We Built the Wall Read online

  A longtime social activist, Sandra works for a Texas labor union. She is sixty years old, but youthful and vivacious; only a few lines on her face hint at her age. Her eyes sparkle, her black hair shines, and she gestures enthusiastically with her hands. She wears boots over slim-fitting pants and two sweaters—it’s a chilly desert night in January. Even though her first language is English, Sandra speaks with me in Spanish.

  A few minutes later Carlos walks over with a firm step and joins us. His appearance catches me off guard. I have seen him before in photos and videos, with a robust frame, deep voice, and impassioned way of speaking that lent him an imposing air. The Carlos in front of me has the same wavy sandy hair, pale complexion, strong nose, mustache, sideburns, and somewhat uneven beard, but is someone else: thirty pounds lighter, the skin on his face hanging slack around squinty eyes, his voice raspy, tired. Sandra tells me that her husband was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx a few months before. He is recovering from an aggressive course of radiation treatment.

  Carlos asks for a glass of water without ice and starts to talk, gesturing with his hands for emphasis. He’s an effective orator: like a preacher, but without the arrogance. He smiles and speaks with passion. In recent months, all of his time and energy have been consumed by a particular kind of case: Mexicans living in exile in the United States because of violence in their home country.

  “Everything is political,” Carlos tells me the day we meet. “It has to be political to make the case for someone applying for asylum, to make the U.S. government understand what is happening.” When the Reyes family’s case found its way to Carlos, he began to see a pattern in the stories of his clients—journalists and social justice and human rights activists and defenders—and their motivations for fleeing to the United States. He began studying “those individuals who, before the attack, had been working on protecting democracy.” A human rights defender, he says, is someone who works professionally in the defense of human rights, while an activist (e.g., a family member of the disappeared) seeks justice where the state fails to provide it. Within just a few months, Carlos had compiled a list of twenty-one human rights defenders who had been assassinated. Justice had not been served in a single case.

  The asylum cases coming from Guadalupe are, for Carlos, personal. Born in 1954 in El Paso, he describes himself as a “pocho”—a slang word roughly translating to “Americanized Mexican”—but strongly identifies with Mexico. His mother was from Guadalupe; his grandfather was mayor of the city. As in all border communities, Carlos’s family home “on the other side” was an extension of his own.

  “We knew through our family that things were really bad, that Chapo Guzmán had gotten there in 2008, and they were killing the leaders of La Linea,” Carlos explains, referring to the local cartel in Juárez. Some of Carlos’s relatives were among that group—“a little bit removed”—so they knew the details. Then the Reyes Salazar family was referred to him.

  The family’s case, Carlos says, represents the entire system of “authorized crime” in Mexico. “The criminals don’t function without authorization from the state,” he says, “whether it’s on a municipal, state, or federal level.” When criminal groups first arrive in a town, they tend to identify and target the area’s political leadership first as a form of “ideological cleansing,” Carlos explains. Over the course of several election cycles for governor of the state of Chihuahua, Guadalupe was the only place in the entire state where a leftist candidate from the PRD party won. The candidates who prevailed there were from the Reyeses’ party; the family was therefore considered “dangerous.”

  Aside from relying on open, obvious repression and expelling its people, Mexico also considers those who seek asylum in the United States to be traitors. “People who are under attack are expected to stay there and fight to the death to defend the country that is pushing them out,” he says.

  We are having coffee after dinner, and Carlos gestures forcefully with his hands to compensate for the weakness of his voice. He finds it troubling that since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for seventy years before losing in 2000, came back into power in 2012 under President Enrique Peña Nieto, the government publicly maintains that everything is just fine in Mexico. The United States has bought the story without question. The media have picked up the message and broadcast it repeatedly, and the narrative has swayed international opinion.1

  “People applying for asylum in the United States are having their petitions denied, even though extortion and death threats are still happening there, in the streets, in everyday life,” Carlos recounts, heatedly. “The U.S. authorities aren’t asking why people come here without papers … The reason they came here is fear, to escape extortion.”

  We’re about to leave the restaurant, but Carlos pauses to tell me a joke he heard from some men being held in immigration detention: “A Honduran, Salvadoran, Mexican, and Guatemalan are in a van. Who’s driving?” He waits a beat. “Immigration!” He delivers the punch line with a raucous laugh.

  Martín Huéramo is nervous. He strides assuredly into Carlos Spector’s law office, but then looks around anxiously for a place to sit. He wrings his hands and shifts impatiently in his seat. In a few days he will appear before a judge who will review his case for asylum. His children’s future and his own will depend on the evidence and testimony that he, Carlos, and others present.

  Carlos is tough on Martín as they talk about his case, and focuses on the political aspect of his argument. They sit side by side behind Carlos’s mahogany desk, a statuette of Lady Justice, balance in hand, watching over them. They go over the weak points in his defense, which could jeopardize his asylum case. Carlos demands his client’s complete concentration, and asks him for some documentation. One by one, these cold, impersonal appearances before a judge decide the fate of the exiled.

  Even before he was a lawyer, Carlos already thought in the political language he has mastered so well. By the time he enrolled in law school at thirty years old, he had already earned a master’s degree in sociology and held several jobs with organizations involved with the Central American and Mexican communities. It was the eighties, and amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants would soon be passed into law. Also around this time, Carlos met Sandra Garza, now his wife.

  Sandra’s family traces its roots back to a time in South Texas “before Mexico was Mexico, when it was a Spanish territory,” as she likes to point out. Sandra was involved in the pro-immigrant movement spearheaded by Humberto “Bert” Corona, the Chicano activist who led movements in support of labor unions and rights for undocumented immigrants—a stance which would eventually cause a rift between him and his longtime ally, the farmworker activist Cesar Chavez. During these formative years, Sandra also worked with students who fled Mexico in the wake of the student massacre of 1968, and another violent attack on students in 1971 in an incident known as “el halconazo.”

  “I met Sandra when she was an organizer for the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union here in El Paso,” Carlos recalls with a smile. A year has passed since our conversation over dinner at the Mexican restaurant, and now we’re meeting again in his office, in a building on a corner in a popular El Paso neighborhood. Carlos is a new man: although still lean, he’s put on weight, his hair has grown back, his beard has filled in, his gaze is sharp, his voice strong once again.

  “Some friends told me, you’ve got to meet this girl, she’s doing what you’re doing,” he says. “When I was introduced to her, I saw she was involved with the same things. I had met the woman who would accompany me, sometimes follow me, and sometimes lead me in the social struggle that comes at such a high emotional and political cost.”

  For the Spectors, that struggle has become a way of life. The first political asylum case Carlos won was in 1991. The petitioner, Ernesto Poblano, was a candidate for Mexico’s conservative National Action Party (PAN), opposing PRI. The mayor of Ojinaga, a town in the state of Chihuahua, Pobl
ano received a message one day stating “that he would not be allowed to win and govern,” Carlos explains. Poblano fled across the border, Carlos successfully demonstrated that his client had been persecuted, and he won the asylum case. That was followed by cases representing other political leaders from PAN or the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), dissidents from PRI, and labor leaders.

  The political landscape since the nineties, however, “has changed a great deal,” he says, because of “massive, large-scale repression. In the eighties and nineties,” he explains, “the repression was clearly aimed at leaders.” But even when, during the presidency of Carlos Salinas, more people began to flee and more leftists were assassinated, “Mexicans weren’t applying for political asylum. If it’s rare for this kind of violence to be acknowledged now, just imagine back then.”

  Originally established as a relief measure by the United Nations in 1952, political asylum allows people suffering from persecution to seek refuge in a country other than their own if they can demonstrate that the persecution falls under one or more of five categories: religion, race, national minority status, political opinion, or membership in a social group. The persecution can be carried out by the state or by a particular group from which the state is either unwilling or unable to provide protection for the individual. Political asylum grew out of an accord between nations following World War II, at a time when fascism and Communism were considered the main sources of persecution.

  “The law has not evolved along with the social, political, and economic changes of today,” Carlos says. It fails to comprehend the reality of a “failed state” that persecutes Mexican citizens, he says, which “is partly why political asylum is denied to Mexicans.”

  Historically, political asylum has been used as a tool to punish the enemies and reward the friends of the nation where asylum seekers apply. For immigration lawyers, the clearest example is Cuba. Because Cuba is ruled by a Communist regime politically opposed to the United States, the U.S. consequently welcomed Cuban immigrants with open arms (until January 2017, when President Barack Obama announced an end to the policy known as “wet foot, dry foot”). “People fleeing persecution in Communist countries or Eastern Europe,” says Carlos, receive a far warmer welcome in the United States “than those trying to escape persecution in countries that are viewed as ‘friends’ of the United States, like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Argentina.”

  In 1980 the United States Refugee Act officially recognized the right to petition for asylum just as civil wars were breaking out in Central America. Carlos believes these factors created what he calls “the country’s political conscience”: the view in the United States that only a civil war or a national tragedy justified an individual seeking asylum. This meant that most cases from Mexicans were denied.

  Despite this, the number of asylum seekers from Mexico began to creep up during Salinas de Gortari’s presidential administration (1988 to 1994). Salinas came into office after a bitter campaign battle against his leftist rival, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, colored by widespread suspicion of electoral fraud on the part of the PRI, the governing party. The most radical leftist leaders were persecuted, and in some cases assassinated, in several states across Mexico during Salinas’s presidency.

  Soon, cases of people exiled because of Salinas de Gortari reached Carlos’s office. In response, he crafted a strategy based on cases of exile in other Central American countries, as well as the Chileans exiled from Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in the sixties. Attacks at the time were focused on leaders with very specific characteristics and in particular circumstances. Since power was centralized, repression was also centralized and channeled to a direct object.

  Repression and persecution in Mexico have changed since the PRI’s fall from power in 2000: the PAN, the rightist party, now dominates the federal government, and many municipalities are in the hands of the leftist PRD. With power decentralized among three political parties, violence extends indiscriminately, with few limits and concrete objectives. Most cases of persecution originate in small cities and towns, rather than Mexico’s major cities—in areas key to narcotrafficking, near to oil wells or with access to water. Cartels, in league with the state, can provide, or deny, access to these areas.

  “It’s often difficult to make the case for asylum based on political views,” Carlos explains, “but when you’re a candidate for office, when you’re a writer or someone who’s constantly criticizing the government publicly, it’s much easier.” When President Felipe Calderón’s war on drug trafficking prompted an exodus, for example, Carlos’s strongest asylum cases were journalists. It was relatively easy to demonstrate persecution based on political beliefs or on their membership in a social group—in this case, the journalism profession.

  Carlos began to take on more cases from journalists and human rights defenders, the vast majority from the state of Chihuahua, and became an expert in this new condition of exile-asylum from Mexico to the United States. Carlos, Sandra, their daughter Alejandra, and a few other people in their office began taking on these cases pro bono or for a nominal fee. When the Reyes case came to the Spectors, the evidence of massive repression was clear. Such cases were easy because they embodied the very definition of political asylum. Considered symbolic cases, they could be used to educate people on their options within the immigration system.

  Carlos started to win some cases through the political asylum office, which is very different from having to go before a judge. There are two political asylum categories: affirmative asylum and defensive asylum. Those who enter the United States legally, with a visa or work permit, can go to one of the asylum offices throughout the country to apply for affirmative asylum. The process is more friendly, and the staff interviewing candidates for asylum there specialize in the subject; they are more sensitive to applicants’ circumstances and can process cases more accurately. Those who apply for asylum at border crossings or those detained while attempting to cross the border illegally are applying for defensive asylum; they try to defend themselves against deportation, presenting an argument for their asylum petition. Their first contact is with immigration agents, who generally do not have the training or knowledge to deal with victims of violence. The standard procedure is to arrest the asylum applicant, then schedule a court date for them to go before a judge. And that is where the battle begins.

  “I never thought we would have to appeal these cases in court,” Carlos remarks, still incredulous that asylum is routinely denied to victims of well-documented, clear cases of violence like the Reyes family. “That’s when I realized the Mexican government is not satisfied with the U.S. rejecting 98 percent of applications. They want them to deny 100 percent of the cases.” He recalls cases in which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the state and federal commissions on human rights intervened on behalf of migrants accused of transgressions such as criticizing the government or the army. Those cases have been rejected.

  It was time to depart from the strategy that had worked with Central American exiles in the eighties, Carlos decided. If that wave of exiles had been characterized by invisibility, people coming from Mexico would have to be highly visible, making public declarations and denunciations and criticizing the Mexican state. “Because the problem is binational,” Carlos argues, “the solution has to be binational: attacking and criticizing the source of the problem from here.” The United States is as culpable as Mexico, not only denying petitions but openly discouraging petitioners by insulting and detaining immigrants at border crossings. Such rejections in turn discourage lawyers from taking on strong cases due to low rates of success, Carlos says.

  Winning political asylum cases for Mexicans has not been profitable for the Spectors, but it has increased the firm’s profile. They currently handle a caseload of 250 clients, including a hundred families, and one by one, the cases are being approved. Carlos has won cases for six members of the Reyes family, for instance, including Saúl and Sara. This is
an extraordinary feat, considering the national statistics: of every hundred cases of Mexicans applying for asylum, ninety-eight are denied.

  Although the figures are discouraging, asylum seekers keep coming. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, of 3,650 asylum applications presented by Mexicans in 2008, only 73 were granted. By 2011, the number of applicants had doubled, but of 7,616 applications, only 107 were granted. In fiscal year 2013, the applications reached 10,177, and of those, 155 were approved; by 2015 the number of applications dropped to 8,923, and 203 were approved. This represents a sea change from 2006, before Felipe Calderón’s war on narcotrafficking began, when 133 applications were filed.2

  On top of enduring a complicated, challenging process, applicants and their lawyers must contend with the far right in both countries; those in the United States argue that asylum seekers are doing so to obtain green cards, while their Mexican counterparts refer to asylum seekers as “buscapapeles” (“looking for papers”), traitors, or criminals. And the Mexican government, Carlos says, consistently echoes this rhetoric.

  Carlos tells me Marisol Valles’s story as an example. For months, Marisol was known as “the bravest woman in Mexico,” a nickname initially coined by the Spanish daily El País and picked up by the other media outlets following her story. A twenty-year-old college student studying criminology, Marisol became the chief of police in Práxedis G. Guerrero, a town in the Juárez Valley in Chihuahua, where her predecessors had met one of two fates: they were assassinated or fled after receiving death threats from narcotraffickers. Marisol took a job that no one else wanted, with the promise that she would head a police corps of mostly female officers, avoid direct confrontations with criminal gangs, and focus on devising policies to prevent violence and crime on the local level.