Despite previously accepting the most refugees globally, the U.S. has a dark history of denying asylum to those fleeing human rights abuses — from the Jewish refugees in the 1930s, to the Haitians during the Duvalier dictatorship, and Salvadorans fleeing political violence in the 1980s. Many times these crises have been caused by U.S.-led regime changes that have bolstered dictators and left behind violent instability. This year, the Trump administration has blocked asylum for Latin Americans fleeing persecution at the southern border. Previously stating these children “are not innocent.” With his interim order, ‘life-or-death’ migrants fleeing gang violence in their home countries (the effect of the United States’ disastrous, interventionist foreign policy) present themselves at a point of entry and are denied. Those that aren’t detained for prolonged periods of time in cramped camps are sent back to often face the death they escaped from. Yet the UN has found that in 58% of cases children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, warrant international protection as refugees.
The United States once stood as the beacon of freedom and equal opportunity, but now stands as the place which sends 5 year old migrant children to court alone with no lawyer, and runs for-profit camps with human rights violations. During 2018, we fell second to Canada for the first time as 22,500 refugees settled in the U.S., in 2017 we granted asylum to 26,568 individuals.
Central American Migrants are Not Economic Migrants but Life-or-Death Migrants
Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are experiencing record levels of violence. With El Salvador and Honduras ranking among the top five most violent countries in the world. The UN Refugee Agency reports that the violence and persecution faced by this Latin triangle is so extreme children would rather embark on a treacherous long journey to the U.S. Subsequently, the total number of migrants apprehended at the border is on the rise again after reaching near its lowest level since the ‘70s. UNHCR documented a 1,185% increase in the number of asylum seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize,from 2008- 2014. The U.S. has received 85% of the total new applications from these three countries in 2012 Additionally, the number of unaccompanied children, has doubled annually since 2011. The U.S. will reach an estimated 60,000 child asylum seekers this year.
Migrant Children and Families Warrant International Protection per Asylum Law
The 120 page UN report found that 58% of (the 404) children interviewed were forcibly displaced by harms warranting international protection. A statistically significant finding. 72% of those children from El Salvador “raised potential international protection needs.” With 66% citing organized violence as reason for migrating. They witnessed “extortion..murders..threats to themselves and their families, friends and neighbors.”
Of the children from Guatemala, 38% raised international protection concerns, 64% for Mexico, and 57% of Honduran children “raised potential international protection concerns.”
The Courts Discriminate Against Asylum Seekers and Deport Them to Their Deaths
According to U.S. asylum law, protection is issued to those who can prove persecution “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” However, the generalized violence targeted at women and children doesn’t easily fit into one of these groups. Thus, U.S. immigration courts grant asylym to those mirgants who demonstrate “a well-founded fear of persecution”, or who qualify for protection under the UN Convention Against Torture.
Nonetheless, the U.S. doesn’t apply the law free of racial bias, much less with this administration’s restrictions on asylum for vulnerable children and families. Asylum is granted in over 75% of the time in NY while only 10% in Atlanta. Life and death decisions are made arbitrarily. A 2017 report found that the asylum law isn’t applied justly — two Honduran women fled for their childrens’ livelihood, and yet only one was granted asylum while the other deported. In fact, we deport victims of terror — the U.S. government denied a literal slave asylum in the U.S. because she provided “material support” to a terrorist organization – as its SLAVE!
Unsubstantiated fear-mongering about these vulnerable populations who are fleeing violence, actually being the violence contribute to these human rights violations. When in fact, only 0.02% (56/250,000) of minors at the border since 2011 were suspected or confirmed to have gang affiliations to their home country according to USBP Acting Chief Provost. Furthermore, MS-13 makes up less than 1% of U.S. and Puerto Rico gang members.
To deny children and families asylum is to literally send them to their deaths. Central Americans deported have been killed from gang violence. A man was recently deported after pleading before the judge that he would be killed if sent back, and he was killed in his home country.
Inhumane Policy: Profiting $775 Per Asylum Seeker Per Day While Abusing Their Fundamental Human Rights
We not only deny asylum, but inflict needless suffering to 5-year-olds in court alone with no lawyers, detain legal citizens, ,run for-profit detention centers rampant with human rights violations under agencies like ICE with little accountability to due process, and separated children. Operating these shelters is a billion-dollar business that runs on the suffering of brown families.
A 7-year-old asylee girl being locked up by ICE for four months at a Chicago jail has become America’s heralded “rule of law.” With the new Supreme Court ruling stating that immigrants, even permanent residents, and asylees, can be held indefinitely, internment camps have become the law of the land.
Then there’s the 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was detained while on an ambulance to an emergency surgery. These depraved, scoundrel of the earth literally staked outside of the 10-year-old girl’s room after surgery to send her back to a country she only resided in until she was 3-months-old. T
There’s also the 43-year-old janitor at MIT whose three children are U.S. citizens and mother, a permanent resident who planned was going to sponsor him for a green card. He didn’t have a criminal record, ran a business, and paid taxes – a model American. But instead of focusing all our efforts on the criminals, they’re detaining children and hard-working, contributing members of society.
These are just a few of too many senseless, inhumane arrests being made in the name of an imaginary threat – the asylum seekers, the 10-year-old brought here as a baby with cerebral palsy, the green card applicants, the Visa holders, and the quintessential hardworking immigrant doing the jobs nobody else will to provide for his family. (No, they don’t take jobs away.) All because there is no path to citizenship and the barriers for the poor, non-English speaking masses which Anglo-Saxon Americans’ poor ancestors fleeing persecution and famine didn’t face, simply exist now.
Children were inhumanely separated from their asylum-seeking parents because Trump said they “are not innocent” is alarmingly on nazi, authoritarian levels, not on par with U.S. democratic values or the presidency. This administration has separated migrant children from parents, and facilitating egregious ICE abuse of detainees by allowing the destruction of it’s paper-trail. If you ever wondered how nazi ideology rose to prominence in 1940s-era Germany, this is how. This is the context for the “animals” comment – Trump’s routine dehumanization of immigrants has been militarized most recently culminating in the murder of 20-year-old, unarmed Guatemalan migrant Claudia Gonzalez and 1,475 lost migrant children as young as 53 weeks. Some of released to human-trafficking rings and others with convicted sexual assaulters. These draconian, morally abominable, unlawful policies serve as “deterrent” according to John Kelly.
What did Trump have to say about his victims of family separation after backlash? “Phony stories of sadness and grief.”
When you dehumanize a people, it’s easy for the “family values,” “evangelical,” “pro-life” a party to treat brown children as livestock. It’s easy to completely disregard their human rights, physically abuse them, and separate them because of a legal status irrespective to their intrinsic human rights. Thus, 97 fatal shootings of migrants occur at the hands of border agents, 18-month-olds are easily ripped from their mothers screaming, the 4-month-old premature baby and her 16-year-old mother are left without medical care, the 16-year-old sexually abused, all without accountability. Losing 1,475 children – some to human trafficking, opening up military concentration camps, and shooting 20-year-old unarmed migrant Claudia Gonzalez becomes business as usual. As easy as it was to commence violence against Germany’s Jewish scapegoat.
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
-Nelson Mandela
How U.S. Backed Authoritarian Governments Destabilized Central America and Created the “Caravans”
Those who lack the ability for sympathy, to love their neighbor, will say “why doesn’t their government protect them?” They’d be hitting the core of the problem. International protection for asylum seekers is precisely aimed at those whose governments are unwilling or unable to protect their citizens.
However, governments don’t become oppressive authoritarian ones who deny their citizenry protection under the law without political intervention — or a good U.S. led regime change. The U.S. has intervened in all not only Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, but also in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Paraguay, Chile, Indonesia, Hawaii, Iran, and Iraq. It takes an entire history book to list all the regime change wars and authoritarians the U.S. has bolstered, but it all has led to instability in Latin countries.
If the U.S. doesn’t want refugees maybe it should stop creating them. In 1954, a covert CIA operation overthrew the Democratically elected Guatemalan president during the Guatemalan Revolution for introducing leftist reform such as a minimum wage and land reforms. While the US saw this as just another communist insurrection and part of Domino theory which had to be stopped, there ended up being other implications. In the process of fighting for democracy, they installed a military dictatorship and left the region destabilized. Four decades of civil war followed, as leftist guerrillas fought a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes whose brutalities included a genocide of the Maya peoples. The US wasn’t taking a hardline stance for democracy, but for their own interests by instilling a deferent pawn to promote them.
During Guatemala’s and El Salvador’s civil wars rampant with human rights abuses from governments backed by the U.S., the U.S. rejected almost all asylum claims. Only three percent of the asylum cases from these countries were granted, compared to higher numbers for other countries like Iran and Afghanistan when they fled Soviet invasion. and Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion); an outcome which had more to do with political decisions rather than assessing the merits of the claims themselves.
The military industrial complex overthrows democratically elected governments, bolsters authoritarian oppressive regimes in Latin America and the Middle-East then absolves itself of the responsibility of the suffering inflicted by those regimes.
Therefore, there should be no surprise there has been a sharp rise in asylum seeking children and mothers from Central America’s Northern Triangle when their countries have remnants of U.S. backed governments that won’t protect their human rights amidst violence and destabilization. With more seeking asylum in the United States from 2013 to 2015 than in the previous 15 years combined. Nevertheless, Trump’s interim order ignores UN international protection law, and insists these children must be rejected by a third country before being eligible to apply in the U.S. A policy ignoring the imminent danger faced by those 58% of children eligible for international protection.
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