How Politicians Made the Border Even More Dangerous for Asylum-Seekers

JUÁREZ, MEXICO — It's mid-June, and Yoemar has lost his shoes. He's running in wet, muddy socks up the riverbank now. He's running through thickets of thorny little bushes, his fingers wrapped up in the neck of his t-shirt, pressed to his stinging eyes, his feet skidding against the yellow dust and gravel. He has a friend with him, Luis, also from Venezuela. They're running south now, when their objective for weeks has always been to get as far north as possible.

When the pair stops under a taller bush with some shade, they're panting, bent at the waist, clutching their knees. A small white drone buzzes overhead and the men break off into a sprint again. Yoemar's sneakers sit several meters north, back on the other side of the river next to a hill of tangled razor wire. On Luis' lower back, two large red bumps form where rubber bullets ricocheted off his skin. The young men, both in their early twenties, need water — it's over 100 degrees out, both are wearing long black track pants, they're nearly in full sun, aside from the wisps of shade from a scraggly hedge of bushes, and if they're going to move forward in any real way, they'll need to wash the tear gas out of their eyes. They're at the U.S.-Mexico border in Juárez and they've just met the Texas National Guard.

Since October 2020, some three million people have crossed the border in the way Yoemar and Luis intended: by wading across the Rio Grande River (where the true, legal border lies), walking about half a football field to the red, metal slats of the looming wall, and waiting for Border Patrol agents to pick up and "process" them. Some six or seven million asylum-seekers fleeing organized crime, natural disaster, economic crisis, or political persecution have successfully settled in the United States since January 2020, the vast majority of them from Latin America.

But asylum-seekers at the border now face two towering, new obstacles — one instituted by Republican leadership, the other by Democrats: a violent transformation in how Texas officials interact with migrants and federal agents, and a new executive order that serves to restrict access to the asylum process for the vast majority of vulnerable people. Yoemar and Luis have already encountered the former, and should they succeed in reaching the border wall and turning themselves in to Border Patrol to ask for asylum, they would not have been allowed in.

Over the past year, the border has devolved into a political spectacle in anticipation of the 2024 election cycle, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deploying the Texas National Guard to defy what he calls President Joe Biden's "open border policy," including a months-long standoff in Eagle Pass, Texas, in which Texas guardsmen continue to block the Border Patrol from accessing migrants crossing the river. Eagle Pass quickly became a photo-op for Republican politicians and fervent supporters of a hard-right, anti-immigrant agenda. As national polls began to show increased support for stricter border enforcement, the Biden administration responded by making a rightward turn, embracing policies that resembled Trump-era doctrine with increasing frequency.

These new policies have made migrants more vulnerable to kidnapping and extortion by criminal groups in Mexico, and have left many thousands stuck in areas patrolled by these very groups, relying on a lottery administered through a smartphone app to make it to safety. The hot political climate has fundamentally changed how asylum-seekers cross the border.

In the past, after telling a Border Patrol agent they intended to ask for asylum, migrants would be forced to leave behind most of their belongings at the wall, aside from what could fit in a medium-size plastic bag. Then they would ride in vans to detention centers and undergo a "credible fear" interview, in which an asylum officer hundreds or thousands of miles away is tasked with determining whether a migrant faces true danger in their home country, and in every country they passed through along the way. "Why didn't you settle in Colombia? And in Panama? And in Costa Rica? And in Honduras?..." the questioning goes.

Once they had proven the U.S. was their only viable option, the migrant would be set free into El Paso, or San Diego, or Eagle Pass, with a court date for an asylum hearing, which could take years. The routine was simple enough for most migrants to navigate — even under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that sent tens of thousands of asylum-seekers back to Mexico, these migrants would simply cross again and again until they were allowed through. Then, everything began to change.

Last fall, Abbott decided to throw a mountain of spikes into the middle of the process, part of a $10 billion initiative called Operation Lone Star, arguing the state needed to intervene, as the federal government under Biden was being too lenient in letting so many foreigners enter U.S. territory, refugees or not. In 2023, 60 percent of migrants coming to the U.S. crossed the border into Texas. In a press conference in June 2023, Abbott announced a violent crackdown: "Some of them, some, may eventually get to the border where they are going to face that multi-layered razor wire and the full force of National Guard and officers... They have one instruction: Do not allow anybody to enter into the state of Texas. Period."

At key gates in the wall where migrants would congregate, agents with the Texas National Guard began spooling out layer upon layer of concertina razor wire at the riverbank, so high the migrants were forced to tunnel through it, so asylum-seekers would be sprinting to the wall clutching their toddler children with blood running down their backs. The stretch between the river and the wall became the setting for a violent game of tag, in which guardsmen would speed around in trucks attempting to catch asylum-seekers running to the wall and drag them back towards the wire and the river — once they touched the wall, the migrants would be in the hands of the Border Patrol, in a way, switching from state to federal jurisdiction. Over the course of a year, spikes turned to gasoline fires, which turned to rubber bullets, drones, and tear gas. But the vast majority of migrants made it into Border Patrol custody anyway, despite their billion-dollar scrapes and burns.

Jokes from Texas officials, including Abbott himself , about using real ammunition suddenly became very real on May 16, 2024, when a Honduran man was found dead on the U.S. side of the riverbank near dawn — onlookers said he was beaten to death by Texas guardsmen. Leide Contreras, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant, also attempted to cross the border on that day to make his asylum claim, and said the rest of the migrants there all had seen a Texas guardsman beat the man unconscious. "I saw him, he was above the river covered in a blanket, so I thought he was asleep, but his face was really beaten up. People started to arrive, press, the Mexican National Guard, and he was still alive there for three hours. He was breathing, but no ambulance came," Contreras says.

"There is no truth to the allegation that Texas National Guard soldiers were involved in the death of a Honduran man on [May 17] in Juárez, Mexico," a spokesman for the Texas Military Department tells Rolling Stone, adding that another witness "reported that the deceased migrant had been robbed and beaten on the Mexico side of the border."

But the unidentified Honduran man may not have been an anomaly. Contreras says he witnessed Texas guardsmen beating women and children in the head with the butts of their guns if groups did not comply to return back to the Mexican side of the river.

"The Texas National Guard deploys only defensive measures when necessary and proportional for self-defense, or in the defense of others," says the Texas Military Department spokesperson.

Rayeli Barrios, an 18-year-old woman from Miranda, Venezuela, reached the gate in the wall with her group of 12 extended family members in late May. She had heard that once she touched the wall, the Texas guard could no longer forcibly push her back to the Mexican side of the river, but she quickly learned this rule had gone out the window. "We were already touching the wall, and they said we would need to return to the other side or they would throw us over themselves," she says. "If the Border Patrol isn't there, they treat you badly."

As a ball of tear gas exploded in the air, the family resigned themselves to returning to the other side of the river and wondered whether the guardsmen would shoot them with real bullets anyway. Despite being tear gassed by the Texas National Guard, Barrios says she believes in law enforcement, and wants to be a cop one day.

In the spring, as the violence escalated, migrants took to waiting until nighttime to attempt to cross, but the guardsmen's drones can spot movement even in the dark.

By making it more difficult to cross the border, Texas gave organized crime groups an opportunity to capitalize on desperate people. The neighborhood surrounding International Marker 36, the gate where most people meet Border Patrol, became a hunting ground for local criminal operatives, lurking there to kidnap or extort migrants waiting at the riverbank for the right moment to cross.

By January 2024, Operation Lone Star had actively impeded the functioning of Border Patrol, and the Biden administration sent a cease and desist letter to Texas. "Governor Abbott's political stunts are cruel, inhumane, and dangerous," the White House said in a statement. The Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas was legally required to allow federal agents to access the border, but Abbott ignored the ruling and the standoff continued in Eagle Pass. But at the same time, behind the scenes, the Biden administration was contributing to the chaos, by asking the Mexican government to crack down on migrants and hold more of them in Mexican prisons. Demand for more clandestine ways to pass through Mexico without encountering Mexican officials skyrocketed.

Kidnappings for ransom surged in Northern Mexico, as did extortion by Mexican immigration officials — a year ago, every Venezuelan would say crossing the jungle of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama was the most difficult segment of their journey, but now, all agree traversing the length of Mexico is the most terrifying. Two of Contreras' traveling companions disappeared when they entered the northern state of Chihuahua in mid-June and he expects they are either kidnapped or dead. It is now difficult to find a migrant who has not been extorted by Mexican officials, kidnapped, assaulted, or robbed.

In May, 2024, in Juárez, a local mafia began killing taxi drivers who took migrants from the airport to Marker 36. Terrified, taxi and rideshare drivers now check the accent of every passenger, refusing to drive migrants and letting the mafia charge any Venezuelan, any Cuban, any Haitian hundreds of dollars for a short ride. Jesus, a driver in Juárez who did not want to share his last name out of fear, says he very rarely will drive anyone near the neighborhood surrounding Marker 36. "You're always tightening, always predicting... the best recipe is to not see anything," he says.

By early June, Biden's ideological transformation was complete, as he unveiled a new executive order that would shut down access to the asylum process for tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. "The American people... are looking for us not to weaponize the border but to fix it," he said. "This action will help us to gain control of our border, restore order to the process."

Biden's about-face mirrored dozens of other powerful Democrats. "Quite simply, we risk losing the 2024 election if we do not seize this opportunity to go on offense on the issue of the border and turn the tables on Republicans," Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy wrote in a memo to fellow Democrats in February.

Convoluted and confusing, Biden's new asylum rule effectively sentences any migrant crossing at a gate in the wall to deportation back to Mexico, or for some Central Americans, back to their home country — this constitutes the vast majority of asylum-seekers. If Yoemar and Luis had made it past the Texas National Guard and into Border Patrol custody, they very likely would have been deported back to Mexico under this rule. Though the pair was aware of a rule change, they were confused as to what it really meant in practice.

Since June, the number of people crossing the border at gates has dropped by nearly 50 percent . But even with the new law in place for months now, 2,000 people on average are still crossing the border and asking for asylum per day, and are deported into Mexico. Usually they are driven to a different border city from the one they crossed in, and occasionally a group is left abandoned in a dangerous area with nothing aside from the clothes on their backs.

Numerous nonprofits advocating for human rights have argued the asylum rule violates both U.S. and international law , because it restricts the way people are allowed to ask for asylum and leaves the most vulnerable migrants without any way of entering the United States. A similar Trump administration policy that sought to ban migrants from entering between ports-of-entry was struck down in the courts in 2018. "This policy replicates some of the harshest anti-immigrant policies under the previous administration, seemingly catering to fearmongering against immigrants and driven by a desire to appear 'tough on the border,'" says Vicki B. Gaubeca, associate director of U.S. immigration and border policy at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.

Under the new order, the only way to access the asylum system is to enter a lottery on a smartphone app to win an appointment with Border Patrol agents at a designated port. There are only 1,450 slots for appointments on the CBP One app each day, and likely over 100,000 people waiting and refreshing the app each morning, with more arriving each day in Southern Mexico (the latitude in one's IP address necessary to access the app). Under the new rule, with all asylum-seekers deported aside from those with appointments on the app, in six months, there could be over a million people stuck waiting in Mexico, all clicking the same button on their smartphones every morning, the scent of their desperation attracting a blossoming smuggling industry.

Many migrants, like Henry Morales, who escaped a death threat in Guatemala, were robbed of their phones, and are now working clandestine jobs in Mexico to save up enough money to buy another one. Many thousands are now stuck in Mexico without the financial means to stay for months, vulnerable to surging kidnapping and extortion, praying to a faulty technology. It's not a first-come-first-serve system — some have already been waiting over a year to secure an appointment.

"I'm afraid to go anywhere other than home and work," said Yaquelin Quintana, a migrant from Cuba, who is living on the outskirts of Mexico City while she waits to receive an appointment on the app. Like most migrants, she does not have official paperwork to live or work in Mexico. "I keep thinking migration agents will be everywhere," she says. Quintana is earning just over 15 dollars a day working at a convenience store, enough to rent the corner of a room in a house with her husband. They are not prepared to live for many more months in these conditions, and are running out of options.

The couple needs to save their last few thousands of dollars to pay off the extortions they know they'll encounter from Mexican officials and organized crime operatives (who are often indistinguishable) when they enter a northern state on the way to their appointment with U.S. Border Patrol. But how long will they have to wait? The couple has already spent over $10,000 they saved over several years to flee economic disaster in Cuba, and as more migrants fill Mexican cities, stuck in limbo and looking for work, employment opportunities become few and far between.

Victor Luz Sanchez, Director of the La Esperanza migrant shelter in Juárez, said the new Biden rule, similar to border policies under Donald Trump, leaves Mexico to pick up the pieces of a Washington optics war. "What are we going to do with all of these people? The government, it just sits there and throws the ball," he said.

Sanchez also worries as it becomes more difficult to reach the United States, smugglers will capitalize further on growing desperation, and migrants will risk their lives to travel with a pollero who will offer passage across the border for a high fee — putting the migrants at risk for potentially lethal scams. There is no way, Sanchez said, for people to effectively protect themselves from kidnapping, robbery, and death in this new environment on the migrant trail in Mexico.

Experts like Sanchez don't expect Vice President Kamala Harris to safeguard the wellbeing of asylum-seekers. She has advocated for increasing the ranks of the Border Patrol, told Guatemalans facing rising rates of violence and poverty "don't come," and supports border legislation allotting billions of dollars to opening more migrant detention centers, some of them privately owned. "I refuse to play politics with our security," Harris said in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, adding: "We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border."

Harris visited the border in Arizona on Friday to tout the border legislation. A Harris campaign aide enthusiastically noted, "Unlawful border crossings have dropped since she and President Biden announced new measures earlier this year to strengthen border security."

During her speech in Douglas, a border city, Harris said, "I will take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry. Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentering for five years." She added: "We will pursue more severe criminal charges against repeat violators, and if someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and instead crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred from receiving asylum."

Next week, the Biden administration is expected to take further executive action, making it more difficult for a future government to reverse the policy banning asylum access to people who cross the borderline on foot without an appointment.

For migrants like Yaquelin Quintana and Leide Contreras, Mexico is miserable, but one thing is clear: No matter the razor wire, no matter the legal challenges, they're not going back. Contreras has seen two men die in front of him since he left Caracas, lost most of his possessions, faced extortion, and is living in a shelter in Juárez with 80 other men, where he will likely need to stay for months. But no amount of suffering in Mexico could send him back to Venezuela, where he says he is sure he would die.

"I hope I get an appointment," he says.

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