We Built the Wall Read online

  The day after Del Río, the Migrant March reached Laredo, Texas, just as the city prepared for its most important celebration of the year: February 17, George Washington’s birthday. The day’s festivities would culminate in a special ceremony known as Abrazo, or “hug.” The ritual is as simple and beautiful as its name suggests: residents of both sides of the border, Laredo in the United States and Nuevo Laredo in Mexico, walk over the bridge that joins the two cities, and, at the midpoint, exchange hugs to express their friendship.

  “Local authorities, senators, deputies, lots of people come from the other side, and practically the whole city goes from this side,” explains Juan Ramírez, vice mayor of Laredo. “A little boy and girl from Mexico dressed in traditional Mexican clothing lead their group, and the same on this side, a little boy and girl in traditional Texas clothing.”

  This ritual of friendship renewal has been celebrated at the border crossing for 119 years. There were plans to build a wall there, too.

  Part Two

  Exile and Asylum

  4

  Annunciation House

  The Asylum Tradition

  A red brick building sits on the corner ten blocks from the border between Mexico and the United States. Erected almost a century ago, it’s in El Paso, Texas. Juárez, Mexico, is just across the river. And everyone knows that even though the two cities are only steps apart, those from the other side of the border who find their way to that red brick building can finally feel safe.

  Since its founding in 1978, Annunciation House has offered shelter, a bed, a shower, and a hot meal to the homeless and anyone with nowhere else to go. The concept first took hold in 1976, when a group of young Catholic idealists got together in El Paso, searching for a meaningful mission for themselves, and proposed the idea of creating a space to serve people without a home. In 1978, the Catholic archdiocese in El Paso decided that the project was worthwhile and gave them the second floor of the brick building to use, on the condition that they also maintain it. And with that, Annunciation House was born.

  Rubén García was among that group of young Catholics. As director of the Office for Young Adults at the diocese, he decided to focus all of his enthusiasm and energy on the new project. He and four others moved into the second floor and began seeking out “the poorest of the poor” to lend a helping hand.

  “When the House first opened, there were only two other shelters in El Paso,” recalls Rubén, who is still the director of Annunciation House. “At the time, we didn’t know those shelters did not accept undocumented people.” It was 1978, and after the end of the Bracero Program, which between 1942 and 1964 had allowed Mexican workers to enter the United States on a temporary basis, immigration laws had hardened. No social service organization could offer aid to anyone who was undocumented.

  “We found out when we were flooded with immigrants who told us they had looked for help and had been refused ‘because we don’t have papers,’” Rubén remembers. “We understood then that immigrants were the most vulnerable group. They were the poorest of the poor.”

  Ever since the first opponents of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz’s regime made El Paso the headquarters for their conspiratorial operations over a century ago, the El Paso/Juárez area has been the setting for border crossings related to asylum and exile from Mexico and sometimes even from Central America. “The house was founded in 1978, right when the Sandinistas defeated Somoza in Nicaragua and took control of the country,” Rubén remembers. “That’s when the guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala rose up, hoping they could overthrow their governments too, which as we know did not happen. But the civil wars caused a wave of exiled migrants, and El Paso was one of the border towns where they landed. So we took them in at the House.”

  With increased border security efforts and a hardening of immigration politics in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, undocumented immigration into the United States has grown increasingly dangerous but has not diminished. Over the past two decades, Annunciation House has remained full, sheltering between 100 and 125 people on average. Since they first opened their doors, Rubén estimates that he and his volunteer staff have welcomed about 125,000 people.

  Saúl Reyes crossed the Santa Fe bridge with his wife and their three children in February 2011. When the Reyes family arrived in El Paso, the first place to shelter them was Annunciation House.

  Dozens of families have stories like that of the Reyes family. They have been harassed, persecuted, and physically attacked, their property has been ransacked or burned to the ground, and their attackers enjoy full impunity. One study by the Autonomous University of Chihuahua found that since 2008, when violence in the area escalated, approximately 100,000 Mexicans have moved from Juárez to somewhere in the United States; half of those moved to El Paso.1

  Similar to the wave of upper-class pro-Díaz Mexicans at the beginning of the twentieth century, some leaving Juárez have the resources, a visa, or a work permit allowing them to stay in the United States legally. Others, like the Reyes family, thought they had a strong enough case to win asylum and decided to embark on the legal process. But these cases are the exception. Although migration and asylum are commonplace in El Paso del Norte, U.S. legislation is restrictive when it comes to granting political asylum to citizens of countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Given that asylum laws date from the 1980s and were formulated based on the geopolitics of the Cold War, those who come from Mexico and Central America are not considered eligible for protection since their governments are, at least theoretically, democracies. Immigrants from countries like China, Iran, or Venezuela, which the United States defines as non-democratic, have approval rates for asylum applications of between 70 and 82 percent, while the rates of approval for asylum petitions from Honduras and Guatemala are around 15 to 16 percent. Petitions from El Salvador are approved less than 8 percent of the time, and approval rates for Mexico are barely 2 percent. Faced with these dim prospects, the majority choose the only option they have: entering the country without documentation or with a temporary visa that will soon lapse, and fading into anonymity among the 11.5 million undocumented people living in the country.

  Father Arturo Bañuelas knows his city well. The priest of the San Pio parish for twenty-six years, he recently moved to a new parish also in El Paso and has been closely involved with Rubén’s work at Annunciation House. The shelter’s operation is indispensable, he asserts, especially with all the exiles from the recent violence in Juárez. That city and El Paso, Father Arturo points out, are bound by “very strong economic, cultural, and religious ties. The people here are one community. Now we understand that after the violence broke out, for each person killed [in Juárez], a hundred more on both sides of the border have been affected … We are closer to each other here than to the capitals of our own countries. So the people who had the resources found a way to get out when the violence started. The ones who stayed in Juárez are the poorest, the ones who could not pay for their escape.”

  One morning in July 2014, Rubén got a phone call. It was an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agent told him about the growing numbers of underage migrants traveling across the border alone, or with their mothers, then detained around the Río Grande in South Texas. Immigration authorities could only process them, but once they were released on bond, they had nowhere to go and had no family or host to receive them. The ICE agent told Rubén that planes were about to fly into El Paso with 140 migrants. They would be released under their own recognizance. For the ones with nowhere to go, the agent asked, could Rubén take them in?

  Although Rubén was used to taking in entire families, the phone call surprised him. For years, Annunciation House had been subjected to raids and harrassment by the border patrol and ICE agents. Gradually, however, the harassment had abated, to the point where ICE agents themselves escorted undocumented pregnant women, sick people, and children to Annunciation House. And the house had prov
ided temporary shelter to approximately 2,500 undocumented minors from Central America during the 2014 surge.

  Annunciation House has become an icon for El Paso, a community that boasts of being the “Ellis Island of the southeastern U.S.,” according to Mexican American journalist Alfredo Corchado, whose family, originally from Durango, made El Paso their home after spending a few years in the fields in California.

  “This city is home to people who want to reinvent themselves, who are fleeing hard times and need security, a way to start over,” Alfredo says, a hint of pride in his voice. “It’s a city that takes in the oppressed, the dispossessed, people who have lived through bloodshed and uncertainty.”

  In May 1976, while he was still working for the archdiocese, Rubén invited Mother Teresa to visit his group of young adults. She accepted the invitation, and a relationship grew between them. Two years later she asked Rubén to work on a project she was starting. But Rubén had just received permission from the archdiocese to create a shelter for the poor, and he told her he could not accept her invitation. Mother Teresa responded in a letter praising his decision: “Now you can go forth and do a work of annunciation. You will announce the good news and give people a home in the name of Jesus.”

  From then on, Annunciation House’s destiny was settled.

  5

  Political Asylum

  Sheltering Arms, but Not for Everyone

  Rocío Hernández has twice been held in immigration detention in the United States. Both times, in October 2013 and March 2014, she had come from Mexico to request political asylum at the border crossing. And both times, after spending a month in detention, she was deported. When she first asked for asylum, she had been living in Mexico, her birth country, for four years. Before that, she had spent fifteen years living undocumented in the United States.

  “I had gone back to Mexico to go to school, for the chance to have a professional career,” she told me over the phone in 2014. She was in Veracruz, where she had gone to live after being deported for the second time.

  With long black hair, a dark complexion, bright eyes, and a wide, vivacious smile, Rocío migrated to the United States with her family, without papers, when she was four years old. Her life unfolded like that of a typical American girl: she went to school and thought about what she would do when she grew up. But when she tried to continue her education after high school, the door slammed shut. She did not have a social security number.

  “At the time I wanted to go to art school, which costs twice as much as a regular school, and I couldn’t get a scholarship, or financial aid for immigrants,” Rocío recalls. “My parents did not have a good financial situation. We couldn’t apply for a loan.”

  So when Rocío was nineteen, she decided to return to Mexico and continue her education there, leaving behind High Point, North Carolina, her parents, her seventeen-year-old sister, and her thirteen-year-old brother. She went to the Mexican state of Veracruz, where her family was from, and enrolled in a program for graphic design and public relations. The experience was harder than she had imagined. She felt like a foreigner in the country she had considered her own. And the state her parents fondly remembered had become one of the most dangerous in Mexico, where drug cartels and organized crime operated with impunity, journalists were assassinated, and young people were kidnapped, their bodies discovered weeks later in mass graves. But in spite of the abundant evidence of the violence in Veracruz, the evidence presented by Rocío on her particular situation, and the fact that she had lived most of her life in the United States and her entire family was there, her case was not considered strong enough for an asylum petition.

  “My dream was to live in Los Angeles someday and work in a fashion design company, but I couldn’t,” she tells me as we finish our conversation. “The truth is I don’t see myself living in Mexico, I’m afraid here. So I’m considering going to London to study art, or fashion.” It has been five years since she last saw her parents; they cannot travel to Mexico because of their immigration status.

  Most of the 1.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States have been an integral part of its society, economy, and culture for much longer than one or two years. Only 14 percent of undocumented immigrants have been in the country for less than five years, while 66 percent have made their home in the United States for a decade or more.1 Just like Rocío, most have deep roots in the United States through their communities and families. But the law still defines them as “aliens,” and they are denied the opportunity to work, to pursue higher education, and to build a stable life. The proportion of long-term residents is even higher among the 6 million undocumented immigrants from Mexico;2 just 7 percent of undocumented Mexican immigrants have been in the country for less than five years, and many have been a part of U.S. society for over twenty years.

  In spite of these statistics, indicating Mexicans’ strong links to the United States and long-term contributions to its economic output, legal and societal stigma, including disparaging myths and clichés, seems to mark immigrants from Mexico as “more undocumented” than those from other countries. Mexicans comprised 52 percent of the total undocumented population but 65 percent of those deported in 2015.3 Mexicans are also subjected to expedited repatriation, wherein those detained illegally crossing the border from Mexico or Canada can be immediately returned to their countries of origin without any judicial process.

  “That’s something I’ve called ‘Mexican exclusion,’” says Carlos Spector. “There aren’t waves of migrants coming from the Canadian border and being deported, right? That provision is aimed at Mexico … to prevent Mexico’s humanitarian crisis from being reflected in granting political asylum.” U.S. immigration court judges, Carlos says, classify the violence suffered by asylum petitioners as criminal activity rather than political violence, despite the fact that “the crime is being committed by the state … They recognize abuses in Cuba, Venezuela, all over the place, but not Mexico.”

  Since its founding, the United States has presented itself to the world as a just, fair nation that opens its arms to whoever sets foot on its land in search of freedom and prosperity. Nonetheless, until just before World War II, there was no legal measure in place through which someone seeking asylum could apply for it. After the war, when international norms on the issue were standardized, U.S. law began to guarantee rights to certain individuals as refugees, but generally on the basis of economic, commercial, or political criteria, rather than human or civil rights. The United States has accepted 3 million refugees, but the vast majority of these have come from only three countries: Cuba, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union. In the United States, “refugee” almost always means “refugee from Communism.”4 The United Nations Refugee Convention was ratified in 1951 and the United States signed the protocol defining refugees in 1967, but for decades U.S. policy remained entrenched in Cold War politics.

  Several episodes illustrate U.S. policy toward those who knock on the door seeking refuge. During the 1930s, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt relied on the immigrant quota system in effect at the time to justify U.S. refusal to accept refugees from Nazi Germany. After the war, the Allies had to decide what to do about the 1 million people displaced from occupied territories. The United States created the Displaced Persons Act (DPA), agreeing to admit 205,000 refugees between 1948 and 1950. After that, approximately 80,000 Jewish refugees were also accepted through an amendment to the law, but over 70 percent of those were from the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.5

  Several years later, after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the attorney general’s office exercised its discretion to conditionally admit, or parole, thousands of Cubans who had abandoned the island for the United States. Through the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, a legal remedy was created specifically for this population, and any Cuban who had been present in the United States for one year could be granted permanent residency immediately. In addition, various federal assistance programs made it easier for the
Cuban community to adjust and assimilate to life in the United States.6

  This policy of open arms for Cubans contrasts sharply with policies in place for refugees from Haiti, a neighboring Caribbean island. During the 1970s, thousands of Haitians fled their country because of the harsh repression of dictator François Duvalier’s regime. Like the Cubans, many left on small rafts or rickety boats cobbled together from whatever materials they had on hand. They made the treacherous journey and arrived in the United States seeking asylum.

  As one would expect, the cases started to pile up. The U.S. government created the Haitian Program to deal with the 6,000 to 7,000 cases that had accumulated at the INS in Miami since mid-1978.7 But the number of pending cases was rising not because the government did not have the capacity to process them, but rather because of a deliberate policy of addressing the long line of Haitian citizens at a snail’s pace. Duvalier was a U.S. ally, after all. As with other countries in past decades, openly admitting that his government was creating political refugees would have contradicted U.S. diplomatic policy.

  In July 1978, the INS established that Haitian refugees would be considered “economic,” not political refugees. This classification dramatically reduced their likelihood of qualifying for political asylum. To discourage Haitians from trying to immigrate in the future, the INS recommended that they be detained upon their arrival in the United States, refused work permits while their cases were pending—if cases were opened for them at all—and processed and deported as soon as possible. What followed was a disaster: under the new program, refugees were interviewed at a rate of forty per day, with agents who had received no training in political asylum. Almost 40,000 applications were processed under the program, and each and every applicant was denied political asylum.