We Built the Wall Page 15
The treacherous journey across Mexico, inclement weather, abuse from government agents and extortionists, and fear of leaving her home were just some of challenges Ileana faced when she set off from her country in Central America to try to enter the United States undocumented.1 But none of that compared, according to the fifteen-year-old, to the eleven days she spent locked up by U.S. immigration, abused, unprotected, and denied access to basic services.
Since the surge in unaccompanied minors began, and in spite of the (clearly inadequate) efforts of immigration authorities, charges of abuse filed against the Border Patrol and other security agencies, including treatment that could be considered torture, have risen sharply. Groups of lawyers and activists have increased pressure on the government to take legal action, such as suspending the deportation of some of these youth who qualify for a U visa, granted to those who “have suffered substantial mental or physical abuse as a result of having been the victim of criminal activity” that “occurred in the United States or violated U.S. laws.”2
Ileana’s case, handled by the New York law firm Amoachi & Johnson, serves as a good example of this. When Ileana was detained by Border Patrol agents in Texas, according to her lawsuit, the first violation of her rights she experienced was overcrowding. She was locked in a confined space with over a hundred other people, including women, small children, and other teens, and not even enough room to lie down, she told her lawyers weeks later. In the days that followed, she experienced a series of rights violations: lack of food or food that had spoiled, lack of safe drinking water, freezing temperatures, and housing conditions violating standards in U.S. legislation. Once she had been released from the detention center, she cataloged these violations and others as she was filing her suit. Ileana’s lawyers presented a request to the Justice Department to have her deportation order annulled, given that the immigration authorities had interviewed her regarding her eligibility for asylum under conditions of detainment that violated all rules.
As one of her lawyers, Bryan Johnson, recounted to me, Ileana was in the border processing center for four days (rather than the mandated seventy-two hours), then transferred to a military shelter in Oklahoma for seven days, during which time she lost eight pounds. “She ate practically nothing during that time,” Bryan says. “She was kept in very cold temperatures, with fluorescent lights turned on all day and all night”—conditions experienced by “almost every kid who entered the country between July and August,” he points out.
These statements, researched and verified by his legal team, are corroborated by accounts published in the media and from activist organizations: H., a seven-year-old boy with a disability and severely malnourished at the time of his detention, was detained in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) custody for five days without access to medical treatment. When he was finally released, he had to undergo emergency surgery. D., a sixteen-year-old girl, was held in a detention cell with adults. When agents searched her, they violently spread her legs and touched her genitals. K., a fourteen-year-old girl with asthma, had her medicine confiscated when she was detained by CBP agents. During her time in the overcrowded cell, she suffered several asthma attacks. Guards threatened to discipline her if she kept on “faking it.” C., a seventeen-year-old girl, was held in a freezing cell—what detainees call the “hielera” (“freezer”)—wearing wet clothes. It took three days for her clothes to dry. The only potable water was in the toilet tank, in full view of the other detainees, with a video camera over it.
In June 2014, these testimonies were included in a legal complaint presented to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorities by a coalition of activist and human rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). The document included testimony from 116 children between the ages of six and seventeen, who were interviewed at the temporary shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services about the mistreatment they’d experienced in DHS custody.
Jonathan Ryan is the executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), an organization headquartered in Texas. During the summer of 2014, the organization received more calls asking for help than ever before, describing the horrible conditions and abuse children had suffered in custody. The surge in migrant children traveling alone “tested the government’s capacity much more than any of them would admit,” Jonathan tells me a few months later on the phone. A lawyer by profession, he and I first met at a forum on immigration in San Antonio. While acknowledging that some of the installations may have been overcrowded, Jonathan asserts that some of the inhumane practices denounced that summer are nothing unusual in immigrant detention.
“This wasn’t because of a lack of resources,” he says. “For example, temperatures in cells where the children were held were kept at an average of 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Maintaining this temperature in South Texas, in the height of summer, implies an allocation of resources in an additional effort to make them uncomfortable, to disincentivize them and discourage them from continuing to seek asylum.”
While in the processing center, immigration agents interviewed the unaccompanied minors to determine if they were eligible to seek political asylum or some other form of humanitarian relief. But the majority of these children, like Ileana, were interviewed under prison-like conditions, which likely produced a disheartening effect. Under this pressure, many of them signed a form authorizing their voluntary removal from the country. In our conversation, Jonathan confirms the pattern of abuse of unaccompanied minors in immigrant processing facilities, the same one described by Ileana’s attorneys and the coalition of organizations who filed the complaint in June 2014.
“It’s not just the physical conditions,” Jonathan says. “It’s the psychological abuse too. The kids describe harsh language, and a lack of respect. They are told they don’t have any right to be there, or to apply for asylum.” The officials’ priority, he says, rather than ensuring the children’s welfare, is “making them leave the country as soon as possible.”
When the attorneys of Amoachi & Johnson made their complaint public on December 11, 2014, they elevated the tone of the discussion in two ways. First, they sent their request to annul Ileana’s deportation not to the Department of Homeland Security, but to the Department of Justice (DOJ), asking the DOJ to review the treatment of unaccompanied minors by Customs and Border Patrol. Second, the lawyers explicitly categorized Ileana’s treatment as torture.
In their public briefing, the firm cited documents published that year by the Obama administration regarding torture implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They pointed out that the DHS had created conditions for detaining migrant children “identical to what the CIA used to detain suspected terrorists during the Bush administration”—conditions that had been condemned by President Obama as having “significantly damaged the image of the United States throughout the world,” the lawyers explained. Over ten pages, they detailed the treatment Ileana had received, including being deprived of food, water, clothing, and blankets and forbidden to bathe or change clothes. Ileana, they wrote, “saw other children ask for the air conditioning to be turned off; CBP agents denied their requests and told the children they were nothing more than ‘abandoned dogs.’” By recording the verbal abuse and psychological abuse of these children, the lawyers hope to improve their conditions and stop their deportation proceedings. A preliminary response from the DHS Inspector General ordered an investigation into the conditions at some processing centers. To the lawyers, the issue goes beyond that: they see the necessity of tallying verbal and psychological abuse, and ensuring that considerations are put in place for these children, including stopping their deportation proceedings. Those who break the law saying “we don’t want you here” may become the reason they stay here.
Epilogue
On April 6, 2017, at 7:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, President Donald Trump ordered an attack on Syria. Fift
y-nine Tomahawk missiles were launched on an air base, killing over eighty civilians. The attack was carried out sixty-three hours after the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians in a rebel-controlled province, killing hundreds of women and children who were suffocated by the effects of sarin gas, which damages the nervous system. A few hours after that attack, Trump justified his actions in advance. “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that was so lethal,” he announced, “that crosses many lines, beyond a red line, many many lines.”
Trump’s response to the killing of children, however, did not include revising his position on asylum law, nor did it entail any initiative to welcome refugees from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime into the United States. In fact, the guidelines established by the Trump administration in its first one hundred days in power resulted in an increase in asylum cases; applicants were denied release under their own recognizance or with a bond, which meant longer periods of imprisonment as their applications were processed. Immigration lawyers have interpreted this action as a response to the president’s failure to enact a “Muslim ban” through executive order.
One of the cases encompassed by these guidelines landed in Carlos Spector’s office. On February 5, 2017, Mexican journalist Martín Méndez Pineda presented himself at the Juárez–El Paso border requesting asylum. He had been receiving death threats in the state of Guerrero after publishing an article describing various methods used by federal police officers to intimidate citizens. After presenting convincing evidence to establish “credible fear,” ICE responded by denying his release from detention. According to Carlos, the U.S. government keeps asylum seekers locked up in detention for as long as possible in order to convince them to drop their asylum applications, which represents a grave danger for other journalists under threat in Mexico. In just the first four months of 2017, four journalists were murdered in Mexico, and two more were wounded but survived assassination attempts.
The first months of the Trump administration offered convincing evidence that its policies on asylum and detention of undocumented immigrants would not only seamlessly continue the policies established by the previous administration, which violated international humanitarian guidelines, but would also mean longer periods spent in detention. This would benefit the two large private companies that manage the country’s immigrant detention facilities.
In the six months after Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 8, 2016, the stock prices of CoreCivic and GEO, the two largest operators of private immigrant detention centers, rose by over 100 percent. This was of course very good news for those companies, not only for the financial bonanza it represented, but because if things had gone in another direction, their futures would have been hanging by a thread.
On August 18, 2016, while Obama was still in office, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reduce the number of government contracts with private prisons. After that announcement, stock prices for both private prison corporations plummeted by 40 percent. Two months later, in the final days of the presidential campaign, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) changed its name to CoreCivic and announced that it would have to make staff cuts in order to stay on budget. Trump and his adversary, Hillary Clinton, had made their opposing positions clear: Clinton vowed to cut private prison contracts, while Trump declared his conviction that the private prison system was good for the country.
Deputy Attorney General Yates’s decision to cut back on private prison contracts was based on a Department of Justice report, which included an analysis of the drastic growth of the immigrant detention system in the United States. Between 1980 and 2013 it had grown by 800 percent and then decreased from 220,000 detainees in 2013 to 195,000 in 2016. Paying large sums of money to those private corporations was no longer necessary, the report concluded.
The two corporations’ stunning rebound after the election—CoreCivic’s stock rose 140 percent; GEO’s rose 98 percent—took place against the backdrop of two situations. One was Trump’s campaign rhetoric to lock up immigrants and the implicit need to keep the companies providing this service on the government payroll. The second was the donations that GEO and CoreCivic had made: $673,000 to the Republican Party and at least $130,000 to the Trump campaign.
On February 23, 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Yates’s memorandum, effectively breathing new life into CoreCivic and GEO. Sessions explained that maintaining private prison contracts would “meet the future needs” of the federal corrections system. Although Sessions’s announcement did not directly allude to the detention of undocumented immigrants, then Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly would refer to it explicitly three days later when he sent a memorandum to all agencies involved with immigration services and border security. The memo expanded the list of offenses to be considered crimes, which would also increase the number of undocumented people vulnerable to being arrested, detained, and put into deportation proceedings.
According to the memos signed by Kelly, the new administration would hire 15,000 new immigration agents to carry out these arrests; however, the memos authorized hiring only 50 new immigration judges. This meant that by mid-2017, 201 immigration judges would be handling over 500,000 pending cases, plus all the new cases for those detained during the new administration. There would be more detainees, a greater demand for private detention centers, longer waiting periods, and higher profits than ever for companies making a lucrative business of locking people up.
Trump had been in the Oval Office for less than a month when a series of photos taken by the Reuters news agency quickly traveled around the world. The pictures showed a family approaching the U.S. border, carrying their scant possessions in a few suitcases, holding their small children in their arms. They were trying to cross over, but not from Mexico into the United States. This family was fleeing the United States, trying to make it into Canada.
It would soon become clear that over the previous twelve months, coinciding with the beginning of the presidential campaign period in the United States and Republican candidate Trump’s blatant anti-immigrant message, the number of people illegally crossing from this country into Canada in order to seek refuge or asylum had risen exponentially. The busiest area was the border with the Canadian province of Quebec; there, the number of people arrested for illegally crossing went from 254 in 2015 to 1,222 in 2016.
The average number of asylum applications per month at the land ports of entry in Quebec province rose from 111 in the first half of the year to 255 in September and 593 in December. These spikes followed Trump’s July victory in the GOP primaries and his successful bid for the presidency in November. The total for 2016 was 1,695 applications, 72 percent up on the 985 registered in 2015. The trend continued into 2017 with a total of 3,365 asylum applications, twice the previous year’s count.
According to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) records, most of those who illegally crossed from the United States to petition for asylum in the last months of 2017 and the beginning of 2017 were from Syria, Sudan, and Yemen, three of the seven nations included in Trump’s “Muslim ban.” In Manitoba, the majority were from Somalia, another of the seven nations. Other Canadian provinces, such as Manitoba and British Columbia, experienced the same phenomenon.
Although Canadian authorities have said they will not speculate on the possible motivations for this wave of migration, it is possible to infer that the measures adopted by the new U.S. presidential administration could be sending families to the northern border and into Canadian territory, where policies on refuge and asylum continue to be generous. Other asylum seekers do not even venture to present a petition for asylum in the United States, some activists explain, and go directly to Canada.
The democratic country that has long boasted of its tradition of opening its doors to “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” has become a place that must be fled, a stepping-
stone to somewhere else. Without laying a single brick, we’ve already built a wall.
When I began research for this book in 2013, Enrique Peña Nieto had just taken office as president of Mexico. Many victims of violence who had fled the country during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term and his “war on narcotrafficking,” with over 100,000 murders, including 48 journalists and 38 mayors killed, now hoped that with a new administration, the tide would turn and it would be safe for them to come home. That has not been the case. At the close of 2016, in Peña Nieto’s fourth year in office, 67,000 people had been murdered during his term, including 30 journalists and 16 mayors. Indices of violence had risen in three out of four states. The brutal aggression in Mexico has not stopped. The corruption, massacres of civilians, and human rights violations continue to mount, while international organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders grow weary of putting out recommendations that no one heeds.