Waiting game: Asylum seekers at California border at more risk during court fight
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TIJUANA – María Guadalupe Cruz has been trying every day since January to get on the Biden administration’s electronic waitlist, so she could seek asylum in the United States for her and her family.
The 32-year-old mother left Honduras in 2021 with her husband and two children after local gangs tried charging a “war tax” on her home that she couldn’t pay, she said.
Organized criminal gangs fighting for territory near San Pedro Sula, the northern city where Cruz’s family lived, have progressed from extorting protection money from businesses to collecting it from households, she said.
“I told them I couldn’t pay, so they gave me 24 hours to abandon the country,” she recently told CalMatters, at the Tijuana shelter where her family lives in a tent. “And they said if we ever came back, they’d kill us all.”
The family had traveled along the northern border of Mexico, trying to find an access point where they could legally approach the United States to seek asylum.
Now it’s up to technology. The Biden Administration requires asylum seekers to seek asylum appointments through its CBP One smartphone app.
But so far Cruz, like thousands of others, has been unable to get an appointment through the Customs and Border Protection’s app using her cell phone. Mexican and U.S. authorities are blocking people without appointments from even approaching land ports of entry, contributing to increased risks at the Mexico-California border.
“I don’t want to try to throw ourselves across the (border) because I know it’s a crime,” she said. “Even though migration isn’t a crime, I just want to do everything legally. We just want to follow the rules — whatever they are — because if we don’t, and they send us back to Honduras, we’ll be killed.”
Legal challenges to asylum rules
What exactly those rules are seems to become less clear every day, she said.
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in July that the Biden administration cannot restrict how individuals apply for asylum, even by requiring them to use an app.
The Biden Administration has appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking it to block U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar’s decision. The administration indicated it plans to fight the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.
The legal challenge could disrupt what had been a downward trend in the number of unauthorized border crossings at U.S. border cities, Biden administration officials warn. That outcome could substantially impact California, where many migrants arrive hoping to find more humane treatment than at other places along the 2,000-mile stretch of border.
In Texas last week, two migrants drowned near Eagle Pass, where the state has installed razor wire and floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande to deter migrants. Although the Texas Department of Public Safety denies either migrant died from getting entangled in the barriers, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador blasted the Texas governor, calling the buoy system a ‘death trap.’
“No good person would do this,” said López Obrador at a recent news briefing in Mexico City.
California seen as safer
By contrast, California officials tout the state’s more welcoming and humane border. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office has declined to comment on the federal asylum ruling or on California’s specific plans should the court’s stay be lifted, allowing more asylum seekers entry.
The officials have said California has helped 423,000 people since April 2021, with “temporary services and travel coordination,” and spent $1.3 billion since 2019, helping the federal government provide humanitarian services to new arrivals at the border.
“While the federal government is responsible for immigration policy and processing, California has served as a model of partnership for a safe and welcoming border, undertaking humanitarian efforts in border communities,” wrote Scott Murray, deputy director for public affairs and outreach programs for the California Department of Social Services, in a statement.
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