The United States enters a new immigration era with a heavy hand

USA this Friday opened a new migratory era by applying a strong hand to the migrants who arrive avoiding the “legal channels” and, at the same time, Mexico suspended the transit permits with which asylum seekers moved north.

Migrants arriving at the US border must have made an appointment through the CBP One mobile application or have applied for asylum in a transit country to the United States and been denied.

Because otherwise, with few exceptions, they could incur a presumption of ineligibility for asylum, according to a new rule that came into force early Friday morning.

The internal political calendar has had a lot to do with the tightening of asylum conditions. And it is that the democratic president Joe Biden He is headed for the 2024 presidential elections with migration as one of his weak points, which the Republicans intend to take advantage of.

“Only God knows”

Migrants do not give up. Agustín Sortomi, a Honduran, tried to turn himself in to border authorities Thursday in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with his wife and his two children.

“I have already turned myself in twice and they don’t receive me. I don’t know what to do,” he told AFP.

“We jumped into the river but (the guards) threw us out. We are not going to conquer that dream, only God knows when we are going to conquer it,” he declared, waiting to see “what solution the new rules have.”

If the migrants “do not have a base to stay, we will remove them very quickly (…) We have been very, very clear that there are legal, safe and orderly ways to seek help in the United States and if someone arrives at our border south, will face harsher consequences,” Interior Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN television.

He refers to the fact that they will apply Title 8, a norm that allows expulsion with a ban on re-entry for five years and possible judicial prosecution.

Mayorkas acknowledges that the situation is “challenging”, although according to the Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, “the flow is decreasing” and there are no “confrontations or situations of violence on the border.”

Mexico, whose president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obradorspoke this week by phone with Biden, appears to have coordinated with his neighbor.

During Ebrard’s press conference, a sheet was presented stating that the Migration’s national institute (INM) ordered all its offices “not to grant Multiple Immigration Formats, or any other document that authorizes transit through the country.”

Those documents allowed migrants to move from the south to the north of Mexico.

An AFP collaborator verified that a center that granted these safe-conducts in the city of Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, was closed on Thursday.

And this complicates life for migrants, the vast majority of whom are Latin Americans, who flee poverty, risking their lives on dangerous journeys until they reach Mexico, a country with security problems and drug trafficking in some regions.

At the El Chaparral border crossing, in Tijuana, the five members of the Díaz family, originally from the southern state of Guerrero, arrived this Friday for their appointment to request asylum. They got it in 10 days after requesting it through CBP One.

Patriarch Amadeo Díaz, 62, told AFP that he was kidnapped by members of the drug cartel Michoacan Family that he is “hitting very hard”.

The director for the Americas of Amnesty International, Érika Guevara Rosas, accuses Mexico of “complicity” in the “inhumane and cruel policies” of the United States against people fleeing massive violations of human rights in their countries.

This Friday the US government woke up to two bad news.

A Honduran teenager, Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, 17, died at a refugee center in Florida. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose Office of Refugee Resettlement oversees the care and accommodation of unaccompanied migrant children, confirmed the death but gave no further details.