One November afternoon, Evelia was frying eggs for dinner when the phone rang. The voice on the other side told him to look out the window.
When he peeped out, he saw four men in a black SUV. They shot twice inside their single-room home in the mountains of the Mexican state of Guerrero. She and her three children, aged 14, 10 and 8, fled through the back door. They didn’t take anything with them.
“We didn’t eat anything that night,” she said.
For three months, members of a criminal group had been calling her to demand that they pay about 500, 000. They also tried to get their eldest son to sell drugs at school. When Evelia and his son refused, the group threatened to kill them,
She took her threats very seriously. Four years ago, in 2014, the group had begun to threaten her husband, a collective transport driver. One day. While traveling between his town and a nearby town, the members of the group stopped the van and killed him, she said.
Romina walks through downtown Los Angeles after appearing in the immigration court. She fled the violence in the state of Guerrero in 2017 and sought asylum in the United States.
“They cut his body into pieces,” Evelia said, making a movement of sawing on his wrists and knees. He said they left the pieces of his body and his vehicle burned on the road. She said she was too frightened of reprisals to report the crime.
Although Mexico is a large country — about three times the size of Texas – Evelia thought cartel members would find it wherever it was. He had heard of other people in his village who had fled threats of extortion, kidnapping and death seeking asylum in the United States. She and her children traveled to Tijuana, one of the main ports of entry between the two countries, to do the same.
Over the past year, international attention has focused on the Mexican-American border while thousands of Central American migrants traveled to Tijuana, many of them in the attempt to seek asylum. President Donald Trump sent the National Guard and the army to the border and referred to migrants as “criminals.”
The administration has also implemented policies to deter asylum seekers, such as migrant protection protocols, which were first made effective in January. When fully implemented, the policy will require nearly all asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, rather than in the United States, until immigration judges decide on their cases. Several groups have brought a lawsuit in a federal court to challenge the policy.
Obscured by controversies along the border, however, there are the experiences of another significant group of asylum seekers. The number of Mexican asylum cases adjudicated by U.S. immigration courts has increased more than two and a half times since fiscal year 2014.
According to Amnesty International, people of Mexican nationality formed 80% of asylum seekers in Tijuana before the migrant caravan arrived in November. A spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services said the agency collects the previous addresses of asylum seekers, but does not retain this information in any database. But migrant shelter operators in Tijuana said they have seen a pronounced increase in asylum-seeking families from Guerrero and Michoacán, who have been hit particularly hard by war-related violence against The narco in progress in the nation.
Asylum seekers in Tijuana usually wait more than a month to get an interview with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent.
Mexican asylum seekers are exempt from U.S. policy that requires applicants to wait in Mexico for a judge to pronounce their claim. Although some are given the initial entry to the United States, that passage is only the beginning of a long stay in limbo.
The Desert Sun followed three women from Guerrero — Evelia, Rosa, and Romina — through various parts of their asylum process. Their experiences provide a glimpse into how the process works behind the doors of migrant shelters and detention centers and the closed doors of migratory courts. For example:
Evelia waited five weeks at a Tijuana migrant shelter to meet with a U.S. asylum officer.
Rosa and her daughter were detained for three days in San Ysidro. Now live in Orange County and Rosa still cannot apply for authorization to work.
Romina, a transgender woman, was detained for seven months, with men, at Otay Mesa. He has waited for more than a year to apply for a work permit and is now facing indigence.
These women face long waits for the judges to decide their destinies. Until fiscal year 2019, which began on October 1, 2018, the average case in U.S. immigration courts remained pending for almost two years.
And their chances of gaining asylum have historically been low. About 13% of the Mexican asylum seekers in 2018 obtained it, a smaller percentage than for asylum seekers from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Those to whom the asylum was denied either were deported or obtained another form of relief, such as suspension of removal, which prevents deportation but does not lead to permanent legal residency or provides relief for other family members.
Meanwhile, Evelia, Rosa, and Romina are waiting in precarious and vulnerable situations, far from the homes they left in Mexico, and far from knowing if a judge will give them shelter in the United States.
In Tijuana, people take a number and wait
When Evelia and his three children arrived in Tijuana in mid-November, they went directly to the El Chaparral Poe to register. In a square adjacent to the border, she added her name and place of origin — Guerrero — to a list in a worn-out notebook. Evelia received a number, which would determine when a U.S. immigration officer would prosecute his family for asylum procedure.
Once Evelia received her number, she and her children headed to the Mother Institute, a shelter for migrant women and children. The shelter has rooms, but you are not allowed to stay in them during the day, so spend time in the shelter yard, which has a frame for swings without swings, a couple of trees, picnic tables and benches. Migrants cook three communal meals each day in the shelter’s kitchen. Washed clothes hangs from all possible points.
In Tijuana, the poorest asylum seekers spend their time in shelters where they wash their clothes and eat community meals.
While they wait in Tijuana, asylum seekers spend most of their time behind the shelter’s doors. The boys go to school in the same place. Doctors and psychologists have office hours. Lawyers advise women about their asylum cases. Volunteers donate clothes for families, many of which come from warmer climates and did not bring jackets.
Led by Catholic nuns, the shelter’s capacity is supposed to be 45 people, but the number of residents sometimes grew to 160 in 2018, according to Mary Galván, a social worker there. She said that approximately three quarters of the people who sought refuge there in 2018 were from Mexico, mainly from Guerrero and Michoacán. He said that women asylum seekers from Guerrero typically come from humble backgrounds, from farm workers.
“Poverty has made them so strong and so vulnerable at the same time,” Galvan said.
By mid-December, Evelia and his children had been waiting in the shelter for five weeks. Christmas was approaching and Evelia expected his number to be marked any day. Shivering in the shelter yard in a black woolen sweatshirt, red pants and flip-flops, he put his hands in his pockets and joked that he was practicing for the cells at the entrance Poe, which migrants call coolers, because rumors say they are Frost. He said he hopes not to spend much time there.
He spoke Quedito, in short sentences, as he described why he was fleeing Mexico. But he became more talkative in describing Houston, where he hoped to go if he was liberated in the United States. Evelia said he has a cousin there that offered to house her and her children.
“They say it’s really nice there,” he commented. He added that his cousin told him that the city has many parks. She said she was excited to buy tennis and try new foods.
In November 2018, Yovani, a migrant who traveled from Michoacán to Tijuana, read aloud the names of asylum seekers who will be interviewed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials that day.
Mentioning Chinese food, he said, “I’ve tried it, but they say it’s better there.” He said he has dreams for the future of his family in the United States. She attended the third grade in school. She wants her children to receive a better education. He said he wants to buy a house.
“The most important thing is to be the owner of your own house,” he said.
After the arrest, the delay of the immigration court
Unlike Rosa, who spent three nights in custody, Romina, a transgender asylum seeker from Guerrero, spent seven months in an ICE detention center, where she was detained with Men. Sometimes, she said, she was so desperate to get out of detention that she considered quitting her claim. Locked up and feeling that she was being treated like a criminal, she lost over 18 kilos.
“Returning to my country would be to return to a death sentence,” he said. “At that moment, you don’t know it would be better; Confinement or death. ”
In Guerrero, criminal groups publish lists of potential victims on Facebook and WhatsApp, using nicknames and crude language to describe their targets. A criminal group threatened his father twice, putting him on the lists of whites posted on the platforms, he said, and accused him of working for the rival group.
In June 2017, Romina’s father was raised. After his disappearance, Romina said someone called her and warned that “the same thing happened to him would happen to all my family.” Days later, Romina’s sisters found her father dead near Chilpancingo, the state capital, where her captors had thrown him into a hollow, with her hands and ankles tied together behind her back.
Rosa, a warrior asylum seeker, was detained for three nights in San Ysidro, California before being released with an electronic shackle attached to her ankle. He has taken the monitor for almost three months while waiting for an audience with a U.S. federal judge.
The threats continued after the death of his father, Romina said. Men she suspects were associated with a criminal group stood in the street and watched her family home, she said. Three days after the discovery of his father’s body, Romina fled from Guerrero. She believed that criminal groups would track her, no matter where she went.
“I knew absolutely nothing about asylum,” said Romina. “I only knew that I wanted to enter the country to save my life”
Romina was detained at the entrance gate of El Chaparral and transferred to an ICE detention centre in Otay Mesa, a community just north of the border.
She met other transgender women in the confinement, who presented her with lawyers from organizations that support transgender asylum seekers. She hoped they would help her, but she was told that her case was not strong enough to guarantee her pro bono representation. So she decided to defend herself in her asylum case. From his confinement, he studied the immigration legislation of the United States and put his case together.
“I have to fight with fingernails and teeth, because I want to save my life,” he said.
On January 30, 2018, a judge agreed to release the word, as he could not pay bail. She left Otay Mesa the next day. Secured to his ankle, there was a GPS monitor, which he carried for five months.
“You feel alive,” she said about the day she was released. “You feel like you don’t have to fear anymore, you feel alive and you feel like you’re going to be okay.”
Rosa and her daughter Sofia, both originating in the state of Guerrero, spent five weeks in a shelter for migrants in Tijuana before being able to be considered as possible refugees in the United States.
Romina said that representatives of a group that supports transgender asylum seekers, called Las Crisantemas, picked her up outside the detention centre. She was taken to a home in Orange County that they rented to house transgender women. Romina said she lived there for four months.
By August, Romina was living in a mobile home park in Santa Ana, with income assistance coordinated by the Crisantemas. She had transferred her asylum case from the Otay Mesa migratory court to the Los Angeles courthouse and was anxiously awaiting her first presentation in L.A., scheduled for December 14th. While asylum seekers may apply for a work permit 150 days after completing their asylum application, Romina said the watch stopped for her request, at 80 days, when she left Otay Mesa. She had to wait until the December audience in Los Angeles — more than ten months after she left the lockdown — to start walking again. After that I would still have to wait until March to apply for a work permit.
Romina found a lawyer who agreed to take her case for $2000, 000. They agreed that Romina would pay the fare in deliveries, once she got a work permit. Immigration is a civil issue, so as in family courts or bankruptcy, the government does not provide lawyers.
The results of the asylum process vary significantly depending on whether people have lawyers. Between 2012 and 2017, about 83% of the asylum applications of Mexicans represented by a lawyer were denied, while about 97% of Mexican asylum applications without representation were denied, according to TRAC data.
On December 14, at 8:30 a.m., 11 months after his release, Romina appeared at the court on the 16th floor of an office building in downtown Los Angeles. The room was brimming with people waiting to see a federal immigration judge so she squeezes on a wooden bench and was distracted with her cell phone for more than three hours, until her case was called.
Dressed in denim trousers and white slippers with golden details, he declared his legal and masculine name and asked the judge to call her Romina.
To gain asylum, people must prove that they have suffered persecution, or fear that they will suffer future persecution, because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. When the alleged persecutor is not affiliated with the government, people must show that the government of the country does not have the will or is unable to protect them.
Romina’s attorney provided the judge with new documents: an amended form I-589, the asylum application, and an updated report of the country’s conditions, which provide the judge with the background information on the general conditions and status of the rights Human rights in the country of origin of the asylum seeker. Reports may consist of articles in the press and reports produced by the Government and Ngos, among other documents.
Romina’s lawyer shared the evidence of the most recent death threat she had received. In the fall, Romina’s name appeared on a list of whites on WhatsApp. “We’ll find you,” they wrote in capital letters, calling it by their male name and a homophobic offense. The lawyer also shared information about another transgender woman, a friend of Romina’s, who was shot at her home in Guerrero.
Evelia, an asylum-seeker from the state of Guerrero, helped prepare community meals and washed dishes at the Madre Assmear Institute, a shelter for women and children.
The judge scheduled the next appointment at Romina’s Court, an individual audience, for November 2020, almost two years later. The full audience took six minutes.
“It was a long wait just so they could give me a court date,” Romina said outside the office building.
Romina seemed to deflate. He knew he could not be deported, but was frustrated that he could not yet access medical benefits or a work permit. He joked that he could speed up the process if he married an American citizen.
By February, Romina’s situation had become more critical. I still didn’t qualify for a work permit. The mobile home where he had been living was sold. It had to leave in early January and since then it has not had a stable place. Without an income, she has had to rely on transgender women she met during her detention to have housing and support.
“In the end, it was worth being cooped up, because I met these people who are helping me,” he said.
Romina, always resilient, has plans for what she will do if she gains asylum in the United States. He said he wants to create an organization that would provide safe haven for transgender asylum seekers, for those moments when you don’t know what you’re going to do, because you don’t have a place to live, you don’t have a job and you don’t have any money. ”
The goal, he said would be that “someone else doesn’t go through what I’m going through.”
Romina will have to wait until a judge decides on his asylum claim to be able to continue his dream. He’ll probably wait a long time.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Reporter Rebecca Plevin and photojournalist Omar Ornelas of the Desert Sun traveled twice to Guerrero, Mexico, for the report of this project. They spent four days reporting in Guerrero in August; They returned in October and spent two more weeks reporting in the State, with the support of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis reporting. They also spent four days in Oregon with a Guerrero family asylum seeker in December and more than a week in Tijuana, interviewing Guerrero migrants throughout the fall. Reporters conducted all interviews with migrants and asylum seekers in Spanish and translated their citations for their narration. Some of the subjects cited in this project gave the interviews on condition that the Desert Sun did not use their names or shoot their faces, due to security reasons
THE TEAM BEHIND THIS INVESTIGATION
Reporting and research: Rebecca Plevin, Omar Ornelas
Edition: Evan Wyloge, Kate Franco, Julie Makinen, Matt Solinsky
Photography: Omar Ornelas
Videos: Omar Ornelas, Bernardo Torres, Ricardo Ariza, Eric Chavelas
Video editing: Vickie Connor, Scott Hall
Graphics and illustrations: Veronica Bravo, James Sergent, Ramon Padilla
Digital production and development: Annette Meade, Spencer Holladay, Andrea Brunty, Ryan Marx
Social media, commitment and promotion: Brian De Los Santos, Mary Bowerman
Translation: Andres Ocampo
Editor’s note: Several of the subjects that appear in these stories gave us interviews on the condition that The Desert Sun did not publish their names or photograph their faces, for security reasons. The reporters conducted all the interviews with asylum seekers and migrants in Spanish, and translated their appointments for this report. More about this series.
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