Some asylum-seekers who will be forced to wait out their cases in Mexico will now have to figure out on their own how to travel hundreds of miles to their immigration court dates in the United States, following the Trump administration’s announcement of an expansion of the inhumane, illegal, and deadly Remain in Mexico policy, CBS News reports.
Under the expansion, asylum-seekers who have asked for protection in Arizona will be returned to the Mexican state of Sonora to wait for their immigration court dates. However, those courts dates will be in El Paso, Texas, nearly 350 miles away. “Since the U.S. is not providing them transportation,” CBS News said, “these asylum-seekers will have to find a way to travel across hundreds of miles of territory and two Mexican border states to reach Ciudad Juárez, the city neighboring El Paso.”
In the year since Remain in Mexico’s implementation, the Trump administration has forced out nearly 60,000 asylum-seekers, dumping them in Mexico with no concern about their personal safety, where they’ll sleep, or whether they can access legal help, or whether they’ll even be able to find out if their court date has changed. So of course, how this new group of asylum-seekers is being dumped is of no concern to the administration either.
"This choice presents enormous obstacles to asylum-seekers," immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told CBS News, adding that the policy expansion will only increase the violence that hundreds of asylum-seekers have already faced during the past year. "Nogales is seven to eight hours from Ciudad Juárez and the journey for many can be dangerous, as it requires going through cartel-controlled territory,” he said.
The Trump administration’s anti-asylum policies have in fact been a boon to cartels and kidnappers, who have waited at Mexican bus stations for their victims like spiders in the darkness. “Powerful criminal organizations have seized on Trump’s changes,” VICE reported last September, “targeting asylum seekers with family in the U.S. by holding them hostage until their relatives come up with thousands of dollars to pay for their release.”
