New York Times
By Julia Preston
January 9, 2016
When
mothers and children streamed across the Texas border in 2014, the
Obama administration devised a strategy to manage the influx, putting
them in detention centers
to convince others that illegal crossers would be caught and sent back.
But
that strategy is now under intense legal and political attack, leaving
the administration with limited options as it tries to stem a new rush
of families fleeing and
seeking asylum amid escalating violence in Central America.
This
recent influx is compounding President Obama’s troubles with
immigration in his final year in office, as his efforts to achieve broad
protections for immigrants already
living in the country illegally have stalled in the federal courts and
his fallback actions to try to quell a new border surge have alienated
many political allies.
A
federal court has ordered Department of Homeland Security officials to
release children and their parents swiftly from detention, to pursue
asylum claims in courts across
the country. Those rapid releases have begun, with most mothers from a
center here in Dilley and another nearby in Karnes City, Tex., being
discharged in less than three weeks — although they wore ankle bracelets
so officials can monitor their movements.
In
recent days, Homeland Security agents have made arrests to deport
families who arrived in 2014, and whose asylum cases failed in the
courts, saying it is an alternative
way to send a discouraging message to potential migrants in Central
America.
The
raids provoked a nationwide outcry from Latino and immigrant groups
whose support the White House has long courted. The groups say women and
children should be welcomed
as refugees and not expelled to face the brutal street gangs they fled.
And immigrant advocates — and all three Democratic presidential
contenders — have said the administration should close the family
detention centers entirely.
The
Republican presidential candidates have pointed to the latest illegal
flow as proof that Mr. Obama’s border enforcement has been hopelessly
lax.
The
new rush of Central American families began in late July, and on
several recent days reached the heights of the 2014 influx. By Dec. 1,
more than 17,000 migrants in
families were caught along the border, more than double the number in
the same period in 2014.
Homeland
Security officials had started in June to reconfigure the two Texas
centers, after mothers and children had spent long months in
confinement.
Then
in August, Judge Dolly M. Gee of Federal District Court for the Central
District of California ordered that migrant children could not be held
in a locked detention
center and had to be released, with their parents, “without unnecessary
delay.” But the judge made an exception for an emergency due to an
“influx,” for which she permitted children to be held for up to 20 days.
Homeland Security officials seized on that exception,
arguing that an influx existed even before the recent spike.
By
doubling asylum officers and speeding legal procedures since late
October, officials have been completing most initial asylum screenings
in the two detention centers
here in South Texas and releasing families within the 20-day limit.
Rather
than shuttering the two centers, officials are adding 500 beds at the
center in Karnes City, doubling its capacity. And they won their request
for a federal appeals
court to swiftly review Judge Gee’s order to release migrants quickly.
The order, the Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, said this week,
“significantly constrains our ability to respond to an increasing flow
of illegal immigration to the United States.”
On
Monday, officials sent many of the more than 120 mothers and children
who were arrested over the weekend to be deported back to the center in
Dilley — set up to screen
asylum seekers entering the United States — for final steps before they
are sent out of the country.
But
in a new legal setback for the administration, officials on Thursday
had to halt the deportations of three Salvadoran mothers and their
children arrested in the raids,
removing them from an airplane at the last minute, after lawyers at the
Dilley center won stays from the immigration appeals court. One woman
had presented a doctor’s statement saying she had epilepsy and had three
seizures since her arrest.
The
new flow from Central America has several causes. Mothers here said
gang violence had spread across El Salvador and Honduras in the past
year, even reaching rural
villages, with attacks increasingly against women.
Several
women also said they had heard from the local radio and family members
in the United States that women crossing the border were allowed to
stay.
“I
heard this country gives protection to single mothers with children,”
said Karla Rodríguez, 30, who came from El Salvador with her 4-year-old
daughter.
Ms.
Rodríguez said she had been a manager at a busy upscale hotel in San
Salvador. Gunmen seeking targets for kidnapping came to her home
demanding the names of guests.
They followed her to work, saying they would take her daughter if she
did not give up guests. She fled.
Apprehended
at the border, Ms. Rodríguez and her daughter passed a first screening
interview with an asylum officer in the Dilley center and were released
in 10 days.
They planned to join her father, who lives in Delaware, and to fight
for asylum there. Resting at a shelter in San Antonio before continuing
her journey, she was elated, despite the heavy band on her ankle. “I
trust in God, who brought us this far,” she said.
Inside
the centers, officials have set a frenetic pace. Women and children
have medical screenings at in-house clinics within 24 hours after
arrival and dental checkups
within two weeks, members of the medical staff said. Everyone gets
vaccinations.
Most
women have interviews with an asylum officer within six days — warp
speed in the immigration system. The interviews are for officers to
determine if a migrant’s fears
of returning home are credible.
Most
women are persuading officers that their fears are real. Of 7,892
migrants admitted to the two centers in the three months ending Nov. 1,
only 41 were rejected and
deported, official figures show.
But
many women are not connecting with lawyers to help them with their
cases. The tempo is faster than lawyers here, mostly volunteers, can
handle. Court statistics show
that asylum seekers with lawyers are far more likely to go to court and
win their claims. Yet at the Karnes City center one day, two frantic
lawyers scrambled just to make last-ditch contact with bewildered women
who had lost several legal rounds.
“We’ve
been running around trying to prevent women from being deported before
they even had a real opportunity to express their fears,” said Stephanie
Cordero, a volunteer
from the Legal Aid Society of New York.
One
of those women was Rosa Elida Castro, 26, a Salvadoran who said she was
preyed upon by a gang because they assumed she had inherited money
after her mother died. An
ex-husband had sexually abused her, hounding her out of her home.
“If we weren’t in danger,” she said, crying, “why would we have come?”
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