Biden’s halt on border crossings — and Mexico’s policies — ‘disorient’ asylum seekers

Many South American asylum seekers in Mexico City have adopted pay-by-the-week rooming houses and outdoor encampments as temporary shelter en route to the U.S. almost a month after President Joe Biden's executive crackdown on the border and long wait times for an asylum appointment.

Due to a tracking feature on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's CBP One app, Mexico City is the southernmost point in Mexico where the app can be accessed. This adds to the capital city's draw as a central hub for migrants on their way north.

On June 4, Biden signed an executive order giving him the authority to shut down asylum processing on a provisional basis at the world's largest migration corridor. The key changes to the Immigration and Nationality Act allow for larger-scale expedited removal and restricted asylum of unauthorized immigrants.

Ramon Daniel Vargas Vargas has been in Mexico City for five months now, living in what is locally known as "Casa Verde" in the Santa Maria la Ribera neighborhood due to its easily recognizable shade of light green. Casa Verde charges $100 a month for a small room.

Stands serving arepas, the pre-Colombian street food popular in Venezuela and Colombia, have popped up near the house, serving migrants a small taste of home.

The house is mostly inhabited by Venezuelans, Vargas said. He has been trying to reserve an asylum appointment through the CBP One app, which he has to do daily on his smartphone. He heard about Casa Verde by walking around and through word of mouth, though he says the living conditions are difficult.

"They treat us like animals," he said about the house's landlords. "I left Venezuela due to insecurity and the failing economy. I have my cigarette and candy stand here, anything helps while waiting for the appointment at the border," Vargas said in an interview in front of his temporary home.

Jean Carlos, his wife and two children are slightly further on in their voyage to the U.S. They resided in a makeshift encampment for two months in Plaza de Soledad in the downtown La Merced neighborhood of Mexico City and are currently in a shelter in San Luis Potosi. Though the lodging is also provisional, it has its problems.

"This place is like a prison," Carlos said. "They take your phone every day at 6 in the evening, and give it back to you at 10 in the morning, but I need my phone to make an appointment on the app so we can leave here."

Biden's changes are provisional and in effect until the number of arrested migrants at the border stays below 1,500 for seven consecutive days and another 14 days after that initial week. The new policy will then go into effect again after a sustained seven-day period of 2,500 illegal border crossing encounters or more.

Various immigrant rights groups sued the Biden administration this month over the rule, citing the 1980 Refugee Act, which was enacted to provide a procedure for "admitting refugees with special humanitarian concerns" to the U.S. by providing "comprehensive and uniform provisions for the effective resettlement and absorption of those refugees who are admitted."

Those with prior appointments using CBP One can continue with their asylum process, a system that has faced its own criticism.

Some immigration advocates say that even though asylum through CBP One is still available, allowing appointments solely through the app is illegal and diminishes an already impossibly narrow window for asylum that can have wait times of up to eight months.

"Those arriving at the border without a CBP One appointment aren't attended to because there is already the presumption of a lack of credible fear," said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.

Mukherjee also noted the time limit that Biden's new order places on those seeking asylum without an app appointment. If someone crosses into the U.S. for asylum, they then have four hours to find legal counsel to plead their case as to why they should be allowed to stay. Before the order, asylum seekers had 24 hours to find a lawyer.

"They have four hours to find a lawyer for what is most likely the most important interview of their entire life," Mukherjee said.

Dora Rodriguez, the founder of Casa de la Esperanza migrant resource center and shelter in the border town of Sasabe, Sonora, said she noticed a change in the borderlands the day the executive order went into effect. Casa de la Esperanza is a unique center for migrants in Mexico because it doesn't primarily serve as a shelter for those on the way to the U.S. seeking asylum — it hosts people who have just been deported to Mexico.

"The first thing you notice is the cruelty. You see hundreds of people getting deported in an hour. Border Patrol makes people sign forms they don't understand and then they deport them," she said in a telephone interview.

Rodriguez highlighted the cruelty of deporting people to a town that is in the middle of one of the harshest landscapes in the world, with a population of less than 1,000 people with very few resources of its own.

"They take their shoelaces as a security measure, they take their IDs so they return to their country with nothing to identify themselves with, little girls and boys. Where do they go?"

Though the Mexican government has issued no formal border policy response of its own, agents of the National Guard and National Institute of Migration forcibly relocated 400 migrants from an encampment in Giordano Bruno Plaza in Mexico City on June 5, the day Biden's proclamation went into effect.

The migrants were transferred to buses and promised trips to regulated shelters in Puebla, Morelos and the state of Mexico, though their arrival to those places is unconfirmed.

"What they do with migrants here within Mexico, specifically with the caravans and shelters, is they move people around. They disorient them, it's like a game of chutes and ladders," said Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa, a professor and immigration researcher at the Ibero-American University Puebla, in a telephone interview.

Mexico's National Institute of Migration detained 223,978 people for irregular migratory status in the state of Tabasco between January and April 2024, 68,099 more than Chiapas, which shares a border with Guatemala and a known entry point for the voyage to the U.S.

Yrizar Barbosa believes this number is highly suspect.

"We think they take a lot of immigrants from other places and now are sending them to Tabasco," he said. "The Army, the National Guard, the Navy, they set up checkpoints wherever they send them, usually in a very rural area that isn't accessible to journalists or lawyers."

In a June 17 press conference, Nuria Fernández, head of the National System for Family Integral Development, stated that so far in 2024 her organization has attended to more than 48,111 children in 88 active establishments across the country whose daily capacity is more than 9,000 migrant children, adolescents and companions.

More than 40% of these services are in the southeast, specifically the states of Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Veracruz. Another 34% of the services are in the northeast, in the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Sonora.

The government organization said that the children come from Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, Haiti, Brazil and Cuba.