Mexico is a Cage Too
I just read another headline about an El Salvadoran man being murdered in Tijuana while our government forced him to wait in Mexico during his political asylum process in the US. It hardly seems like a dramatic headline during a moment in history where the murder and death of migrants in our borderlands is a daily occurrence. It has become so quotidian that a video of a migrant child collapsing, writhing for hours, and then dying in a pool of his own blood in a hielera caused minimal public outcry and has mostly passed out of the news cycle within two weeks. Violence against migrants in Mexico is really common. When I worked with transgender asylum seekers during the last caravan in the border town of Agua Prieta, we were not allowed to leave the shelter where we stayed at any time of the day. My colleagues who work with asylum seekers all across the US border have told me gut wrenching tales of kidnap, rape, and the murder of Central American asylum seekers. They speak of the desperate things people are doing to avoid that violence. Parents waiting in Mexico are now even sending their children alone across the bridges into the US to protect them. They are choosing family separation over remaining together in places like Tijuana, Juarez, and Matamoros.
The government program that sends people to Mexico to wait for their asylum hearings is audaciously and cruelly named the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). Calling a program where gentle and vulnerable people are sent to live indefinitely on the street in some of the most dangerous cities in the world protection is the biggest “fuck you” I could have possibly imagined from the Trump Administration. My colleagues cleverly and accurately call it the Migrant Persecution Protocols without screwing up the acronym. MPP has been official US policy for almost a year. It works like this: when people present themselves at the ports of entry for political asylum or are detained crossing the border for the same reason, the US processes them and then sends them back to Mexico with a notice to appear in US immigration court on a specific date in the future. The idea is that if they want asylum, they can wait around in Mexico and when their day in court arrives, they can show up at the bridge, be put in chains and be transported to the nearest court. They can have their five minute hearing and then be transported back to Mexico to await their next court hearing. It is worth pointing out that this is the exact way a detention center is used for asylum seekers detained by ICE to get through their court hearings. Essentially, Mexico has become the world’s largest immigration detention center, and by far the most dangerous one. I make no secret of how much I abhor ICE detention of immigrants and I have caught myself celebrating to hear that people were placed in US detention centers rather than the MPP program.
If you haven’t learned about MPP yet, please take three minutes and check out this infographic (note here they call MPP “Remain in Mexico” which is an unofficial name for the policy). Do it. This information is really important and this graphic from the Latin America Working Group makes it pretty easy to understand. Simply putting “violence remain in Mexico” in a google news search engine will also turn up many articles reporting on this: good, important journalism that hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves. Try it. Try not to feel completely outraged and terrified when you read what is going on.
The attention that the American public has paid to this program is completely disproportionate to how wretched it is. Most Americans have never heard of it. When I email my local Representative to Congress(I see you Ben Ray Lujan) about immigration and border policy I get a standard email that brags about various tweets he posted demanding oversight in 2018. Elizabeth Warren blandly talks about kids in cages on the debate stage. Everyone I know who works among the folks affected by this policy is losing their mind over the sheer injustice and inhumanity it creates. Every new story of violence, to us, feels like the one story that might get our public to pay attention and understand the danger of this program. Yet it still hasn’t happened. A father and his young child drowned in June trying to escape MPP and it didn’t outrage us enough. Advocates stand among the ruin that this policy has caused and are appalled that it can happen so audaciously in plain view. It feels like a genocide.
I think back to Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” policy that caused family separation and such a wild public outrage. It remains the one time in the last several years of the Obama and Trump administrations’ assaults on immigrants and refugees when the public has been able to sustain enough anger that it actually caused politicians to take notice and the administration to retreat from their policies. The thing is that MPP is just another executive policy exactly like zero tolerance was. It causes the same trauma, terror, sadness, fear that zero tolerance did but also rape, kidnap, assault, and murder. And so many more families and children are being put in harms way because of it. Mexico is a cage too. A more dangerous cage. And the MPP program is sending the most vulnerable and traumatized families there every day by the thousands. If the American public understood it and how horrible it is, it follows that after our success during the family separation nightmare we could put a stop to MPP too. But we need to want it. We need to face what is happening and refuse to look away. We need to say to our government: these people are coming to the US to ask for our help and we want to help them. People do not belong in cages whether they are real or metaphorical. 1 year is enough. It is time to put a stop to MPP and the only way that will happen is if we come together and tell our government we have had it. We can riot. We can take to the streets. We can put our bodies at the ports and at the immigration courts in San Diego, El Paso, and South Texas. We can force all of our democratic candidates for president to go on record on whether or not they will end this program the day they take office. And if we don’t do that, then we, as a society, are letting it happen. This is exactly the same way genocide happens in plain view.
