We Built the Wall Read online

  We Built the Wall

  We Built the Wall

  How the US Keeps Out Asylum Seekers

  from Mexico, Central America and Beyond

  Eileen Truax

  Translated by Diane Stockwell

  First published by Verso 2018

  © Eileen Truax 2018

  Translation © Diane Stockwell 2018

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-217-3

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-216-6 (US EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-215-9 (UK EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the U.S. by Maple Press

  For my fellow journalists in Mexico. For those who

  died denouncing injustice, and for those who have

  been persecuted and killed for telling their stories.

  And for the lawyers in the United States

  who work pro bono to save lives.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART ONE: THE BORDER

  1. The Line Between Life and Death

  2. Carlos Spector, Attorney-at-Law for Impossible Cases

  3. Constructing a Border

  PART TWO: EXILE AND ASYLUM

  4. Annunciation House: The Asylum Tradition

  5. Political Asylum: Sheltering Arms, but Not for Everyone

  6. Giving Up Freedom to Save Your Life

  7. The Business of Locking Up Migrants

  PART THREE: IMPUNITY

  8. Preserving Memory

  9. Impunity

  10. Seeking Justice from the Other Side

  PART FOUR: HERE WE ARE

  11. Back to Life

  12. The Never-Ending Wave

  13. “We don’t want you here!”

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  One night in December 2012, José Luis Benavides, Kent Kirkton, and Julián Cardona came over to my house. They had barely walked in the door before Benavides said, “I have the story for your next book.” That book is We Built The Wall.

  I made my first trip to El Paso and Juárez in early 2013, and I would go two more times over the next two years. There, I discovered the generosity and clarity of purpose of Carlos, Sandra, and Alejandra Spector, and the boundless courage of those they represent, overcoming their fear, anger, and indignation to rebuild their lives, while continuing to demand justice.

  Thanks to Sara Salazar de Reyes, Saúl Reyes, Gloria López, and their families, for opening their homes and their hearts to me. To Martín Huéramo, Carlos Gutiérrez, Alejandro Hernández Pacheco, Cipriana Jurado, Sandra Rodríguez Nieto, Irma Casas, Rubén García, Arturo Bañuelas, Claudia Amaro, and Yamil Yáujar; sisters Nitza, Mitzi, and Deisy Alvarado; Rocío Hernández, Santiago García, Erick Midence, and Enrique Morones, for sharing moments from their lives, their experience, and their knowledge of both sides of the border. To Melissa del Bosque, Julián Cardona, and Marcela Turati for their extraordinary documentation work, and to my journalist colleagues at El Diario de Juárez for being a beacon of light to better understand life in the complex El Paso–Juárez region. To immigration lawyer Daniel M. Kowalsi for sharing information necessary to understand the tangled web of U.S. immigration law.

  To Diane Stockwell, I owe gratitude not only for her complicity and energy in getting this book published, but also for her sensitivity in understanding that every word spoken by a victim of forced migration has meaning. To Andrew Hsiao and the team at Verso Books, I am grateful to you for raising the voices of the protagonists in this book so they will reach those who have yet to hear them.

  Thanks to Edgar Krauss, Alfredo Corchado, and Angela Kocherga, for their encouragement at the beginning of this project, and to Willivaldo Delgadillo and Toni Piqué for their critical readings. To Jaime Abello Banfi, Natalia Algarín, and the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo’s journalistic books workshop for giving me the chance to work on the first draft of this book under the masterful watch of Martín Caparrós. To Diego Fonseca, Catalina Lobo-Guerrero, Ander Izagirre, Roberto Valencia, Claudia Jardim, Andrés Hernández, Esteban Castro, and Cecilia Lanza, for their thoughtful readings and incisive critiques.

  José Luis Benavides and Kent Kirkton have my admiration and warm appreciation for their intelligence and ability to feel injustice against others as if it were theirs—and my gratitude for making room for me in their little red pickup truck and taking me along on their tour through the borderlands.

  A few days before New Year’s Eve in 2013, Diego Sedano and I got into our car and set off for Fabens, Texas, to go talk to Saúl Reyes and his family. A year later, we drove even further, from Los Angeles to San Antonio, to talk to the three young sisters who still hope their mother will come back one day. For the stories, the tears, and the songs we shared on those days driving down Highway 10, this is Diego’s book, too.

  Introduction

  Ann Donnelly’s name echoed all over social media the night of January 28, 2017. Donnelly had been a federal district court judge for just over a year when a ruling from her court in Brooklyn, New York, made her the first judge to block an executive order by President Donald Trump.

  The executive order, signed by Trump the day before on Friday, January 27, was announced as a temporary cancellation of permission to enter the United States for citizens of seven countries: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, with the alleged aim of protecting the country from terrorism. Although the order defined those barred from entering by their nationality, it was widely known as the “Muslim ban,” a phrase popularized by Trump himself during his presidential campaign, because Islam was the predominant religion in the seven countries cited.

  Of the twenty-three executive orders signed by Trump during his first twelve weeks in office, this was the most polemic, stirring the strongest reaction from U.S. citizens. Within just a few hours, large crowds descended on the biggest airports in the country to protest the measure and to show support for people being detained upon arrival, including permanent U.S. residents who had temporarily traveled to their country of origin. Syrian refugees scheduled to arrive in the United States that weekend were detained; an infant girl from Iran traveling to the United States for life-saving heart surgery was not allowed to enter the country. Within a few days, federal courts in other cities had also blocked the order. For the first time in many years, the United States took a hard look at itself and its policies of accepting and excluding refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and people from other countries in general.

  It was probably about time. For decades, the United States has promoted itself to the rest of the world as a democratic country, with an open-arms policy that affirms diversity, which has very little to do with how the nation actually shapes its policies around immigration, refuge, and asylum.

  In spite of being the country with the largest number of immigrants in the world—almost 50 million people living in U.S. territory were not born there—the United States has a smaller percentage of immigrants in relation to the general population than other countries. Immigrants comprise 14 percent of the U.S. population, compared
with 22 percent in Canada and 28 percent in Australia; countries that have openly acknowledged their need for foreign labor have reached figures as high as 75 percent in Qatar and 88 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Even in Spain, a country experiencing large-scale immigration only recently, 13 percent of the population are immigrants, just one percentage point less than the United States.

  Another image the United States sells to the world is the “melting pot,” referring to its ethnic diversity. Compared with other countries, however, it is not a leader in that sense either. In terms of diversity, once again other countries such as Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have higher indices. In the United States, one of every four immigrants comes from a single country, Mexico. In other destination countries popular with immigrants, mainly in Europe, migration comes from a wider, more diverse range of countries.

  As with most countries that receive immigrants, the current demographic composition of the United States is the result of the government’s application of immigration policy based on the country’s economic and workplace needs. But it is also a function of the alliances and shifting sands of international politics. In terms of refuge and asylum policy, and the methods for detaining and processing immigrants, the predominant principles have more to do with political, and even partisan, criteria, not human rights or social justice. The United States opens its arms to whoever benefits it economically at the moment, and to asylum and refuge seekers who can demonstrate persecution or a threat to their safety or their lives, as long as they come from countries with governments viewed as questionable by the United States. For those seeking asylum or refuge for identical reasons who come from countries with governments viewed as friendly and democratic by the United States, the door slams shut, even if they can demonstrate a fear for their lives as credible as any exhibited by nationalities with governments deemed hostile by the U.S.

  Throughout history, the collective imagination of the United States has constructed the “other” as the enemy—“the undesirable,” as described by law professor Bill Ong Hing. That “other” has evolved as necessary to successive administrations. There was “the undesirable Asian”—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos—in the second half of the nineteenth century, followed by Jews and Italians at the beginning of the twentieth century, Communists for several decades, Mexicans for much of the same century, Central Americans for the last twenty years, and Muslims filling the role of the “other” for the first decades of the twenty-first century.

  The normalization of using political criteria to establish rules for entering the country, and for granting refugee status or political asylum in particular, is reflected in actions such as Trump’s order, which broadly violates international protocols protecting human rights.

  After glimpsing a reflection of itself as a nation in the “Muslim ban,” a significant part of the U.S. public has reacted with horrified alarm; along with protests in the streets, a strong legal response has been launched. Just hours after Trump’s executive order was announced, groups of volunteer lawyers got to work, setting up shop in airport cafeterias. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the most powerful civil rights organization in the country, filed its first lawsuit in the name of two brothers originally from Iraq in the federal court presided over by Judge Donnelly, resulting in the first suspension of the travel ban. That Monday, barely seventy-two hours after Trump’s executive order was signed and suspended, the ACLU reported that it had received $24 million in donations in just three days through its website—six times more than the total for an average year.

  One hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was connecting anti-terrorist and national security rhetoric with migration. In addition to justifying measures like the “Muslim ban,” such connections encompassed building a border wall, accusing Mexicans of being drug dealers and rapists, and claiming without evidence that undocumented people vote illegally; these last two assertions reinforced his promise to deport 11 million undocumented people from the country.

  Since he was sworn into office, reality has forced Trump to tone down this rhetoric. During his administration’s first hundred days, the “Muslim ban” was blocked twice. The 11 million promised deportees has shrunk to 2 or 3 million; given the state of U.S. infrastructure and federal resources, deporting such a massive number of people would be extremely difficult and onerous, aside from incurring political and social costs. As for the border wall, Congress has forced Trump to get his head out of the clouds. The political will may be there and the legislative grounds in place, but at least for the first two fiscal years of the Trump administration, the money has not been included in the budget.

  With no way to launch a controlled media offensive on these issues—not even by disqualifying them as “fake news”—and faced with the need to produce some evidence of success in his first months in office, Trump seems to have chosen to focus his efforts on arresting undocumented people and putting them into deportation proceedings, as well as denying entry to people seeking refuge or political asylum in the United States. Neither action requires any special allocation of resources, or Congressional approval.

  Although talking about Trump as a dangerous threat to immigrants has been a good strategy for media outlets trying to increase their online traffic, the so-called “deportation machine” has already been up and running for at least a decade, beginning with the George W. Bush administration in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and picking up steam during Barack Obama’s time in office. Almost 3 million people were deported in the eight years of Obama’s presidency—a number that Trump has provided as a possible goal for his administration. And the criteria in place for granting refuge or asylum were established fifty years ago, initially based on international humanitarian goals but implemented in the service of convenience and political interests.

  This book aims to lay bare these two phenomena. U.S. immigration policy during the Trump presidency and in the years beyond could be outrageous and appalling, but discriminatory policy is nothing new. Most Americans have refused to acknowledge that the immigrant community has endured discrimination and a hostile environment for decades. Tax dollars paid by U.S. residents are spent to lock up immigrants, re-victimizing those who have already been victimized in their home countries, who have reached out to “the best democracy in the world” in an attempt to save their own lives. Those who come to the United States fleeing violence, or for health reasons, or to escape hate and harassment because of their sexual orientation or religious beliefs have been forgotten by their home countries. But in the United States, we have not done much better. We rarely think about the new arrivals who have had to leave everything behind and come here as a last resort, arriving in a new land only to be labeled “the other,” the foreigner, and whose lives depend on accepting this description. From the comfort of our own secure legal status, we have already built the Wall.

  In Part One, I will present a general overview of the hundreds of thousands of victims of violence who arrive in the United States each year seeking asylum and the series of obstacles, including bureaucratic red tape, a confounding legal system, and social indifference, they meet here. I will discuss how the southern border of the United States has functioned as a port of entry for those whose presence in the country ultimately benefits the government, while this same border has also served to reinforce the concept of “the other.”

  Part Two offers a deeper analysis of how the criteria for granting and denying asylum were developed. I also examine the robust business these criteria represent for the corporations that manage private immigration detention centers. In Part Three, I talk about the governments of Mexico and other countries that not only have failed to meet their responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of their citizens, but also are at times complicit in the violence and persecution that compels people to leave. Finally, in Part Four I will tell the stories of those who have had to start their lives all over again in the United States, a completely
unknown land, to the great indifference of most of its residents.

  The stories told in this book only hint at the enormous debt the United States owes to its own image as a democratic country, and the role it plays in human rights violations committed around the world, including in Mexico. My hope is that through reading this book, people inside and outside the United States can knock down the wall of indifference that we have propped up for years, and offer understanding and solidarity to the most courageous among us: those who have risked their lives to denounce injustice, to defend what they believe in, and who, years later, with tremendous strength, have learned to live again.

  Part One

  The Border

  1

  The Line Between Life and Death

  The desert is wily. With every breeze, dust wafts across the highway leading into town, a fine sand that clings to cars, to your shoes, to your tongue. Lines of desert sand run along the edges of the streets, separating the pavement from the simple ranch houses, painted in earth tones, surrounded by chicken-wire fences. In some yards small trees struggle to grow, defying the arid conditions, surrounded by tricycles and clothes hung on lines to dry in the sun. It feels like we’re in Guadalupe, in Juárez Valley, Chihuahua, Mexico; the Church of the Nazarene, the tortilla stand at the supermarket, the hand-lettered signs advertising home-cooked meals all add to the illusion. But before turning around on the highway, right where the desert ends and the row of humble little houses begins, a small, unassuming sign tells you where you are: Fabens, Texas.

  A nine-mile stretch bisected by the Río Grande separates Fabens from Guadalupe, along the U.S.-Mexico border, a thirty-minute drive east of the bridge connecting El Paso and Juárez, Mexico. Lower Island Avenue on this side of the border becomes Cruz Reyes Street on the other. Just beyond a sign reading, “Estados Unidos Mexicanos,” another row of houses begins, a mirror image of the first: the same colors, the same stunted trees, the same sand swept across the road, the same first names, the same last names. The difference is that in Guadalupe, the homes are empty. The people who lived there were killed. The ones left alive were threatened, extorted, mutilated. They grabbed a few belongings when they could, crossed the border, and never went back.