AN ASSAULT ON ASYLUM? EXPERTS RAISE ALARM

“The policies at the [US-Mexico] border are so restrictive that we’re seeing a record number of people amass because they’re being prevented from crossing,” said Javier Hidalgo, director of pre-removal services at RAICES, an organisation in Texas that supports asylum seekers and migrants. “We’re not as a country diverting the resources to creating a system to meet the need for the processing that needs to happen,” he told Al Jazeera. “[We’re] diverting resources to being preventative.” The deadly consequences of US immigration policies are often “erased from the public view”, said Hidalgo, who pointed to recent figures that showed more than 850 people died in the 2022 fiscal year trying to cross along the US-Mexico border. The recent deaths of dozens of mostly Guatemalan migrants in a detention centre fire in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, also put a spotlight back on the dangers asylum seekers face when forced to wait in Mexico in hopes of having their claims heard in the US. “It’s an increasing level of desperation,” Hidalgo said. “There’s a huge amount of preying upon this population that’s waiting to get across. We have created a market for kidnapping by the cartels and corruption by the officials on the other side of the border. And then we blame the victims – and it’s an ugly cycle there.”

Read more at Al Jazeera.