America’s Southern Border Situation is Cruelty By Design
A bipartisan effort to reject responsibility is exacerbating the humanitarian crisis
Immigration has long been one of the most politically and socially charged issues in the United States. Since Biden became president, activists in the right-wing political information ecosystem, who were committed to undermining him long before he was elected, have seized every opportunity to attack what they see as Biden’s disastrous “open borders” immigration policy. In their view, the surge of undocumented immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border is due to Biden’s refusal to adopt his predecessor Donald Trump’s inhumane immigration control model of family separation and indefinite detention. As the number of people seeking political asylum from countries around the world, particularly Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela, and other countries in the Americas undergoing severe political crises, has worsened beyond the U.S. government’s expectations, it has become clear to many that, in contrast to “open borders,” the Biden administration has actually continued the Trump administration’s brutal immigration restrictions for a very long time.
The Title 42 policy played a major role in this. During the COVID-19 outbreak, the Trump administration seized the opportunity to invoke the public health provisions of the U.S. Code to privilege the government in the midst of a crisis, claiming that all undocumented immigrants could be temporarily detained and deported without review in immigration court proceedings because they might have brought the virus into the United States. Senior members of the Biden administration, from Vice President Harris to Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, have repeatedly pleaded with those suffering from deteriorating conditions to stay away from the border. Even as they try to overturn certain cruel immigration restrictions, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court continues to prevent Biden or anyone else from doing so.
With the Biden administration’s declaration that the national emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic is officially over, Title 42 officially expired on May 11, becoming a thing of the past once and for all. According to initial media reports, many migrants who had been waiting at the southern border for days began to rush over the border wall upon hearing the news, creating an even more difficult situation for border management, which, according to official CBP data, apprehended 68,000 undocumented migrants attempting to enter the U.S. border in the first week of May alone. Even after Biden announced that he would send 1,500 National Guard troops to control the chaos at the border, accusations of Biden’s “open borders” continued unabated. The state of Florida, which is not on the U.S.-Mexico border, has even decided to sue the Biden administration, eager for a Republican-appointed federal judge to reinstate rules that would speed up the deportation of immigrants.
But the end of Title 42 deportations did not ease the pressure on these refugees who longed for a chance at a new life in the United States. After the expiration of Title 42, Title 8 of the U.S. Code became the default law for dealing with undocumented immigrants; a law that provided them with a legal pathway to apply for entry into the United States, but also imposed stricter scrutiny on who met the criteria for seeking asylum. Those who do not meet the criteria are not only subject to deportation, but may also have a criminal record, which is not allowed under Title 42’s deportation provisions. Despite having a full two and a half years to adequately prepare for what might happen, the Biden administration has provided very limited conditions and space for these immigrants. The fear of crossing the border, which could result in a criminal record and imprisonment, has deterred many immigrants from crossing the border, a success that Mayorkas bragged about in an interview with CNN.
The general deterioration of global democracy, the exacerbation of climate change, and the economic crisis caused by a variety of complex reasons are making more and more residents of the country choose to give up everything they have and wait for their chance, knowing that entering the border without authorization could lead to deportation or even imprisonment. Only 60 percent of these immigrants qualify for the humanitarian asylum status, which gives them a temporary opportunity to enter and remain on U.S. soil, go through immigration courts, and ultimately decide their own fate and that of their families.
Though their numbers are already a fraction of the number of immigrants fighting for a chance at the border, the end of Title 42 has sent many U.S. cities into an unprecedented state of panic. In Texas, which has the longest border, Republican Governor Greg Abbott began a year ago to bus undocumented immigrants crossing the border without consultation to cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, where Democrats hold power. Instead of having any communication or discussion with them about immigration, Abbott believes that only letting the migrants arrive from nowhere will make the Democrats understand the seriousness of the border situation.
As the cities’ facilities began to struggle to house the ordinary people being used as political tools by conservatives like Abbott, city officials looked to Biden and Mayorkas, who claim to want to end Trump’s brutal border policies, for the help they deserved. But all they got was silence and pretense. Coincidentally, in interviews with the media, they said that Republican politicians are holding these refugees hostage, and the Biden administration, which should be responsible for this, has not taken proper leadership, and both sides are blaming each other while refusing to face the real problem. In the suburbs of New York City, as public resources for immigrants become more limited, the city has resorted to commandeering hotels for temporary shelter; and when these resources become unsustainable, local municipalities have even forced homeless veterans temporarily staying in these shelters to leave.
During the Trump presidency, his brutal policies against undocumented immigrants have been condemned by many political figures and organizations. In addition to Title 42, which was used extensively during the pandemic, these included policies that required asylum seekers to remain south of the border in unsafe regions in Mexico to await the outcome of their claims, and deterrence policies that forcibly separated family members of undocumented immigrants who crossed the border. While the Biden administration ended enforcement of both of these violations of basic humanitarian rights, the wounds caused by these policies will not heal; to date, there are still at least thousands of family members separated under Trump who have not been reunited. Not only that, but the Biden administration has chosen to require immigrants traveling to the United States through other countries to first seek protection there, until they are denied, before they can continue to apply to the United States.
The Biden administration still chooses to call its goal “fair, orderly, and humane” immigration reform, but many journalists and immigrant advocacy organizations have strongly questioned this claim. As an example of the application process, many immigrants who do not want to break the law have listened to border agents and downloaded the CBP One mobile app launched by the White House in January, making it the only way for immigrants to get an appointment for legal status at a U.S. port of entry. If they do not have a smartphone, a stable internet connection, or do not speak the language that meets the vetting criteria, they are completely cut off from the only official channel that currently allows them to enter the country legally. Not only that, but as a process that requires on-site photo security checks, many darker-skinned people who use this process find it extremely troubling when their faces cannot be accurately identified. While waiting at the physical border, immigrants experience firsthand the insurmountable digital divide outside the high walls.
For immigrants whose entire family comes to the border to request an appointment, the app’s programming flaws make the situation even more agonizing. CBP One assigns each family member their own appointment slot, not as a whole family. If there are only four slots available, a family of five will not get an appointment. This design flaw effectively puts the family at risk of this unthinkable active separation to increase their chances of getting an appointment. The app’s design is completely incapable of handling the traffic of hundreds of thousands of applicants at a time; many immigrants, using cell phones purchased from the cartel, wait at all hours of the day with spotty Internet connections, only to be told at night that their applications still haven’t gone through or that the appointments have all been filled.
For people in these countries, where the political situation is increasingly chaotic, being stranded is often a life-threatening situation, and as they wait in agony for results, the refugee camps around the border are becoming increasingly dangerous. A late-night fire at a migrant shelter in Juarez, just outside El Paso, Texas, killed 38 people; surveillance video from the scene shows security guards who should have been first in line to put out the fire ignoring the blaze and failing to do what they should have done. The inability to determine when appointments will be available has caused severe trauma for many applicants, and has even revealed the whereabouts of some fleeing abuse and persecution. In some camps, hundreds of people awaiting the outcome of their claims are living in conditions of extreme shortage of food and drinking water, and are forced to use excreta-contaminated water for bathing and cooking, putting them at risk of infection from contagious gastrointestinal and skin diseases, including potentially fatal diseases such as cholera.
For activists seeking systemic immigration reform and media reporters who have long followed the situation at the border, the policies implemented by Biden, while nominally changing much of the brutal segregation of the Trump era’s xenophobia, still do not essentially move away from the core idea that sees enforcement, deterrence, and dissuasion as the best solution to the influx of immigrants. To this end, the Biden administration has not only artificially perpetuated the hardships faced by asylum seekers by keeping Section 42 in place and refusing to increase the number of cases in the immigration courts, but it has also entered into agreements with the countries from which many immigrants come in an attempt to further avoid making them a problem they have to face before they even arrive at the U.S. border. For many, this series of Biden policies has completely disillusioned them with the last vestiges of the Biden administration; with another presidential election looming, they are very pessimistic about the administration’s willingness to reduce the problem at the border in an environment where Republican politicians and conservative media continue to lash out at Biden over immigration.
In this process, the most punished are not the conservative politicians calling for militarized border control and Biden’s impeachment, let alone Biden himself, who vowed to draw a line in the sand with Trump on immigration policy but has repeatedly gone back on his word, but the countless families and individuals who willingly gave up everything they had and risked their lives to come to the border because they had rosy imaginations and faith in America, only to see their dreams ultimately shattered. Ordinary families and individuals. The deep-rooted bureaucracy and America First mentality of the U.S. government treats the lives of these ordinary people as political bargaining chips and their situation as a tool to promote their political positions; in the process, few people really see them as human beings and naturally look away from the unfortunate fate that befalls them.
Many undocumented minors who enter the United States find their American dream a nightmare from which they cannot wake up because of the difficulty of reuniting with their families. Lacking proper identity and language skills, and at an age when they should be receiving a proper education, many of these teenagers, after crossing the border, begin working extremely hard in factories across the country, with some as young as 12 working in extremely dangerous places such as slaughterhouses. The wages they can receive are well below the minimum hourly wage, the hours exceed the maximum, and there are no guarantees of health insurance or safety protocols. Even more frightening is the fact that these child laborers are not just sneakers who sneak across the border on their own; their names are often on the federal government’s registry, nominally sponsored by their guardians in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring that they are not improperly disposed of. As the number of young undocumented immigrants increases and government agencies become negligent in their vetting of guardians, these youth are set aside and forced to pay back these guardians in blood and sweat, more than the government should be responsible for, under the pressure of huge debts due to smuggling and rent. Child welfare workers estimate that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied immigrant minors end up working full time; the pressure to work causes many children to drop out of school, further losing the opportunity to change their lives.
For decades, the bipartisan debate on how to approach immigration reform has focused on strengthening border security and legalization pathways for undocumented immigrants versus expanding legal avenues for entry. But in recent years, a surge in the number of immigrants seeking asylum has disrupted this equation, exposing deep political and moral divisions. Amidst the shifting realities, Republicans maintain their brutal and hardline approach with more determination, viewing these people in any way they can as a propaganda tool, while Democrats remain frustrated, refusing to take their fair share of responsibility while refusing to actively seek solutions. In the end, the ordinary people waiting for their fate to be rewritten at the border will probably never know who is holding the scales of their lives, and will find it difficult to accept the disillusionment that they will not be able to obtain the equality and protection they seek even after coming to the United States.
