The Trump regime euphemizes an element of its asylum policy as the Migrant Protection Protocols. Under MPP guidelines, U.S. immigration officials have implemented a “Remain in Mexico” policy, shipping thousands of Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans seeking asylum back to the Mexican border cities of Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana to await word on a U.S. hearing, which can take weeks or months to happen.
A Reuters investigation has found that 13,000 children, including 400 infants, are among the 40,000 or so immigrants who have been sent back across the border. In an op-ed piece this summer, Andrea Pitzer wrote:
The Migrant Protection Protocols do not actually protect migrants. Instead, they inject vast numbers of displaced people into the most dangerous neighborhoods of cities that are unfamiliar to them. According to Human Rights Watch, the Mexican government noted this month that “the number of asylum seekers marooned in Ciudad Juarez already outnumbered the spaces available in free humanitarian shelters by 11 to 1.” Without money or work permits, these migrants end up sleeping in abandoned housing or outside, at risk of rape, kidnapping, robbery and murder.
Immigration authorities make their decisions about who is handled under MPP on a case-by-case basis. The guidelines state that unaccompanied children should not be sent back across the border, but children who arrive with families can be.
Reuters reports that data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees U.S. immigration courts, show around a third of the nearly 40,000 migrants in the MPP program as of September 1 were children under 18; 3,400 of them under 5-years-old; and 418 under 1-year-old. That was more than a month ago. Now there are 51,000 in MPP.
With so many people crowded together in unsanitary conditions, the potential for the spread of disease—flu, chickenpox, scabies—is immense:
Florida resident Helen Perry, a nurse in the U.S. Army Reserve who joined a volunteer aid group headed to Matamoros on Labor Day weekend, told Reuters she saw families camped out in donated tents—each with between 5 to 10 people sleeping inside—a few dozen feet from the border.
One family, with four small children, was curled up under a tree, she said. People lacked access to fresh water and proper restrooms and were bathing in the Rio Grande river, she said.
One baby Perry examined had a chronic eye infection and was beginning to develop scarring, threatening his vision. Another had a fungal rash under his arm so severe it limited his movement.
As Pitzer noted:
The United States has already created a concentration camp system north of the border, with many detainees held in miserable conditions in violation of court-mandated limits simply for pursuing the legally permitted activity of seeking asylum. If we continue our current policies, the United States risks spurring violence against migrant populations and further destabilizing Central America, all while launching a new civilian detention system abroad that will join our existing camps to establish a dangerous cross-border network that could endure for years.
While there are multiple causes, underlying at least some of the flow of migrants to the U.S. is climate change. Over time, immigration for that reason is going to soar. Not in the thousands or tens of thousands of people but likely in the millions. Long before that day comes, the United States needs to elect leaders with the compassion and smarts to design an immigration policy that doesn’t kill children, separate them from their parents, or consign them to camps where they are subject to abuse, malnutrition, and the effects of trauma that could last them all their lives.