SAN YSIDRO, Calif. — It was never like this before.
The migrants come now in the middle of the night or in the bright light of day. Men and women arrive by the hundreds, caked with dirt, with teens and toddlers in tow. They jump the small fences in remote parts of Texas, and they gather on the hot pavement at the main border crossing in California. Tired and fearful, they look for the one thing that they pray will allow them to stay in the United States, at least for a while: a Border Patrol agent.
Gone are the days when young, strong men waited on the Tijuana River levees for their chance to wade across the water, evade capture and find work for the summer. These days, thousands of people a day simply walk up to the border and surrender. Most of them are from Central America, seeking to escape from gang violence, sexual abuse, death threats and persistent poverty. The smugglers have told them they will be quickly released, as long as they bring a child, and that they will be allowed to remain in the United States for years while they pursue their asylum cases.
The very nature of immigration to America changed after 2014, when families first began showing up in large numbers. The resulting crisis has overwhelmed a system unable to detain, care for and quickly decide the fate of tens of thousands of people who claim to be fleeing for their lives. For years, both political parties have tried — and failed — to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, mindful that someday the government would reach a breaking point.
That moment has arrived. The country is now unable to provide either the necessary humanitarian relief for desperate migrants or even basic controls on the number and nature of who is entering the United States.
The immigration courts now have more than 800,000 pending cases; each one takes an average of 700 days to process. And because laws and court rulings aimed at protecting children prohibit jailing young people for more than 20 days, families are often simply released.
At the current pace of nearly 100,000 migrants each month, officials say more than 1 million will have tried to cross the border in a 12-month period — the equivalent of 1 percent of the population of Guatemala and Honduras. Some of those arriving today will have a strong legal case to stay under international refugee treaties and federal asylum laws, but most won’t have a formal asylum hearing until 2021.
The flow of migrant families has reached record levels, with February totals 560 percent above those for the same period last year. As many as 27,000 children are expected to cross the border and enter the immigration enforcement system in April alone. In recent days, officials have grasped for ever-more-dire ways to describe the situation: “operational emergency”; “unsustainable”; “systemwide meltdown.”
An Ineffective ‘Not Welcome’ Message
For President Donald Trump, the situation at the border has generated red-hot fury. It erupted again on Sunday as he abruptly forced out Kirstjen Nielsen, his long-embattled homeland security secretary, for what he considered her failure to put an end to the surge of migrants.
In recent days, the president has landed on a dark new message that, if taken literally, could mean an end to all immigration — legal and illegal — across the Mexican border.
“The system is full,” the president said in California on Friday. “We can’t take you anymore.”
But the president has not chosen to prioritize a surge of new resources to the border, which could help ease the overcrowding and suffering that have gripped the migrants and the border communities where they arrive. Instead, Trump has insisted on simply trying to stop people from getting into the country in the first place — a policy of deterrence that not only has failed but has made the problem worse.
In an effort to send a “you’re not welcome” message, the administration has tried a series of strategies: prosecuting everyone who crosses illegally, taking their children from them, tightening asylum standards, slowing down the number of people allowed to apply for asylum each day, forcing asylum applicants to remain in Mexico while they wait for court dates.
In some cases, this approach has proved too cruel for the American public to tolerate and has run up against the protections enshrined in the Constitution, which the courts have decided protect migrants as well as citizens. Some of the president’s agenda has been blocked by Congress or the courts. None of it has fixed the problem.
And the administration has done little to speed up the immigration courts, though that could be just the deterrent the president has sought.
“The backlog has been allowed to build to the point of a crisis,” said Doris Meissner, the immigration commissioner in the Clinton administration and now a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “They do not accept the basic proposition that this is a population where there are people qualified for protection and that enabling the systems we have is an answer.”
Seeking Asylum, With Children
Only about 20 percent of asylum-seekers ultimately win the right to live and work in the United States by proving that they would face persecution in their home countries. Applicants have the burden to show evidence of past persecution or compelling testimony that establishes the “well-founded” fear that they would face danger if they return home.
The asylum process begins with a “credible fear” screening to see if an applicant is likely to succeed in the first place.
Out of nearly 100,000 credible fear interviews during the year that ended in September of 2018, an asylum officer confirmed a credible fear 74,677 times — a nearly 75 percent approval rate. A senior Trump administration official vowed on Tuesday to dramatically reduce that rate by making the standards tougher.
But it is what happens after the credible fear interview that is at the heart of America’s bitter immigration debate.
In 2017, 11,292 immigrants who had been released on bond or on their own recognizance were ordered deported because they failed to show up for their immigration proceedings, a 26 percent increase over the previous year, according to Justice Department data.
Blanca Vasquez, who fled Honduras after gangs killed her husband and torched their home, passed a credible fear interview at the border in 2013. She was released and settled in northern Texas, where she got a janitorial job and waited for her day in court. About a year later, she said, she unintentionally missed her first hearing and was most likely ordered deported for failing to appear. She’s not sure, because she stopped going to court at all. “I got confused,” she said. “I ask God to look after me. There are too many problems in my country; I want to stay here.”
Maria Perez, a Honduran who joined a caravan with her 8-year-old son, Yunior, in November, waited two months in Tijuana for the chance to apply for asylum after her son’s father was killed by a man who continued to threaten her family. When her number — 1,506 — was finally called, she and her son were soon released to await their court hearings under the juvenile protection laws. She lives now with a friend in Northern California, but she does not have a lawyer and isn’t sure how to proceed with her case.
“I am very worried. I don’t know what to do,” she said.
The Source of the Problem
Trump often says he plans to build a wall on the border with Mexico to halt illegal immigration. But when the standoff over funding for the wall led to a 35-day government shutdown in December and January, it actually made things worse. Many immigration judges were furloughed, and tens of thousands of deportation and asylum cases were delayed, in some cases for years.
There is another problem with the wall: Slowing the exodus of migrants from Central America would need to start in those countries first.
Central America’s economies are still weak, and residents face drug and gang violence at levels largely unseen in other countries. Many are subject to deep poverty, a situation that recently reached a crisis with the collapse of coffee, corn and maize crops.
American diplomats say the best way to confront that kind of lawlessness is with the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid that has been flowing to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras for several years, designed to bolster the rule of law and improve the economy.
Last week, Trump abruptly abandoned those efforts, ordering the State Department to scrap about $500 million in aid to the three countries. Trump’s decision has been criticized by members of both parties, who call it shortsighted.
Likewise, critics say that Trump’s repeated denigration of Mexico over the years — including his insistence on building a border wall — risks undermining Mexico’s willingness to help to keep Central American migrants from traveling to the United States.
“It’s an invasion,” Trump declared in February, after Congress denied him money to build a wall. “We have an invasion of drugs and criminals coming into our country.”
In fact, the migrants are mostly victims of the broken immigration system. And nearly all of them are scared — of being shipped off to Mexico, separated from their children, sent to prison. Scared, especially, of going home.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.