandatory use of the app in this cases, it is being waived in Nogales POE.
DHS did not however, to my knowledge, employ a single sociolinguist to create a process for language identification; which was also largely reduced to an “ app” piloted to Border Patrol agents. Such a hire was highly recommended and repeatedly ignored.
This is part of the same missed pattern of human rights violations that media is ignoring. Indigenous advocates demanded a national commission for Indigenous issues related to asylum be created by the White House Task Force on the Reunification of Families. (Families forcedly separated by The Trump policy). This was refused.
No reporters have looked into the Biden Administration’s obfuscation or identification of Indigenous families forcedly separated (though El Otro Lado did).
So is the language “app” actually deployed?, Is it having any positive response or is it problematic due to its design and or presentation in the field?, i.e. outside ports of entry.
In the Out of Sight and Out of Mind Hunan Rights report we predicted that post MPP and Title 42 , boder violence will be maintained or increased. The essential question is why? How does Mexico, as the US’s largest trading partner respond? , by extending it to their Southern border or replicating conditions for Cartel to do their dirty work for the trade system both countries enjoy?; that sacrosanct policy is never questioned, yet it is at the very heart of the violence. It is what makes nationalistic racism profitable. Follow the money.
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