U.S. and Mexico Teaming Up to Turn Away Central American Refugees

Guest Blogger: Rachel Prandini of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center:

A year ago, the southern border was in the throes of an unprecedented surge of unaccompanied alien children as well as thousands of women with children from Central America seeking refuge in the United States. The more than 60,000 unaccompanied minors and similar numbers of family units were fleeing gangs, drug cartels, and domestic violence. Critics—without any empirical support—argued that the children were drawn north by the Obama administration’s deferred action program for DREAMers. Buying into the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the Obama administration immediately set up family detention centers and converted refrigeration units to house minors, while it prioritized deportation proceedings for both groups.

The plight of unaccompanied minors is off the front pages, in part because the numbers of those reaching our borders is said to have dramatically declined. Although just how much the numbers reaching the southern border of the United States have declined is inexact, one thing is clear: any decline has been affected dramatically by Mexican intervention, rather than a reduction in violent conditions in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

It turns out that the Mexican government has its own southern border security and deportation plan. Between October 2014 and April 2015, Mexico’s National Institute for Migration detained about 93,000 Central Americans. Almost 16,000 minors were apprehended between January and August of 2014, compared with less than 10,000 in 2013. Deportations from Mexico to the Northern Triangle countries have increased: 8,350 unaccompanied minors were deported from Mexico in 2013, and the figured jumped to 18,169 in 2014. The trend continues: 3,819 unaccompanied minors from Central America were deported during the first five months of 2015 – a 56 percent increase over the same period in 2014.

Mexico’s deportation enforcement plan takes a page from U.S. immigration schemes–past and present. There is an increased presence of immigration officials in pickup trucks patrolling the roads and bus stations en route to the train line. Raids on hotels and restaurants where migrants find shelter have been waged. Immigration agents, supported by federal police and the military, are targeting the trains, removing migrants and detaining them. The companies that run the cargo trains on whose roofs migrants travel are counseled by Mexican officials to increase the train speed in order to deter migrants from riding them.

While Mexican agents are supposed to screen unaccompanied children for international protections, that does not regularly take place. The children have no knowledge of their rights to apply for asylum and are left to fend for themselves when asking for protection. The migrant children who reach Southern Mexico are systematically detained, often in poor conditions, for long and unpredictable periods. Detention conditions –coupled with the prospect of being detained for months while awaiting a decision on their status –deters children from seeking asylum. Researchers have found that the “immigration system currently in place in Mexico operates more like a child-deportation-machine.”

It turns out that the United States has invested significant political and fiscal resources in the fortification of Mexico’s southern border. Through the Merida Initiative, a 2007 agreement between the United States and Mexico that has funneled $2.3 billion to the Mexican government not only to combat drug cartels and organized crime as part of the United States’ decades-long war on drugs, but to fund Mexico’s southern border security plan. The United States is simply trying to encourage Mexico to interdict migrants merely in order to prevent them from reaching U.S. territory. This is very reminiscent of President Ronald Regan’s high seas interdiction of Haitian refugees attempting to prevent them from reaching U.S. shores. In the process, the United States and Mexico are foreclosing eligible migrants from exercising their international rights to seek protection from persecution. We now know that represented children in U.S. immigration courts have a 73 percent success rate, compared with 15 percent of those who are unrepresented. Sadly, we also now know that the United States and Mexico are preventing young migrants fleeing violence from reaching our immigration courts.

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