Aid workers threatened with arrest for evacuating migrants left in cold

For the second time since December, humanitarian volunteers say on Saturday they had to transport hundreds of migrants from the border wall east of Sásabe, Arizona — where they were waiting to turn themselves in to border agents — due to potentially deadly winter-weather conditions and lack of response from border agents.

About 400 migrants, including children and elderly people, waited at the border wall more than 15 miles east of Sásabe from Friday evening into Saturday morning, when aid workers arrived amid snow and freezing temperatures, volunteers said.

Border agents didn’t come to the wall in response to volunteers’ calls for help because they claimed Border Patrol vehicles couldn’t make it over the steep, muddy roads on Saturday, said Aryanna Tischler, volunteer with Tucson humanitarian-aid group No More Deaths. 

So the aid workers with No More Deaths, Tucson Samaritans and Green Valley Samaritans began evacuating people themselves to the Border Patrol processing station in Sásabe, despite border agents threatening them with arrest for doing so, Tischler said.

“Legally, we know what we’re doing is not smuggling. We know that we’re not evading Border Patrol by bringing people to the station in Sásabe,” she said. “We know what we’re doing is legal, and we know if we don’t get people off the wall, that people could die.”

Particularly since November, human smugglers have been dropping large groups of migrants off in this remote area of the border wall — much further east of the Sásabe port of entry than before — which is only accessible over roller-coaster steep gravel roads that some two-wheel-drive Border Patrol vans have trouble navigating.

Aid workers are frustrated that after so many months, Border Patrol hasn’t allocated more resources to the region, both in the form of more four-wheel-drive vehicles and personnel to transport migrants, and boosting processing capacity at the center in Sásabe, volunteers said.

On Saturday and Sunday, many migrants continued to wait exposed to the elements outside the processing center because border agents said they’d reached capacity at the center, Tischler said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees Border Patrol, says agents prioritize transport of the most vulnerable to the best of their ability. But the agency is funded through a continuing resolution and can’t overspend its allocation.

“In places where we are encountering large groups, Tucson Sector prioritizes vulnerable populations for transportation and is generally able to accomplish our goal to move everybody that is gathered overnight in from the field that day,” according to a CBP statement.

“CBP has taken significant steps to surge personnel and resources to impacted sectors and address the challenges we are experiencing across the southwest border. Encounter numbers continue to fluctuate, as smugglers and bad actors continue to spread falsehoods and show complete disregard for the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable migrants,” CBP said.

Logistical nightmare is a choice

Immigration experts say ongoing humanitarian crises along the border are the result of U.S. legislators’ decades-long failure to update the nation’s outdated and underfunded immigration system and to keep pace with evolving trends in migration.

The basis for most of the legal processing for migrants at the border today is rooted in policy established in 1996, when most migrant arrivals between ports of entry were Mexican men seeking work, and few were presenting as asylum seekers turning themselves in to agents, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the immigrant-rights nonprofit American Immigration Council.

“That system has never been funded to the level it should be,” he said. “Congress in 1996 said it would create a system to rapidly screen asylum seekers who cross the U.S.-Mexico border, but it’s never given the resources nor the asylum officers necessary to carry out those screenings in large numbers.”

It’s also created a logistical nightmare for border agents whose mission is supposed to be focused on interdicting contraband and the migrants who are trying to evade law enforcement.

The outdated system also makes it virtually impossible for those fleeing poverty and seeking work in the U.S. to access work visas, despite a significant labor shortage in the U.S., Reichlin-Melnick said.

“If you filled every single open position in the U.S. right now with every unemployed American, there would still be millions of open positions, because unemployment is so low. Our legal immigration system is simply not flexible enough to allow that,” due to the limited number of guest-worker permits, he said.

“For the vast majority of people coming to our border, there is no line they can stand in, no legal pathway they can access, and so the asylum process has become in many ways the only way for people to have any chance of getting into the U.S.,” he said.

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“The right way”

Many who are showing up and presenting themselves to border agents today will ultimately be denied asylum when they get their day in court. But due to a massive backlog of 3 million pending cases in the immigration courts, most asylum hearings are being scheduled five to six years from now. In the meantime, border agents are releasing legally processed migrants into the U.S. with a notice to appear in court.

“If people have a strong claim, they should be able to get that claim heard in a reasonable period of time,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “And if people don’t have a strong claim, we should not incentivize them into accessing the asylum system and clogging it up.”

The lack of options for requesting asylum “the right way” has helped create a massively profitable smuggling industry that organized crime groups in Mexico have taken over, immigration experts say.

Asylum seekers turn to human smugglers out of desperation, said Pedro De Velasco, director of education and advocacy for Kino Border Initiative. The binational nonprofit offers food, shelter, legal assistance, psychological support and other services to migrants at its resource center in Nogales, Sonora.

Thousands are waiting in northern Mexico for an appointment through the CBP One application, which, under a controversial Biden administration policy called “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways,” is the only way for most migrants to request an appointment to seek asylum.

But the DeConcini port of entry in Nogales is the only port that accepts CBP One appointments in the 700 miles between Calexico, California, and El Paso, Texas, and it only accepts 100 appointments a day.

That’s left thousands of vulnerable migrants waiting up to six months in dangerous border communities, where criminal organizations are preying on them through kidnapping, extortion, robbery and assaults.

Smugglers are misleading migrants, telling them the U.S. has “open borders,” Reichlin-Melnick said. They’re also falsely telling migrants — who may not have a strong asylum claim or who are primarily fleeing poverty, rather than persecution — that they could qualify for asylum when they likely won’t, he said.

Many migrants “don’t really understand that years down the line, they might end up thrown in detention and deported because all they’ve heard is, ‘This is your way to come to the U.S.’”

Not “aiding and abetting”

Many factors are at play in the current surge of migrants at the southern border, including global trends, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“One of the biggest issues here is that we are in an unprecedented time for displacement globally,” he said. “The United Nations estimates there are more people displaced outside of their countries than at any point in human history, and the U.S. remains in many ways the most secure, stable, safe and rich country in the world.”

Tischler says humanitarian volunteers have been accused of “aiding and abetting“ human smugglers, and of encouraging migrants to come to the U.S., through their efforts to render aid to migrants who are lost in the desert or whom smugglers have dropped off in remote areas of the U.S.-Mexico border.

More than 4,100 migrants are known to have died in the southern Arizona desert since 1990, and thousands more are missing, according to Humane Borders.

“People aren’t fleeing (their homes) to receive humanitarian aid at the border,” she said. “All we’re doing is supporting people’s needs, so that people don’t die. There’s nothing we’re doing that’s enabling migration. Migration will continue even if we stop rendering aid in the desert.”

Reichlin-Melnick said there isn’t evidence to support the idea that humanitarian aid — on the border, or in temporary shelters like Casa Alitas in Tucson — is driving migration.

“It bears no relationship to reality,” he said. “You don’t travel 3,000 miles or further because you want a bottle of water and a blanket.”