In early June, Ofelia Arrellano said a gang in Mexico City threatened to kidnap her youngest son if she did not pay the $160 monthly fee to keep her toy store running.
Arellano, 37, and her two sons gathered enough money and fled. She feared the gangs’ influence if she stayed in Mexico, so they headed north toward the U.S., she said.
But just as they were headed to the US-Mexico border, Joe Biden issued a new directive to curb the surge in migration into the US. When the number of people crossing the border illegally surpassed a daily average of 2,500, he would temporarily close the border to most asylum applications. The strict measures have been in place ever since.
Unwittingly, Arellano and her sons reached northern Mexico on July 25, crossing rugged terrain into Arizona at a point where the 30-foot U.S. steel barrier ends. There they waited for U.S. Border Patrol agents, assuming they were exercising their right to seek asylum.
But when the officers arrived, “they told me I was going to be deported,” an anguished Arellano said.
“I told them I couldn’t go back to my country because our lives were in danger, but they said asylum was no longer an option and that I had to go live in another area of Mexico,” she said from a shelter in Nogales, on the Mexican side of the border with the smaller sister city of Nogales, Arizona.
The US president’s regulations, published by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, are his most restrictive immigration policy to date.
Combined with the Mexican authorities’ collaboration with the US to prevent people from even reaching the border, this has had a dramatic effect on the numbers.
This gives Biden and now 2024 Democratic presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the opportunity to push back against the Republicans’ constant and effective line of attack that Democrats “will not secure the border.”
Related: Republicans want to question Harris about her immigration record — but what does that entail?
But human rights activists and some leading Democrats are actually asking: At what cost?
Members of Congress just sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for an “entire end” to Biden’s border controls, saying the executive order “forces individuals to wait in harm’s way while they face threats to their safety, in violation of U.S. law and international treaty obligations.”
It was signed by 19 U.S. House of Representatives members, including nine from border states — Joaquin Castro, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia and Greg Casar of Texas, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Juan Vargas, Robert Garcia, J Luis (Lou) Correa and Nanette Barragán of California — as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush of the Squad and Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
It said Biden’s regulations “mirror an earlier asylum ban enacted by the Trump administration” and violate legal guarantees that “people fleeing violence and persecution can seek asylum regardless of how they enter the United States.”
Since 1980, when Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act, there have been two ways to obtain asylum in the United States: from abroad as a resettled refugee or on U.S. soil as an asylum seeker, with legal obligations to provide protection to people fleeing persecution.
Meanwhile, immigrant rights groups have filed an amicus curiae brief in the federal case in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others are suing the government on behalf of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).
The report says that since the new rules went into effect, advocates have spoken to people explicitly seeking asylum, exercising their domestic and international rights, who also “described their past persecution, explained their asylum claims, showed officers their injuries, and reported visibly sobbing and pleading to be heard.” But they “were ignored by U.S. immigration officials or told they would be deported anyway.”
Others said they were unable to express their fears because officers forbade them to speak, reprimanded them, intimidated them or told them there was no more asylum, even when some of them had lawyers present.
The report said that instead of referring migrants for a formal interview with qualified asylum officers or immigration judges, there was a “terrifying atmosphere” for asylum seekers, with border agents “verbally abusing them, telling them to ‘shut up,’ saying they had ‘no right’ to an interview, or completely ignoring their attempts to communicate.”
Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants fell to a three-year low in June, continuing a downward trend that began earlier this year. Recent reports suggest the number of migrants crossing the border fell again in July, to the lowest level since September 2020. Officials said the executive order will remain in effect until the average number of daily illegal border crossings falls below 1,500 for a week.
“It seems logical for political parties to take a tough stance at the border now, but what we need to do is ensure that asylum seekers have the protections that the law requires,” said Alvaro Huerta, director of litigation and policy at the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a party to the amicus curiae brief.
In Nogales, Mexico, the Kino Border Initiative, a humanitarian and advocacy program and another signatory to the amicus curiae brief, reported that of the 457 people it assisted after they were deported to Mexico in June, 345 said they were ignored or denied asylum.
“Those who verbally expressed fear or intention to seek asylum reported being outright ignored, lied to and told asylum was no longer an option, or threatened with prolonged detention,” the report said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not respond to requests for comment.
Arellano and her sons were deported from the U.S. to Mexico in late July. She found her way to the Kino shelter and, speaking on her fifth day there as she considered her limited options, she said, “My final destination was Indiana, where my oldest son lives. But now we may have to go back to the place we fled from.”
The US government says: “Those who receive the order of removal will be banned from entering the country for at least five years and may face criminal prosecution.”
Pedro de Velasco, director of advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative, said the shelter has seen a sharp increase in the number of people coming there after being deported, 80 percent of whom are women and children. The group also provides food, medical and legal services to male deportees sleeping in other shelters.
De Velasco said some people have been coming back and forth to Kino for months, unsuccessfully trying to get an official appointment with U.S. authorities to apply for asylum, using the mobile phone app CBP One. The app distributes about 1,500 appointments a day to asylum seekers waiting in Mexico, which falls far short of the demand.
A poster on the wall of the shelter is intended to discourage people from taking the last resort of venturing into the wilderness to evade authorities and enter the US.
“Many people have died crossing the road. There is not enough water. Many people are lost in the vast desert,” the poster reads.
De Velasco pointed out the greater danger.
“Without options, the government is pushing migration further out through remote areas. The cost of this policy could be the loss of human lives in the desert,” he said.
Humanitarian aid volunteers from the Tucson Samaritans, a group that works to prevent migrants from dying in the Arizona desert, recently helped 10 asylum seekers who had crossed the border at Sasabe, a small hamlet in a harsh, dry landscape of scrubland but few other features beyond the towering border barrier and distant mountains.
Eventually, the asylum seekers were rounded up by border patrols: four from Latin America, three from Nepal and three from India.
However, since Biden’s new directive, volunteer Chris Craver said fewer people have been arriving at the Samaritans’ tent post in Sasabe hoping to turn themselves in to agents and seek asylum. There have been “many more people saying they should have crossed the desert” and instead trying to avoid detection, he said.
At that moment, two men approached the border barrier from the Mexican side.
Alberto, 35, and Jesus, 36, cousins from Mexico who asked that their last names be withheld to protect their safety, said they left Hermosillo, about 175 miles south of Nogales, because of high crime and low wages. They called through the fence and said they would cross the border the next morning, through the Sonoran Desert, where summer temperatures regularly top 100F (38C).
Related: In Search of Diego: The Hunt for a Missing Migrant in the Arizona Desert
They had water but little food, and they were hungry, they admitted, their feet aching in worn boots after trekking through the brush. They wanted to reach Tucson, 70 miles to the north, led by smugglers, but they were also worried about their cell phones running out of battery.
Pima County, which covers much of the Arizona-Mexico border, is responsible for collecting the majority of human remains found when migrants don’t make it. From January through July of this year, the remains of 95 such travelers were found, more than a third of whom died from heat exposure, others from drowning, falling into a diabetic coma or from unknown causes. Sadly, that number is typical, Greg Hess, the county’s chief coroner, told the Guardian.
“We haven’t seen much variation in who’s carrying out what executive order or who’s putting up a wall here or there. That doesn’t seem to have an impact on the number of deaths,” Hess said.
The climate crisis also plays a role. Hess said officials are concerned about “how hot and how dry it is there. This has been a problem for southern Arizona since the early 2000s. The hotter it gets, the more people are going to die.”
Alberto and Jesus trudged away, and their fate remains unclear. Arellano and her sons are not back in Mexico City, but have gone to stay with a relative a few hours away, trying to establish themselves while fearing gang members will show up at their doorstep again.
