‘I’m in Danger’: Migrant Parents Face Violence in Mexico Under New Trump Policy

On a chilly morning in mid-April, two Central American families piled out of an Uber and joined the long line of pedestrians waiting to cross the Paso del Norte Bridge from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso. Other folks in line were on their way to school, work, or errands in El Paso—the everyday stuff of binational cities. But these two families—each with a father, pregnant mother, and child—had a different destination: U.S. immigration court.

The day before, the two young fathers, Edwin Escobar from El Salvador and Ronaldo Garcia from Guatemala, said that after leaving their church shelter for food, they had been kidnapped by three men at gunpoint, held for three hours, beaten, and robbed. The men broke Garcia’s finger and stole the five pesos—about 25 cents—that he had to his name. Now, as the parents guided their children toward the international bridge, they spotted something both familiar and alarming: a man and woman staring at them, talking on their phones, and looking around. “When we were kidnapped, we saw people acting just like that,” said Edwin. He said the suspicious man followed them into a bathroom and onto the bridge, and only left after they turned themselves into U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. The families feel lucky to have made it to court that day.

The Garcias and Escobars, whose last names have been changed, are among the first group of asylum seekers to return to El Paso for court hearings since the Trump administration put into place a controversial new policy requiring some asylum seekers to stay in violent Mexican border cities while their cases are heard in the U.S. Immigrants, shelter operators, and human rights groups have warned that the policy, called the Migrant Protection Protocols, endangers the lives of migrants and deprives them of due process. MPP is currently in place in El Paso and California, though DHS has said it plans to expand the program across the Southwest border. Opponents are challenging the plan in court; on Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether to issue an injunction to halt the program, at least temporarily. More than a thousand asylum seekers have been returned to Mexico under MPP, including four to five hundred from El Paso in just over two weeks.

On April 17 and 18, at court hearings in El Paso for 42 asylum seekers, including 15 children, the major concerns of critics of the “remain in Mexico” plan unfolded: migrants faced violence in Mexico and had little or no access to attorneys; the already limited humanitarian relief network was strained beyond capacity; and the court system was at times chaotic—even the judge acknowledged he didn’t know all the rules of the program.

At the hearings, immigration judge Nathan Herbert explained that under MPP, the decision to send asylum seekers back to Mexico to await a ruling on their ultimate fate was up to the Department of Homeland Security, not him. His job was to decide whether they’d be deported to their home countries. He acknowledged that the MPP hearings were “uncharted territory.” Over two days, he repeatedly tried to make the asylum seekers feel at ease and encouraged them to ask questions. He wished one little girl a happy birthday after her mother told him she was turning three in a few days. He made a Spanish interpreter available in the courtroom, and he twice phoned an interpreter of Quiché, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. Herbert also ensured that every asylum seeker in court had their cases reset for May to give them time to meet with an attorney, if they could find one.