Our Inhumane Southern Border By Carine Hajjar
Val Verde County, Texas
Star Ranch, half a mile from the Rio Grande, is a popular spot for border crossers to “surrender” and request asylum in the United States. The surrender I witness this morning is as remarkably unremarkable as all the others I have seen in a week of ride-alongs with law enforcement. A family from Colombia — mother, father, and young son — chat calmly with two adult male migrants as a Customs and Border Protection van pulls up. National Guardsmen lean on their vehicles and watch casually. The CBP officer will take the migrants to a processing center, where they will be assessed for asylum eligibility.
I ask the father what the family’s plan is for life in the United States. “Empezar de cero,” he replies: to start from zero. They remind me of Jorge, a Cuban migrant I met days before at an NGO in town. He wanted asylum to pursue “el sueño Americano,” the American dream. Jorge told me he planned to send money to his three kids at home. It is hard not to sympathize. Why not welcome people who want to work, to improve their lives? This is the motivation behind calls to lower the bar for asylum seekers and thereby create a more open, “humane” border.
Look a little further, though, and it becomes clear that the current system is not ready for that idea, no matter how well intentioned. Right now, a more open border is not only dysfunctional, it’s a danger.
Last month, Customs and Border Protection had 209,906 encounters — both expulsions and apprehensions — with migrants at the southern border. That number breaks a 22-year record. In March 2000, 98 percent of illegal immigrants were Mexican nationals. Last month, a record-breaking 39.5 percent were “long distance” migrants, meaning they were not from Mexico or Northern Triangle countries. Migrants far and wide are receiving a clear message: It’s easy to enter the U.S. illegally. And that message will only be reinforced by the termination of Title 42 in May. A Trump-era limit on asylum, Title 42 was invoked by the CDC in 2020 to mitigate the spread of Covid. The Biden administration has clung to it as its only remaining form of border control. But with the pandemic waning, it has become harder for the Biden administration to justify keeping Title 42. Without it, there will be a deluge. The Department of Homeland Security is preparing for up to 18,000 daily encounters.
The Immigration and Nationality Act mandates that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detain illegal immigrants in removal proceedings. By claiming asylum, migrants can qualify for the Alternatives to Detention program. With detention space full, the DHS is releasing thousands into the United States on a humanitarian “parole” as part of Alternatives to Detention. The migrants I encountered were released with a GPS-tracking phone and a notice to appear in court. In December, over 55,000 migrants were let into the interior, all of them ineligible to work without a permit.
Bogged down by so many asylum claims, the federal government is unable to secure the border against criminals, let alone help vulnerable migrants. The most dangerous are ineligible for asylum under any plausible standard and will not even seek it.
“What we’re getting coming through here are the prior deports and criminals that have zero chance of ever getting any kind of asylum or paperwork to stay,” says a Kinney County officer while checking on Harris Ranch, where owner John Sewell manages over 30,000 acres with the help of his friend Jim Volcsko. The officer, who wished not to be named, mentions rape, aggravated robbery, and aggravated sexual assault of a child. Volcsko, a former CBP agent, chimes in: “There’s a lot of pedophilia.”
A trooper from the state’s department of public safety joins the conversation as we sit on the back porch of the ranch house: “For the most part, it’s all males. . . . They’re smuggling mostly people” (as opposed to drugs). Sewell speaks of an “unprecedented flow” in the last year. Just this morning, he had 15 migrants walk through.
I ask Volcsko whether the uncontrolled migration is the result of an understaffed Border Patrol. “That’s the big lie,” he says. “They’re overtasked. . . . All they are [doing] is transporting the ‘give-ups’ and processing [them for] release.” Upper management, the trooper quips, “has got [the agents] changing diapers” instead of “chasing people.”
No surprise, then, that smuggled migrants are usually allowed to walk free. One Maverick County rancher, who declined to be named, told me on the phone that he had 80 migrants on his property in just one group but that the Border Patrol was too busy to respond. Sewell says he has called for help 20 times in April but has had to fend for himself. The migrants steal, vandalize, and litter. They have caused thousands of dollars in damage to Sewell’s fences and water lines, and have had similar consequences on the unnamed rancher’s property.
The consequences then extend to small communities. Many smuggled migrants are picked up by getaway cars. This often leads to “bailouts,” or high-speed chases in which authorities pursue smuggler vehicles. These can end in deadly crashes, after which the smugglers “bail out,” leaving any surviving passengers. The chases endanger local schools, residential neighborhoods, and the migrant passengers themselves. Angie, a restaurant owner in Uvalde who did not give her last name, told me she feels less safe: “There used to be maybe one chase a week.” Now, she says, it’s four or five a day.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the “humane” border, however, is that the migrants themselves are often paying the most terrible prices, making dangerous journeys north at the risk of trafficking, theft, exploitation, rape, and death.
Just trekking through the harsh South Texas terrain can be lethal. Many migrants die of heat stroke, dehydration, or drowning. Sheriff Brad Coe of Kinney County reports having found 17 bodies last year. That number is abnormally high for the county of 3,600: “We have problems when it’s just two or three,” he says. With only six deputies, he told me, “we’re working twelve-, fourteen-hour days, six days a week.”
The Maverick County rancher found six bodies on his land in 2021 and suspects there are more in the brush. He shares a chilling story of an eight-year-old girl he found on his ranch this year after “she’d been left out here by herself for two nights.” The rancher rescued her from three men who were “just gonna take her away.”
Where?
“Beats me.”
Don McLaughlin, mayor of Uvalde, shows me a Border Patrol detention center for 90 unaccompanied minors. Many minors endure horrors on their treks north. “In our hospital, we had a 12-, 13-, and 14-year-old give birth to babies,” he says.
At Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, the NGO where I met Jorge, migrants share harrowing stories of their own. They report that the jungles of Panama and Colombia are particularly dangerous; a Venezuelan migrant told me that stragglers in northbound caravans are targeted by indigenous groups and roving bands. They’ll “kill, rape, steal. . . . They’ll violate women, children, and even men.”
The lesson of all this suffering is clear: To have a truly humane border, and a system that keeps both migrants and Americans safe, there must be order. The establishment of order, however, need not preclude a welcoming attitude. Sheriff Coe, like most of the citizens and law-enforcement officials I encountered, wants order and generosity. “Shorter lines, better checks, speed up the process,” he says. “There’s room” in such circumstances “to allow more people to come in legally.”
Until then, however, the migrants will follow the incentives. “Whatever they say in D.C. has a ripple effect all the way through,” says Volcsko, the former Border Patrol agent.
Back at Star Ranch, as the Border Patrol agent loads the Colombian family into the CBP van, he turns to me and points at the two single men, behind the family. When asked for identification, only the family produced their passports. As for the other two, the cartels probably “cleaned them up” by taking their documents. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” he tells me. “We can’t run record checks on them.” The two men told me a few minutes earlier that they were planning to go to Chicago.
The agent is visibly frustrated. He shakes his head. In 25 years, from Clinton to Biden, “this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he says. “This administration doesn’t care at all.”
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