10
Caribbean Life, April 7-13, 2022
US migration policy is enriching cartels at US-Mexico border
By Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson is director for
Defense Oversight at the Washington
Office on Latin America
WASHINGTON DC, April 5,
2022 (IPS) — “The migrants try to
organize themselves to stay safe,” a
humanitarian worker told me as we
stood near a town square in Reynosa,
Mexico, steps away from the
U.S. border. More than 2,000 people
from many countries, blocked from
asking for asylum in the United
States, were packed into this square
block, living under tents and tarps,
amid port-a-potties and cooking
fires. Children were everywhere.
“They move the women and children
to tents closer to the center of
the square, to protect them from
kidnappers.” Many nights, men raid
the square, guns drawn, taking people
away and holding them for ransom
under brutal conditions.
It was my fourth day of a mid-
March visit to the Texas-Mexico border
region, and my second day visiting
Mexico’s easternmost border
state, Tamaulipas. Part of me was
beginning to wonder whether the
United States’ border and migration
policies were somehow being
designed with input from the Mexican
organized crime groups that
prey on migrants. It would be hard
to devise a system that benefits
these “cartels” more than the current
one does.
Tamaulipas is a large state, bordering
more than 200 miles of Texas
from Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico.
Of Mexico’s six border states, it is
the only one to have a level-four “Do
Not Travel” warning from the U.S.
State Department, “due to crime
and kidnapping.”
Two cartels, and smaller factions,
fight frequent running gun battles
with each other and with security
forces — while also corrupting and
penetrating government institutions
so thoroughly that the population
has long ceased to view them
as protection.
Given all this, one might expect
migrants to try and avoid Tamaulipas
and its dangers. Though many
do, for the past nine years this
has been the busiest part of the
U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. Border
Patrol apprehends more migrants
in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley
(McAllen, Brownsville, and surrounding
towns), across from most
of Tamaulipas, than it does in any
other of the nine sectors into which
it divides the border.
As Texas dips down far to the
south here, this is the closest point
on the border to Central America, so
the agency encounters tens of thousands
of Salvadorans, Guatemalans,
Hondurans, and Nicaraguans here
each year, along with Mexicans displaced
by violence elsewhere in the
country.
Many are parents with children.
I also met some of a growing
number of migrants now coming
from Colombia, Haiti, and Venezuela.
The vast majority hope to turn
themselves in to U.S. authorities
and ask for a chance to petition
for asylum in the United States,
claiming threats to their lives if
returned.
This is also a busy route for
migration because Mexican organized
crime has locked down the
routes across the border. Those who
can pay several-thousand-dollar
fees, selling everything they own
and borrowing the rest, cross with
cartel-sanctioned smugglers. It’s a
huge moneymaker for organized
crime, and for the corrupt Mexican
Op - E ds
security and migration officials who
get paid to look the other way.
I was struck by the level of control
that organized crime has over
the lives of residents, and especially
of migrants, in the Tamaulipas border
cities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa,
and Matamoros. Cold Warera
East German officials would be
impressed.
Nobody is allowed near the Rio
Grande: riverfront parks sit empty.
Those who try to cross without having
paid a fee are beaten, or worse.
Those who lack a “password” or
other proof that they have paid cartels’
exorbitant fees are kidnapped.
Migrants, including parents and
children, get held in fetid stash
houses, while their captors text terrifying
videos to relatives in the
United States, instructing them to
transfer ransom payments in the
thousands of dollars. If nobody pays,
they are disappeared, enslaved—
forced to perform labor for the cartels
— or even killed. Mexican security
forces almost never come to the
rescue.
In Nuevo Laredo, groups of
kidnappers circulate in vehicles
near the bridges from the United
States, looking for recently removed
migrants lacking the right “passwords,”
whom they then kidnap.
(Five days after my visit to Nuevo
Laredo, Mexican soldiers arrested
the cartel leader who had maximum
control over the city’s criminal
activity, unleashing days of mayhem
with burning vehicles, shootouts,
and grenades lobbed at the
U.S. Consulate.)
In Matamoros, I asked whether
“maybe 20 percent” of migrants
waiting there had been kidnapped
before. “Oh, it’s higher than that,” a
humanitarian worker replied.
And every day, though the
Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) is aware of the dangers and
the consequences, the U.S. government
delivers more victims to the
criminals. The “Title 42” pandemic
policy, which the Trump administration
launched in March 2020 and
the Biden administration is prolonging
until May 23, has expelled
non-Mexican migrants into Tamaulipas
roughly 250,000 times since
Joe Biden’s inauguration, without
giving them a chance to ask for asylum
in the United States.
Mexican citizens were expelled
into Tamaulipas 160,000 times
during that period. To them, we
must add 25,000 Mexican deportees,
mostly migrants whom Immigration
and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) arrested in the U.S. interior.
After Customs and Border Protection
(CBP) leaves them at the
bridges, kidnappers are often waiting.
Meanwhile, with the pretext of
reducing COVID exposure, Title 42
closed the official border crossings
to asylum seekers, making it impossible
to exercise the right to ask for
protection as laid out in U.S. and
international law.
Those expelled, and the adults
and children bottled up waiting for
a chance to approach the ports of
entry, are among the most vulnerable
populations in the Western
Hemisphere, and they’re just steps
from the U.S. border. In February,
researchers from the University of
Texas estimated that roughly 9,500
people were waiting in Tamaulipas
border cities for an opportunity to
ask for protection in the United
States.
Border-wide, Human Rights First
has collected evidence of at least
9,886 cases of kidnappings, torture,
rape, and other violent attacks on
asylum seekers whom Title 42 has
stranded since 2021. In Tamaulipas
the count of abuses is greater than
the statistics indicate, because the
security situation makes data collection
so difficult.
This is why it feels as though the
current U.S. policy was designed to
benefit the cartels. If migrants who
fear return to their countries could
safely cross Mexico, then report to
a port of entry and have their cases
processed, considered, and adjudicated
as quickly as due process
allows, the cartels’ business model
would implode.
But instead, closing the ports of
entry and delivering migrants to
danger have created ideal incentives
for that business model.
This vulnerable population can’t
wait for the rule of law to arrive
in Tamaulipas. The U.S. government
must act to take the business
away from the criminals preying
on migrants. What it needs to do is
already laid out in U.S. law. No new
legislation is required.
Since 1980, U.S. immigration
law has made clear that the official
ports of entry are a proper place
for asylum seekers to approach and
express to CBP officers their fear of
return to their countries. For more
than two years, though, Title 42
made it impossible to approach a
port of entry.
Once Title 42 ends in late May,
asylum seekers must be able to
come to a port of entry, not pay
criminals’ “tolls” to cross the Rio
Grande. Then they should be processed—
checking backgrounds and
health records, beginning asylum
paperwork, evaluating the credibility
of fear claims—in facilities with
the space and manpower to do it
quickly.
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Migrant encampment in the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas,
Mexico. Adam Isacson
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