More than a month after a new immigration program began on Arizona’s border with Mexico, shelters in Tucson haven’t seen the expected drop in asylum seekers.
Instead, the Casa Alitas shelter in Tucson was bustling with about 130 asylum seekers from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Mexico and other countries on Dec. 23. Every day, federal agencies still bring between 20 and 100 asylum seekers to local shelters, said Teresa Cavendish, director of Casa Alitas.
The new immigration program, known officially as the Migrant Protection Protocols and informally as “Remain in Mexico,” makes asylum seekers wait in Mexican border towns and then re-enter the United States for immigration court hearings.
Some asylum seekers in Arizona are bused to El Paso, and then taken to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Department of Homeland Security officials said on Nov. 22.
When the program began in Southern Arizona, advocates worried that asylum seekers would be left in dangerous conditions for months in Ciudad Juárez, rather than spend a few days in safe shelters in Tucson as they prepare to travel to cities throughout the U.S.
A recent report from Human Rights First showed more than 600 public reports of rape, kidnapping, torture and other violent crimes against asylum seekers waiting in Mexican border cities.
Except for a dip last week, the number of asylum seekers released to shelters in Pima County has not dropped since late November, according to statistics from the county, which partially funds the Casa Alitas shelter in unused portions of the Juvenile Justice Center on East Ajo Way.
“We’re still getting fairly large numbers, even though we have the MPP,” said Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.
Nearly 1,500 asylum seekers were released to Casa Alitas from Nov. 13 to Dec. 8, according to Pima County records.
Exactly how many asylum seekers have been sent to Ciudad Juárez from Tucson, or why the immigration court in Tucson is not being used, remain unclear. CBP did not respond to an inquiry from the Arizona Daily Star about the rollout of the program in the Tucson Sector.
“We’ve been made aware that some are diverted to El Paso,” Cavendish said. “We don’t know if that’s happening on a daily basis or just as the need presents itself.”
The number of families seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border peaked in May, when 85,000 members of families traveling together surrendered to Border Patrol agents. Since then, far fewer are surrendering to agents. The Border Patrol reported 9,000 in November.
The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is one of the few areas that saw an increase in recent months. Agents saw 2,300 members of families surrender in November, up from 1,900 in September.
Department of Homeland Security officials cited that increase in November, saying migrant families had started going to areas of the border where MPP “is maybe not as strong as it could be,” such as Tucson and the Del Rio Sector in Texas.
So far, the Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic organization that runs a dining hall for migrants and provides other services in Nogales, Sonora, has seen about 10 families or groups of asylum seekers who went through the Migrant Protection Protocols in recent weeks, said Joanna Williams, a spokeswoman for the organization.
“We are already seeing cases of families that would have been released to shelters like Casa Alitas or the Inn, who are instead sent back to danger and to homelessness,” Williams said at a Dec. 16 protest of the Migrant Protection Protocols in front of the federal building in downtown Tucson. The Inn is another shelter in Tucson.
“They’ll be homeless for the holidays even though we have the capacity to welcome them here in Tucson,” Williams said.
At the Casa Alitas shelter, families played, ate and prepared to travel on Dec. 23, much as families have done since the shelter opened in August and before that at the former Benedictine Monastery on North Country Club Road.
Neptali Martinez, 25, smiled broadly when his baby son, Jehú, said “papá” for the first time as they sat in the shelter. While he fed soup to his son, Martinez said they fled Honduras months earlier to escape dangerous streets and a persistent lack of jobs.
After a lunch of rice, beans, salad and watermelon slices, a woman from Venezuela discussed the collapse of her country’s economy, saying it is now “worse than Cuba,” and a couple from Chiapas in Southern Mexico played with their toddler daughter on a rocking horse.
Some asylum seekers who spoke to the Star had never heard of the Migrant Protection Protocols, while others rattled off quick descriptions of the program.
A woman from El Salvador said she fled her country after her son witnessed his father’s murder. She and her son were the only ones out of a group of nearly 20 people who crossed the border at the same time who went to Tucson. The rest went to Ciudad Juárez, she said.
Cavendish said she got the impression the Migrant Protection Protocols “are not universally accepted or embraced by agents on the ground or fully understood.”
A few weeks ago, a Guatemalan woman with a 3-month-old baby had her fortunes change repeatedly over the course of a single night as Border Patrol agents disagreed on where she should go, Cavendish said.
The woman was “very emotional when she reached us, very frightened,” she said.
The woman told shelter staff that the night before she arrived at the shelter she was in Border Patrol custody, Cavendish said.
An agent told her she was going to El Paso and drew up the travel documents. Then, another agent came over and said that’s not right, she had a baby with her, and ripped up the documents in front of her, Cavendish said.
Soon after, another agent came up and told her she was indeed going to El Paso. But then the agent who had ripped up her travel documents came back and told her to get on the bus to Casa Alitas, Cavendish said.
In at least two instances in Nogales, Sonora, asylum seekers were sent to Ciudad Juárez, only to return to Nogales, Sonora, according to Williams.
In one instance, a Venezuelan woman and her 4-year-old son ended up back in Nogales, Sonora, two weeks after they were sent to Ciudad Juárez, Williams said. They were assaulted in Ciudad Juárez as they looked for a place to stay, prompting them to head back to Nogales, Sonora. As they got on a bus to Nogales, Mexican officials threatened to deport them if they didn’t pay a bribe, Williams said.
Due to the dangers in Ciudad Juárez, “we think this is the start of many trips back to Nogales, to be honest,” Williams said.
If the past is any guide, asylum seekers sent to Ciudad Juárez will spend months waiting.
As of the end of November, about 8,300 people were waiting in Ciudad Juárez for their first hearing in El Paso, including more than 1,000 people whose cases began in May, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Along the length of the border, nearly 22,000 people are still waiting for their first hearing.
The first hearings came in San Ysidro, California in January. In the next six months, hearings began in El Paso; Calexico, California; Brownsville and Laredo, Texas; and to a lesser extent in cities across the country, according to clearinghouse records. The Migrant Protection Protocols began in Eagle Pass, Texas in the fall but the Star did not find records of hearings in that city in clearinghouse records.
Borderwide, the MPP program has seen about 56,000 cases, according to clearinghouse records.
The program rose to a monthly peak of 12,500 cases in August before dropping to 3,700 in November.
