EL PASO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st December, 2019) There is no due process for migrant families that are still being separated by US immigration enforcement during the process of determining if migrant children are in proper care of their guardians, sometimes leading to separation from relatives for reasons that do not necessarily endanger the child, American Immigration Council Advocacy Manager Katy Murdza told Sputnik.
Murdza manages a project that provides pro bono legal services at the Dilley detention center near San Antonio, Texas, which has about 1,500 detainees and is one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
She said these policies causing family separation existed during the Obama administration but became worse under the Trump administration. Murdza added that although the current administration terminated the "zero-tolerance" policy, it has continued in other forms.
Migrant children under the guardianship of relatives have long been separated from their families by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the southern border, Murdza said.
"They [migrant relatives] aren't what CBP defines as the parent, it has happened for a long time, as well as if CBP decides that it's for the child's safety," Murdza said. "But they're not required to provide evidence to the parent or the lawyer so they can separate [them] because they have some minor criminal record from decades ago or just the suspicion of something. There isn't due process in that decision."
Murdza said CBP's reasoning for separating families is not always necessarily something that would show danger to a child.
The Trump administration's Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, also known as the Remain in Mexico policy, has also gutted legal help for migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
In January, the Trump administration implemented MPP, which forces migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims process in the United States. In August, Human Rights First reported that there are more than 110 publicly reported cases of violent crimes against asylum seekers returned from the United States to Mexico under MPP.
The number of migrants waiting in Ciudad Juarez, just across the southern border from El Paso, is 18,000 and 55,000 across the whole border under MPP.
As recently as August, only 1 percent of migrant families - women and children - at the Dilley detention center were from Mexico and 91 percent from Northern Triangle countries. However, the demographics at the facility are highly visible now with Hondurans and Guatemalans making up 11 percent of migrant families at the facility and 69 percent from Mexico.
Many migrant families that would have previously ended up at the family detention center with access to legal services have now been turned back to wait in Mexico under MPP, Murdza said. Most migrants affected by MPP have no access to the asylum process, and even those migrants who do by chance end up in the Dilley detention facility have a very small chance of getting through the credible fear interview, Murdza said.
Murdza said since July of this year the denial rate in the credible fear interview at the Dilley facility increased from to at least 50 percent. She said the change is egregious because 98 percent of families were passing the credible fear interviews through June of this year.
Other concerns for immigration rights groups, Murdza said, include safe third country agreements with the United States and the new US asylum law requiring asylum-seeking migrants be sent to Guatemala to help ease the burden on the US-Mexico border.
In November, the Trump administration began to implement a new asylum rule to send asylum-seeking migrants to Guatemala or other countries that have agreed to "safe third country" agreements with the United States.
The rule is damaging to the hopes of many migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, who arrive at the United States without claiming asylum in a country prior to arriving at the southern border. A majority of these migrants are fleeing persecution and poverty in their home countries.
Murdza explained that Guatemala does not have an adequate system in place to process asylum applications.
Migrants from the Northern Triangle countries have expressed it is not safe to seek asylum in Guatemala or other countries in the region because the criminal organizations persecuting them, such as MS-13, have ties throughout the area that will continue to pose a potential threat, Murdza said.
Earlier this month, CBP said the number of illegal immigrants apprehended trying to cross the United States' land border from Mexico was 70 percent lower in November than it had been in May.
CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan said in the release that those who present themselves as families after crossing the border illegally will no longer be released into the United States.
