Rising numbers of Mexicans seek asylum

By Sandra Dibble9:04 P.M.MARCH 12, 2014

By the time he showed up at the San Ysidro Port of Entry with 10 family members, the 50-year-old farmer from Mexico’s Guerrero state said two of his sons, both in the military and in their early 20s, had been killed, and his 14-year-daughter had been abducted and raped. He and his family no longer felt safe in Mexico, he said, and hoped for asylum in the United States.

Their arrival more than a year and a half ago is part of a surge in asylum applicants at the border who say they fear for their safety at home. The arrivals have put new pressures on a system already plagued with backlogs and allegations that many fraudulent applications go undetected.

This week at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, the orchestrated arrival of close to 40 mostly Mexican-born asylum applicants protesting U.S. immigration policy added a new twist to an increasingly sensitive political debate.

Mexican asylum requests are a relatively recent phenomenon, and have been a touchy subject on both sides of the border; only a very small percentage of requests are granted.

In Mexico City this year, a Mexican congresswoman concerned about the case of a businessman in the northern state of Chihuahua whose legs were severed when he refused to pay extortionists, called on Mexico’s Foreign Ministry to use diplomatic channels and ask the U.S. government to facilitate asylum cases for Mexicans facing extreme violence.

At the same time, criticism that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s asylum screening process is not strict enough has been mounting in Washington, D.C.

“It appears that DHS is doing little to root out the fraudulent applications, which often leads to grants of asylum to undeserving aliens,” read a letter signed by members of the House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 11.

At Otay Mesa on Monday, several of the people preparing to cross the border said they wished to join family and friends in the United States, where they were raised. They said they felt alien in Mexico and were afraid of the crime.

But fear of crime is not enough to qualify for asylum, a status granted to those deemed to have shown “well-founded fear or persecution,” if sent back to their home country. Those who seek such status at U.S. ports of entry must first pass through an initial screening known as the “credible fear” interview, which usually postpones their deportation and allows them to present their case to an immigration judge.

Interviewed in their attorney’s downtown San Diego office, the farmer, his wife and a 28-year-old son did not reveal their names or their hometown, citing their uncertain immigration status. They said they belonged to a communal farming collective in Tierra Caliente, a region know for drug violence.

“They’re going to kill you and your entire family,” said the farmer from Guerrero state, now 52 and living in Vista, remembering the anonymous caller who warned them to flee at once.

Asylum requests at U.S. ports of entry categorized as “defensive asylum” increased from 13,800 in 2012 to 36,000 in fiscal 2013, the great majority at the Mexican border. While DHS statistics show that the largest numbers of such applications have come from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the number of Mexicans making asylum claims has steadily been increasing.

In 2009, 338 Mexicans passed an initial “credible fear” review by an asylum officer at the border, allowing them to enter the country and apply for asylum. In fiscal 2013, a total of 2,612 claims by Mexicans passed the initial review. From October through December of last year, about three out of four Mexicans claiming credible fear, a total of 994, received initial approval, according to figures from the Department of Homeland Security.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not provide more-recent figures, or specific numbers for the highly transited San Diego ports of entry.

One U.S. government official said that until this month’s organized crossing, the numbers had appeared to be down from previous months, an impression borne out by reports from Centro Madre Assunta, a migrant shelter in Tijuana that houses female migrants and their children.

The numbers are down drastically since January, when about 70 people at the center came from families with asylum claims, said Mari Galvan, the shelter’s social worker. While the husbands were in immigration facilities in the United States, the women chose to stay behind in Mexico in order to avoid separation from their children, she said.

While the first hurdle may seem easy, obtaining asylum is difficult. The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Justice, which oversees immigration courts, for fiscal 2012, showed that 126 Mexican applicants received asylum, out of 9,206 petitions initially received by immigration courts; only 1,395 were outright denied, as many cases were abandoned, withdrawn or removed from the docket for unspecified reasons.

“Mexican asylum cases tend to be difficult to prove,” said Esther Valdes, an attorney in San Diego who is representing 20 asylum applicants, most of them claiming to flee drug violence in the states of Michoacan and Guerrero. “Judges as well as asylum officers tend to be a little bit skeptical as to why Mexicans are fleeing, other than for economic reasons,” she said.

Monday’s group of asylum seekers marked the third such public crossing in recent months on the Mexican border organized by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance. The events are spearheaded by members of the so-called Dreamers movement, many of them undocumented U.S. residents brought across the border as children.

The Dreamers’ tactic has served to cloud the issue at a delicate time, and helps feed criticism of the process, say some attorneys who specialize in asylum cases.

“This is a very difficult issue that has bitterly divided the immigrant advocacy community,” said Jason Dzubow, a Washington, D.C., attorney and author of a blog called The Asylumist. “I am not convinced that using the asylum system to make a political point in support of (comprehensive immigration reform) ... is the best strategy,” he wrote in one post. “I fear that the collateral damage to legitimate asylum seekers will be too great.”

In an interview this month, the family from Guerrero state said they left because they no longer felt safe in their small farming town, which had become increasingly dominated by heavily armed drug trafficking groups.

Their lives were peaceful, they said, until the day the father saw his 20-year-old son, a soldier who had come home on a weekend leave, ambushed and shot by municipal police in August 2011.

He reported the crime to the military, but no action was taken, he said. The family began receiving threatening phone calls, and they soon abandoned their home and plot of land, joining family members in another rural community in Guerrero.

In October 2011, his 14-year-old daughter was abducted as she left school and raped, he said. The kidnappers never sought a ransom, never contacted them, and eventually released her, he said.

A second son, age 22, who also had been with the military and in hiding with an aunt in Guadalajara, disappeared in February 2012; his body was found the next day on a road in Guerrero, with signs of torture.

In April of that year, the daughter, an older son and his wife were the first to take off for the border, saying they were afraid to return. Four months later, the rest of the family followed.

Granted humanitarian parole, the family was able to avoid full-blown detention, said Valdes, their attorney, and are now waiting for a decision on their asylum claims.

“They’re going to kill you and your entire family.” Anonymous caller who warned Mexican family to flee country.

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