Over the past three years, Julie Contreras, an immigration and humanitarian activist from the Waukegan area, has visited the makeshift tent encampments filled with asylum-seekers on the southwestern border that were erected after the Trump administration enacted the “Remain in Mexico” program in 2019.
Contreras said she has witnessed the unsanitary conditions in which they live, often hungry and unwashed. She’s also heard the reports of kidnappings and sexual assaults of women and young girls as they are forced to wait for a hearing of their cases in Mexico under the policy also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border.
“They live in inhumane conditions,” Contreras said. “As Americans, we should be ashamed for letting this happen.”
So on Thursday, Chicago immigration leaders cheered when the Supreme Court gave the green light to the Biden administration to end the policy. But they cautioned that it changed little for those migrants already living at the border.
It’s unclear if the Biden administration will end the program immediately or wait for the lower court to rule.
“It gives us hope to create different and more humane policies,” said Oscar Chacón, executive director of Alianza Americas, a Chicago-based transnational organization rooted in Latino immigrant communities in the United States focused on improving the quality of life of all people in the U.S.-Mexico-Central America migration corridor. “It’s a step in the right direction,” he said.
While this is a welcome ruling and a hopeful moment for immigration activists, there are other ongoing efforts in Congress and the judiciary to uphold other tenets of President Donald Trump’s migration policies, including the preservation of Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allows Border Patrol to turn away asylum-seekers.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, Contreras said, “means nothing to me unless Title 42 is revoked and I can rescue some of those migrants to await approval of their cases in a proper setting where they have access to legal aid.”
Contreras added: “No, this doesn’t mean that we’ve opened the border and that thousands of immigrants will be let in.”
Multiple court interventions in states ranging from Texas to Arizona challenged the Biden administration over ending Trump-era migration policies. The lawsuits, some of which have worked their way through to the Supreme Court, resulted in the continuation of “Remain in Mexico” and Title 42 and threats against DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Since the reimplementation of the policy in November 2021, at least an additional 4,076 asylum-seekers have been enrolled in the program, according to the latest Customs and Border Protection data. The majority of asylum-seekers who were placed in program and awaited at the border hailed from Central American countries and the Caribbean.
Contreras has been working with her organization United Giving Hope to rescue a group of over 100 Haitian pregnant women that are living in a shelter in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, for two months, she said.
As the group is forced to wait in Mexico for a hearing on their asylum case, there have been reports of women who have been assaulted, raped and some have had miscarriages and other health issues, Contreras said. And many of the women’s husbands are living in the streets.
“We need to understand that these people risk their lives and choose to wait at the border because that is somehow better than the countries and the conditions they are running away from: extreme poverty, violence, danger,” she said.
If the policies were to be reformed, asylum-seekers could be allowed to wait for their hearing on their case legally in the United States, released to a network of family or to organizations that connect them to proper legal aid and resources.
“Access to a lawyer to help them with the case is essential,” Chacón said. “Those at the border may not even have access to that — so how can they even get their case approved?”
Nicole Hallett, director of the University of Chicago’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and a practicing immigration rights’ lawyer, has represented a number of clients in the Chicago area seeking asylum. According to Hallett, before the implementation of the program, asylum-seekers underwent a “credible fear interview” where authorities would determine whether they had a “legitimate” asylum claim.
“(If they passed that), then the government would roll them into the United States,” she said. “And once that happens, people tend to come to where they have family. And many of my clients came to Chicago to join family members or other people that they knew and so they end up in Chicago even though they arrived in the United States at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
But since the program went into effect, Hallett said that fewer asylum-seekers have “managed to make it to Chicago.”
With the recent Supreme Court ruling, she expects to see more asylum-seekers in Chicago immigration courts litigating their claims to asylum in the months to come.
In Chicago, there are several nonprofit organizations through the Illinois Access to Justice Program that focus on helping asylum-seekers and refugees to access resources and legal services and are getting ready to assist those migrants who are released, said Erendira Rendon, vice president for the immigrant advocacy and defense project at Chicago’s Resurrection Project.
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