by Dara Lind

The startling images have appeared in one news report after another: children packed into overcrowded, unsafe Border Patrol facilities because there was nowhere else to put them. As of March 30, over 5,000 children were being held in Border Patrol custody, including more than 600 in each of two units in Donna, Texas, that were supposed to hold no more than 32 apiece under COVID-19 protocols.

But as the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services scrambles to open “emergency” temporary facilities at military bases, work camps and convention centers to house up to 15,000 additional children, it’s cutting corners on health and safety standards, which raises new concerns about its ability to protect children, according to congressional sources and legal observers. And even its permanent shelter network includes some facilities whose grants were renewed this year despite a record of complaints about the physical or sexual abuse of children.

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“There may be no good choices,” Mark Greenberg, a former head of the Administration for Children and Families (which oversees the unaccompanied-children program) at the HHS, told ProPublica. “Everything has to be weighed against the alternative. And the alternative is the backups at Customs and Border Protection. And recognizing how bad that is, it means that people have to make unpalatable decisions.”

According to internal government statistics and interviews with former officials, legal observers, advocates and congressional staff, those decisions came weeks or months after the first warning signs late last year that the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern U.S. border was rapidly increasing, forcing a scramble to set up facilities in a matter of days. No safety standards are in place at the new facilities — unlike controversial “influx” facilities used in the past.

One new site in Midland, Texas, was briefly closed to new arrivals after the state warned that its water wasn’t drinkable . That site and others have been staffed with volunteers who may not have passed background checks and speak no Spanish. One potential site — a NASA research center in Moffett, California — was scuttled after local protesters pointed out it was near a known Superfund site with high levels of toxic chemicals.

While previous influx sites have been criticized by Democrats in Congress and immigration advocates for sometimes falling short of state standards for licensed facilities, HHS has generally agreed to hold operators to those standards, said attorney Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law. But it hasn’t committed to that now. Nor has HHS offered any other standards it plans to hold the facilities to. In a statement provided to ProPublica, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “We are seeing progress, but it takes time. In the meantime, the CBP workforce has done heroic work under difficult circumstances to protect these children.” HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s “the Wild West,” Welch said, reflecting a view shared by other advocates and congressional staff monitoring the children’s care.

Meanwhile, the federal government has tried to revive its COVID-19-battered network of permanent residential facilities. In January, it quietly renewed three-year grants to several state-licensed providers that previously faced complaints of physical or sexual abuse of children. The facilities have defended their care without denying the allegations.

One grant went to a Texas facility that children were removed from in 2018 amid allegations that staffers were d rugging them , and that had previously fired a staff member for placing a child in a chokehold in 2019. Two organizations that have faced repeated allegations of sexual abuse also had their grants renewed: a foster-care provider in New York accused of placing children with abusers, and a shelter in Pennsylvania where children accused the staff of abuse. The New York organization told ProPublica, “The safety of the youth in our care is of the utmost importance to us and has always been,” and it stressed that both staff and potential fosterers go through “extensive background checks.” Neither of the other facilities responded to requests for comment.

By federal law, children are to be held no longer than 72 hours in Border Patrol custody before they are transferred to HHS housing, except in emergency situations. As of March 30, however, over 2,000 children being held at the main Border Patrol facility in Donna had been there for more than 72 hours, according to reporters.

In recent years, Border Patrol facilities for children have l acked toothbrushes or medical supplies , and the fact that Border Patrol agents aren’t trained to deal with children raises risks that a child will become ill or even die in U.S. custody. This has convinced many officials working in the system that deals with unaccompanied migrant children (including some within Customs and Border Protection) that releasing kids into any HHS care is better than leaving them in Border Patrol custody.

HHS normally places children in a network of shelters while their relatives in the U.S. are identified and vetted (a process that, during the pandemic, has typically taken at least a month). When needed, HHS has also opened influx centers that can be set up in weeks and do not require state licensing. Now, with the assistance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, HHS is opening new “emergency intake sites” in a matter of days, including two in convention centers in Dallas and San Diego.

HHS also relies on a network of state-licensed shelters, which are required to self-report violations found by state regulators to the federal government. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that HHS offered unclear instructions on how such violations should be reported. One grantee, which was cited by state auditors 70 times in two years for violations at three facilities, mentioned none of those violations in its reports to HHS.

Shelters operated by the advocacy organization Texas Impact, an HHS contractor, were cited for 68 violations involving physical abuse or unnecessary restraint of a child. In two cases, children were placed in chokeholds by staff members attempting to restrain them. (In both cases, the staffers responsible were fired.)

In an incident at a shelter near Houston in 2019, a child reported being held in a chokehold for over two minutes. The facility operator (initially operating under the name Daystar Residential Centers) closed in 2011 after a string of abuse allegations, only to reform under the name Shiloh Treatment Centers a few years later. In 2018, the facility was accused in a legal filing of sedating children with antipsychotic drugs . In response, a federal judge ordered the removal of all children who weren’t considered at risk of harming themselves or others. (The shelter did not respond to a ProPublica request for comment.)

Shiloh was among the 23 facilities awarded new three-year contracts on Jan. 1, receiving two grants totalling $2.6 million. The facility has held only a few children during the pandemic, and Welch said it’s possible that conditions have improved. At her last monitoring visit, she said, she heard none of the horror stories that children had told her in the past. But as the GAO report noted, HHS doesn’t explicitly look at past performance when evaluating grant renewals.

The HHS housing crunch has been badly exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Children’s shelters, like other kinds of congregate housing, are under severe capacity restrictions that reduce available bed space.

The HHS shelter population was growing last fall, even before a federal judge ruled in November that the Trump administration had to take unaccompanied migrant children in, rather than expelling most of them from the U.S. immediately under a March public-health order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From Oct. 31 to Nov. 30, the number of children in HHS custody rose from about 2,000 to about 3,000. In mid-December, with about 3,500 kids in custody, HHS officials said in a briefing that shelters near the U.S.-Mexico border were already at 67% of their capacity limits under COVID-19. But HHS took no action to add capacity until Jan. 15, when it sent a message to other government agencies asking them to scout locations for potential influx sites.

Former DHS officials said that HHS has long resisted taking emergency measures, straining the agency’s relationship with Border Patrol. During a similar crunch in 2019, one former DHS official told ProPublica that HHS “refused to acknowledge the operational challenges” that were leading children to be marooned in Border Patrol custody for days, out of a belief that “immigration was kind of a third rail.”

“It’s no coincidence that in each of the surges since 2014, FEMA — the emergency-management arm of DHS — has had to step in,” another former DHS official said. “When the [HHS] system is overwhelmed by the number of intakes, they don’t have the FEMA-like capacity to think improvisationally, to rush resources, or to modify processes, and they become the bottleneck.”

On March 5, the CDC waived the COVID-19 capacity caps for migrant child shelters so HHS could take more children out of Border Patrol facilities. The Biden administration is now working with states to allow shelters to house more children while complying with state licensing requirements. But shelters are struggling to hire staff, as many qualified professionals still fear working in congregate housing because new coronavirus variants are spreading. HHS recently informed Congress that it has upped its incentive pay to help recruiting, but it’s unclear if that will be enough.

A senior administration official acknowledged in March that the number of beds being made available would at best be a few hundred a week — far too few compared to the number of children arriving.

When the Biden administration announced it was reopening the influx care facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, in February, immigration advocates and some Democrats condemned it as another way to keep “kids in cages.” Meanwhile, the other influx facility opened by the Trump administration in 2019, at Homestead Air Reserve Base in Miami, was held in reserve. At present, it appears it won’t be reopened; Axios reported that Biden himself stepped in to veto the possibility.

But HHS policy requires influx facilities to “comply, to the greatest extent possible, with State child welfare laws and regulations (such as mandatory reporting of abuse), as well as State and local building, fire, health and safety code.” There are no such commitments in place for emergency facilities, according to Welch and congressional staff. It’s still not clear who will operate the facilities after the initial setup is completed, or whether HHS will require them to provide support services to children, such as mental health counseling or legal assistance.

People who work in the system often point out that the ultimate goal is to get children reunited with their U.S.-based relatives as quickly and safely as possible. The lack of support services might matter less if children did not end up staying at the new emergency sites for months, they argue.

“We would always want children in a good, safe, developmentally appropriate setting,” Greenberg told ProPublica. “But the issue is just really different for a child who is going to be somewhere for 30 days” compared to longer-term stays.

Ultimately, how long emergency sites remain open depends on how long children keep coming to the U.S. in numbers beyond what HHS can accommodate. Internal government estimates obtained by The Wall Street Journal predict that as many as 25,000 children could cross into the U.S. in May.

A child’s shoe lies abandoned near an illegal river-crossing point at the U.S.-Mexico border on March 24, 2021, in McAllen, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)

by Lomi Kriel

MATAMOROS, Mexico — For the past five months, Valery Sanchez has shared a cramped two-bedroom apartment here with about a dozen gay and transgender migrants, waiting patiently but desperately for her asylum case to be heard across the border in Texas.

From her bedroom window, the 19-year-old transgender woman can see the site of the makeshift migrant camp in Matamoros that she fled months earlier, fearing for her safety.

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At its peak, the camp, a collection of ramshackle tent structures in a park abutting the Rio Grande, ballooned to 3,000 migrants under the Migrant Protection Protocols , a policy established by President Donald Trump. Starting in 2019, the MPP program forced a total of more than 71,000 migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico until their cases could be considered by judges in U.S. immigration courts.

Sanchez said she escaped Honduras in February 2020 after strangers beat her and left her for dead because of her gender identity. She spent the next eight months at the makeshift camp in Matamoros, but fled after other Central American migrants harassed and assaulted her and her transgender friends, telling them they would end up “dead in the river,” she recalled.

Sanchez never doubted her decision to leave until earlier this month, when President Joe Biden’s administration allowed nearly all of the 700 migrants at the camp to cross into the United States as part of a broader rollback of the MPP program, also known as “remain in Mexico.”

The closed-down migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, on Feb. 24. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)

Over a little more than a week, the fetid camp, which lacked running water and had sparked public health and safety concerns, was emptied in collaboration with the United Nations, a first at the U.S. border. The tents that had cluttered the Matamoros riverbank across from Brownsville, the southernmost point of the border between Texas and Mexico, were gone.

Advocates praised Biden for moving to eliminate one of the most visceral symbols of U.S. immigration policies under Trump. The camp had become notorious for the miserable conditions endured by migrants, drawing international attention as a U.S.- sanctioned refugee settlement.

But in closing the camp, the Biden administration strayed from its own guidelines to prioritize vulnerable migrants like Sanchez who have pending court cases, essentially allowing some in the camp to skip the line. Many migrants whose asylum cases had already been denied or who otherwise didn’t qualify for entrance were allowed into the U.S. to be processed, stoking confusion about who gets in and who doesn’t.

Department of Homeland Security officials said admissions from the camp were based on “urgent humanitarian concerns” and in consideration of keeping families together.

But officials involved in emptying the Matamoros camp, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said pressure in the U.S. and Mexico also factored into the decision to prioritize migrants from the camp. Last month’s record freeze in Texas and Northern Mexico added to alarm about conditions.

Sanchez and her housemates feel they are being punished for having sought a safer place to live. Had they stayed at the camp, they would be in the U.S. already, but now they are forced to wait.

“We didn’t leave the camp because we wanted to,” Sanchez said. “We had to.”

She is among tens of thousands of migrants in urgent situations who are so far left out.

“The distinction between who qualifies for relief and who doesn’t is pretty arbitrary,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer in the Rio Grande Valley who works on MPP cases. “It’s a huge, messy problem for the Biden administration.”

“Too Much Chaos”

About 40,000 migrants, a majority of those sent back across the border under the MPP program, have already been denied asylum or otherwise had their cases terminated, according to federal statistics . Only a tiny number have been approved for protection; the rest are still pending. Typically, after a judge rejects an asylum petition in the U.S., migrants are required to return to their home countries.

Many rejected migrants remain in Mexican border cities under perilous situations, hoping for another opportunity under Biden. His administration has not said if it will offer migrants with closed cases a second chance at asking for asylum. Goodwin and other lawyers said many claims were wrongly dismissed.

Asylum seekers make their way across the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros, Mexico, on Feb. 26, to be processed in the U.S. Some had been living at the Matamoros migrant camp for nearly two years after being sent back to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols to wait for their cases to be decided. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)

Trump made immigration a cornerstone of his campaign for office and his presidency, arguing that under previous administrations the U.S. had been too lenient and that regulations should be tightened to prevent immigrants from entering the country.

During his own presidential campaign, Biden noted that Trump was the first U.S. president to make asylum seekers wait in another country. He promised to undo some Trump-era immigration policies, including MPP, saying they were inhumane.

“That’s never happened before in America,” Biden said during a presidential debate last year. “They’re sitting in squalor on the other side of the river.”

The Biden administration halted the MPP program and in February began the process of allowing into the U.S. the 25,000 migrants with pending court cases. About 2,200 of those migrants have been admitted so far, including almost everyone from the Matamoros camp, according to the U.N.

They will now be allowed to live in the U.S. while they await hearings in civil immigration courts that have an average backlog of more than two years, according to federal statistics .

U.N. and U.S. officials said migrants with open cases are being processed as quickly as possible, emphasizing that those who have waited the longest and are most vulnerable should be permitted to enter first.

“The Matamoros camp became a visible symbol of a much larger problem,” said Yael Schacher, a historian who serves as a legal advocate at the global organization Refugees International. “But this is just a tiny, very visible population of a much larger group that is in many cases as vulnerable or more so.”

Newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has urged patience as the administration reconstructs a “dismantled” immigration system.

Biden officials have said that, under Trump, the U.S. decimated avenues to seek asylum, including returning unaccompanied migrant children without legal protections, and cut foreign aid that had been intended to improve conditions in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. The administration has promised reforms such as shortening the amount of time it takes to adjudicate asylum claims, but has not yet provided specifics.

“We have had to rebuild the entire system,” Mayorkas said Tuesday in a statement . “As difficult as the border situation is now, we are addressing it.”

Since taking office, Biden has grappled with an influx of migrants fleeing desperate conditions and hoping that the U.S. immigration system will be more welcoming under a new administration. In February, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 19,200 migrants with their families, about 9,450 unaccompanied children and nearly 71,600 single adults, according to federal statistics released last week . The total of just more than 100,000 migrants was a 28% increase over January and the highest monthly number since June 2019 .

Salvadoran asylum seeker Vilma Vasquez lived for nearly two years in a tent at a migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico. In November 2019, her daughter, then 15, crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor after constantly feeling sick at the encampment. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)

Mayorkas said Tuesday that the U.S. is “on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” in part because of worsening conditions in Central America. A decision by the Biden administration to stop automatically expelling migrant children under a public health order invoked by Trump last March also resulted in an increase of unaccompanied minors entering the U.S.

That has forced the opening of extra facilities and left children in poorly equipped Border Patrol detention centers , which are intended for adults, for longer than the law allows. On March 13, Biden announced that he was deploying the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the border to help care for unaccompanied children.

Mayorkas and other federal officials have said that the border remains closed while the Biden administration tries to reconstruct legal avenues for those seeking protection.

“It’s going to take time,” said DHS spokesperson Sarah Peck. “In the meantime, the border is not open, and people should not make the journey to reach it.”

The confusion stemming from the camp’s closure has added to uncertainty about how the Biden administration is more broadly handling immigration cases involving migrants at the border.

Outside of MPP, the Biden administration is rejecting nearly all migrant adults and some families under the public health order from last March, which invoked COVID-19 as a reason for turning them away. At the same time, the government is allowing some newly arrived migrant families to enter in south Texas, pointing to a lack of shelter space because of new regulations in Mexico.

“Now it’s a bit of being at the right place at the right time,” said Savitri Arvey, a researcher on migration at the University of Texas at Austin. “That causes panic and misinformation.”

At a bus station in Brownsville, Texas, Guatemalan asylum seeker Jorge Mario Gonzalez shows scars from a surgery he had after being shot in his country. Gonzalez said he was shot near the ribs and the bullet went through his body, affecting a nerve, leaving him needing crutches to walk. He and his wife were sent back to Mexico in July 2019 to wait for their asylum cases to be decided in the U.S. After living at the migrant camp for nearly a year, they were among the first group to be processed for entry into the U.S. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)

As the Matamoros camp was dismantled, new arrivals pitched tents outside of the park where it had stood. Asylum seekers in Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, began forming their own camp at that border crossing, hoping to encounter a similarly speedy process. The Tijuana camp has grown to as many 1,500 people since mid-February, representatives from legal advocacy organizations have said. DHS officials warned that such tactics wouldn’t help.

“Physical presence at the U.S. border has not and will not be a means for gaining access to this phased program to address the Migrant Protection Protocols,” agency officials said in a statement to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

Charlene D’Cruz, an attorney with Lawyers for Good Government who works on MPP cases in the Rio Grande Valley, said the conditions in the Matamoros camp were on par with some of the worst refugee settlements she had witnessed in Greece. But D’Cruz said that prioritizing the camp without offering solutions to the larger number of people suffering in Mexico after being returned under MPP is political “tap dancing.”

“There’s too much chaos in an already very chaotic system,” D’Cruz said. “We need more transparency about what’s going to happen next and who is going to be included.”

Left Behind

Dinora Cruz doesn’t understand how U.S. authorities don’t see her as vulnerable or in need of protection.

Cruz, who was returned to Matamoros under the MPP program in 2019, said she pleaded her case to an immigration judge. She explained that gang members had sexually assaulted her twice in Honduras after extorting her for protection money for the convenience store she ran.

Once, she said, gangs broke into her house, firing a bullet that scraped her finger, leaving a deep, jagged scar. After a second attack on the street, she filed a police report with Honduran authorities. They noted in the report that the assault had left her with “serious psychological damage.”

She could no longer pay the extortion money and lost her business.

“The gangs threatened that if I did not give them money, then I would never see my kids again,” she told U.S. authorities at the border, according to her processing paperwork.

Without a lawyer, Cruz said, she struggled to complete her asylum application in English and articulate in court why she qualified. She said the immigration judge told her that she hadn’t provided enough proof and rejected her case in January 2020, just before the pandemic shuttered such courts.

Many migrants still waiting to enter the U.S. arrived at the border shortly after Trump’s MPP policy began in early 2019. Many of their cases were denied in tent courts that were not open to the public. Advocates denounced the legal proceedings , which included mass hearings through video conferencing with poor translation, according to lawyers.

Ariana Sawyer, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, likened the hearings to “kangaroo courts.” She said many migrants’ claims were not properly adjudicated. Of the more than 71,000 migrants returned to Mexico under the MPP program, less than 8% had legal representation. The U.S. government does not provide attorneys to immigrants in such civil deportation proceedings.

Many waited across the border in dangerous conditions. More than 1,500 were killed, kidnapped or assaulted in Mexico while waiting for their court dates, according to tallies by Human Rights First and other international groups .

After the program was implemented , judges granted asylum or other forms of U.S. protection to only about 650 migrants in the MPP program, according to federal data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse .

The Trump administration also made multiple changes to immigration courts, which according to the Migration Policy Institute , a think tank in Washington, D.C, reduced the asylum grant rate to the lowest in decades.

The measures created a broader crisis at the border.

“The Matamoros camp ultimately contained only a tiny fraction of those asylum seekers subjected to this cruel border policy,” Sawyer said.

Because a U.S. judge had dismissed Cruz’s asylum claim, Mexican authorities also revoked her permission to stay and work there lawfully while she awaited her fate in a Texas court. Now she and her two boys, 9 and 10, are living in Mexico illegally. The children have not attended school for more than a year.

Cruz said she is too afraid to return to Honduras. Another woman sent back under the MPP program, who works at a clinic for migrants outside of the Matamoros tent camp, allowed Cruz to stay for free in her rented room.

But the woman has a pending asylum case under MPP and has been told by the U.N. that she will soon be allowed to enter the U.S. under the Biden’s administration’s rollback of the program.

Without a job and with no other options for housing, Cruz doesn’t know how she will take care of her boys once the woman leaves.

Dinora Cruz, an asylum seeker from Honduras, explains why she left her country, in a bedroom in Matamoros, Mexico, that she shares with another woman returned under the Migrant Protection Protocols program. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)

Desperation Remains

The Rev. Juan Sierra, who oversees a migrant shelter in Matamoros, stood outside of the tent camp earlier this month as the U.N. began processing migrants to enter the U.S. Sierra was relieved that they would no longer be living in unsafe conditions, but he feared that the city’s two available shelters would not be able to accommodate the remaining migrants and those who continue to arrive daily.

“The camp isn’t suitable anymore for people to live,” Sierra said. “But if they take away the camp, we don’t have enough space.”

Sierra said his facility can house only about 120 migrants under pandemic protocols. The city’s second shelter is much smaller.

He said the U.S. and Mexico must come up with a clear plan for processing migrants seeking asylum and other protections. Otherwise, Sierra said, migrants could resort to entering the country in increasingly dangerous ways.

“Migrants are going to get criminal groups to go to the U.S., and people are going to die,” Sierra said. “Hopefully both governments come up with a humanitarian solution.”

Rhonda Fleischer, a migration program specialist at UNICEF, which is involved with the dismantling of the MPP program, said migrants are fleeing not only endemic gang violence and poverty but the aftermath of two deadly hurricanes in Central America last year. Many are also searching for employment after months of severe COVID-19 shutdowns obliterated the few available jobs in their countries.

“There is nothing for people anymore,” Fleischer said. “I hear the call for people to wait, that the U.S. is working to find solutions for people who genuinely need protection.”

Nonetheless, she said, “there are families in situations in Central America in which they are in life-or-death circumstances.”

In Matamoros, the tent camp is gone, but the desperation remains.

Sanchez, still living in her crowded apartment with other gay and transgender migrants, checked Facebook for updates on her closest friend, Natasha Mayorquin, who also had a pending case and was let into the U.S. last week as part of the MPP rollback.

The sprawling settlement is no longer visible out Sanchez’s window. At night, she instead looks out and sees the lights of Brownsville. She thinks about her friend, now on her way to North Carolina.

“I feel pretty alone,” she said.

Like thousands of migrants across the border, she clings to hope that she’ll be next.

Valery Sanchez, left, talks to her friend Natasha Mayorquin, both transgender women from Honduras, at Rainbow Bridge, a shelter in Matamoros, Mexico, for LGBTQ asylum seekers. Both moved to the shelter because they feared for their lives at the Matamoros migrant camp. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)

por Dara Lind

El Presidente Joe Biden y los congresistas demócratas trabajan actualmente en rescatar a los inmigrantes que han vivido en Estados Unidos durante décadas con un estatus migratorio legal “temporal”. Sin embargo, el gobierno de Biden está otorgando simultáneamente ese mismo estatus a otros cientos de miles de inmigrantes, poniéndolos en riesgo de quedar atrapados en un limbo similar.

Los problemas que plantea el programa de Estatus de Protección Temporal (Temporary Protected Status, TPS) salieron a la luz la semana pasada, cuando la administración utilizó la autoridad ejecutiva para conceder esa calidad migratoria a hasta 300 mil venezolanos y unos 1,600 birmanos que se encuentran actualmente en Estados Unidos y que se consideran incapacitados para regresar a su lugar de origen de manera segura debido a las emergencias humanitarias que existen en sus países. Los activistas y algunos demócratas electos están presionando al gobierno de Biden para que autorice más otorgamientos de TPS para inmigrantes cuyos países de origen sufren guerras, desastres naturales u otras emergencias, incluidos los haitianos que llegaron a Estados Unidos después de 2011 y los cameruneses.

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Sin embargo, actualmente no existe nada que garantice que cualquiera de estos inmigrantes tenga una vía para conseguir la ciudadanía en el futuro. Aunque la Cámara de Representantes esté trabajando en proyectos de ley que crearían esa trayectoria para quienes ya tienen TPS — sobre todo la Ley del Sueño y la Promesa (Dream and Promise Act), que la Cámara votará esta semana — esas propuestas no corresponden a las personas que obtengan un estatus temporal actualmente, o a quienes pudieran obtenerlo en el futuro.

Esto amenaza con dejarlas en un estado de incertidumbre que se ha vuelto demasiado común en los 30 años desde que el Congreso creó el programa de TPS: a menudo el amparo no es exactamente temporal, pero tampoco es precisamente permanente.

De qué lugares provienen las 400 mil personas que ya tienen el Estatus de Protección Temporal.

Fuente: Registro Federal y Servicio de Investigación del Congreso vía [Centro de Investigación Pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/01/immigrants-with-temporary-protected-status-could-be-offered-a-path-to-u-s-citizenship/)  ((Dara Lind/ProPublica))

La socióloga Cecilia Menjívar, de la UCLA, nombra al TPS como una "legalidad liminar", un estatus frágil que deja a los inmigrantes a merced de los vientos políticos cambiantes. Muchos de los que cuentan con TPS han vivido en EE.UU. durante casi la mitad de sus vidas, obstaculizados en sus carreras y en su capacidad de planificar el futuro sin esperanza de conseguir nunca la ciudadanía según la ley actual, (mientras trabajan legalmente y se convierten en la columna vertebral de sectores clave como la construcción en muchas partes del país).

El presidente Donald Trump puso en evidencia la tenuidad del TPS cuando intentó quitarle la protección al 95 % de los inmigrantes que se beneficiaban de este, proporcionando lo que Erik Villalobos, de la Alianza Nacional del TPS, calificó como una “llamada de atención” para muchos inmigrantes que se habían acostumbrado a estar cómodamente en Estados Unidos y dependían del TPS para seguir en el país. (Entre ellos estaban los propios padres de Villalobos, inmigrantes salvadoreños en riesgo de perder su TPS bajo Trump antes de que él pudiera patrocinarlos para obtener tarjetas de residente en 2018).

Una demanda judicial logró frenar los esfuerzos de Trump, y, hasta ahora, el gobierno de Biden ha adoptado un enfoque generoso al extender el TPS a nuevos países y renovar las concesiones existentes. Sin embargo, las incertidumbres de los últimos cuatro años han hecho que tanto los inmigrantes como los demócratas elegidos se dieran cuenta de que “quizás se deba analizar lo que temporal significa en realidad”, según lo expresó Villalobos.

De acuerdo con la ley actual, se supone que lo “temporal” del TPS representa una solución provisional para inmigrantes que podrían regresar a su país en un futuro próximo, cuando su país se recuperara de una crisis momentánea. El Congreso creó el programa en 1990, después de años de frustración por la negativa del Presidente Ronald Reagan de conceder ayuda a los inmigrantes salvadoreños en Estados Unidos que habían huido de la brutal guerra civil de ese país. El Congreso ordenó el uso del TPS para El Salvador, y autorizó al poder ejecutivo a añadir países a la lista si pasaban por un conflicto armado, desastres naturales o alguna otra “condición extraordinaria y temporal” que hiciera peligroso el retorno. No fijó límites en la cantidad de personas que podrían obtener esta calidad migratoria.

Después de 18 meses, se supone que el gobierno debe reevaluar y decidir de nuevo si un determinado país sigue en crisis y requiere que se le prorrogue el TPS. Si es así, quienes tengan el TPS pueden solicitar otro permiso de trabajo (con su correspondiente cuota de $500 dólares). Si no, se ven obligados a elegir entre quedarse en Estados Unidos como inmigrantes no autorizados, o regresar.

A pesar de eso, en muchas ocasiones a lo largo de su historia el TPS se ha transformado en algo más que una solución provisional. En la práctica, la recuperación se tarda un largo tiempo.

La última vez que se designó a un país del hemisferio occidental para recibir protección temporal fue en 2010, cuando se concedió el TPS a los haitianos en Estados Unidos tras un debilitante terremoto. La administración de Obama prorrogó el estatus tres veces. Cuando el Registro Federal anunció la tercera prórroga, señaló que, aunque “ya se había despejado la mayor parte de los escombros del terremoto” media década después del suceso, los edificios gubernamentales aún no habían sido reconstruidos y la mayoría de los ministerios seguían funcionando en instalaciones provisionales.

La crisis venezolana parece estar igual de inmejorable. Sus sistemas médicos y económicos se habían colapsado incluso antes de la pandemia de COVID-19, provocando la mayor crisis de refugiados del hemisferio occidental. En diciembre de 2019, la oficina de refugiados de Naciones Unidas estimó que más de 4.5 millones de venezolanos habían huido del país. Actualmente se calcula que 5.4 millones de Venezolanos están desplazados en el extranjero, la mayoría de ellos en la vecina Colombia.

Los defensores de los derechos y algunos políticos pasaron años instando a la administración Trump a extender el TPS a los venezolanos que se encuentran actualmente en Estados Unidos, pero sin éxito. Finalmente, en la última noche en su cargo como presidente —sin explicación alguna sobre el retraso ni el cambio de opinión de última hora— Trump emitió una proclamación en la que les otorgaba una concesión de protección similar pero menos formalizada (conocida como salida forzosa diferida). La medida de Trump atrajo tan poca fanfarria que, en muchos casos, los venezolanos que celebraron la concesión del TPS que dictó Biden la semana pasada parecían no saber que ya se les permitía solicitar permisos de trabajo.

Mientras tanto, los inmigrantes con TPS viven su vida en Estados Unidos: trabajan, se establecen, se casan, crían hijos nacidos en Estados Unidos. Algunos inmigrantes llevan décadas con el TPS: 79,290 hondureños con TPS viven en Estados Unidos desde 1998, y 247,412 salvadoreños desde 2001. En una encuesta realizada con estos dos grupos en 2016, los investigadores descubrieron que el titular promedio de un TPS tenía 43 años y llevaba 20 años en Estados Unidos, casi la mitad de su vida. Casi un tercio tenía casa en propiedad; casi dos tercios tenían hijos que eran ciudadanos estadounidenses.

“Para los titulares del TPS, creo que el hecho de que muchos de ellos lleven aquí tanto tiempo demuestra que nada es provisional, si se le da a alguien la oportunidad de crear un medio de vida aquí”, dijo Villalobos.

Cuando se le preguntó qué pasaría con estas personas si perdieran su estatus, Menjívar exclamó: “Dios, no puedo ni imaginarlo”. Por un lado, agregó, es poco probable que se vayan por su cuenta si se les quita la protección; simplemente se convertirían en inmigrantes no autorizados que viven en las sombras, y tendrían que “encadenarlos y obligarlos a subirse a los aviones” si Estados Unidos quiere garantizar su salida. Los deportados se verían aislados. “No tendrían una fuente de vida, perderían todo lo que tienen, su familia”, dijo Menjívar. “Equivale a una muerte social en muchos sentidos”.

Sin embargo, mientras viven en Estados Unidos se les recuerda continuamente su condición de marginales. Según la definición burocrática, ni siquiera son inmigrantes: técnicamente ese término está reservado para alguien que está en vías de residir permanentemente en Estados Unidos. “Incluso el hecho de tener que renovar el TPS cada 18 meses”, dijo Menjívar, “les indica que no es seguro”.

Esa amenaza se hizo mucho más real bajo la administración Trump. “Temporal significa temporal”, dijo el primer secretario del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional de Trump, John Kelly (luego jefe de gabinete de la Casa Blanca), cuando advirtió que los haitianos probablemente perderían sus protecciones en 2017.

En sus primeros 18 meses, la administración anunció fechas de caducación del TPS para haitianos, hondureños, salvadoreños, nicaragüenses, sudaneses y nepalíes, lo que supone el 95 % de los titulares de esta calidad migratoria. A menudo, mientras la administración presionaba para declarar a los países como “recuperados” de sus crisis temporales, los diplomáticos presionaban para que se permitiera que sus ciudadanos permanecieran en Estados Unidos. En 2019, la canciller salvadoreña Alexandra Hill utilizó una conferencia de prensa conjunta con el entonces secretario en funciones del DHS, Kevin McAleenan —llevada a cabo ostensiblemente para celebrar que los países habían firmado un “acuerdo de cooperación” que permitiría a Estados Unidos enviar solicitantes de asilo a El Salvador— para subrayar la importancia de que se continuara el TPS para los salvadoreños.

Mientras tanto, titulares del TPS de diferentes países se organizaron para protegerse, formando finalmente la Alianza Nacional del TPS e impulsando una demanda contra la administración de Trump.

Los jueces federales impidieron que Trump eliminara las designaciones del TPS mientras evaluaban si su administración había violado la ley federal al no deliberar adecuadamente las opciones y sopesar la opinión de los expertos. (Los correos electrónicos que se documentaron como parte de la demanda revelaron que el DHS había pedido que los analistas suministraran pruebas de que las condiciones en Haití estaban mejorando para justificar la terminación del TPS; mientras tanto, un funcionario nombrado por Trump se quejó de que un memorando sobre Sudán “se lee como si una persona que apoya firmemente la extensión del TPS para Sudán escribiera todo hasta la sección de recomendaciones, y luego, alguien que se opone a la extensión se escabulló detrás del primer tipo, lo golpeó en la cabeza, hizo a un lado su cuerpo sin sentido, y terminó el memorando”).

Mientras el asunto se desarrollaba en los tribunales, el DHS siguió prorrogando la validez de los permisos de trabajo de los titulares del TPS. El pasado otoño, cuando el Tribunal del Segundo Circuito dictaminó que la administración de Trump podía poner fin al TPS para los países afectados, el DHS ya había extendido los permisos de trabajo de los inmigrantes hasta octubre de 2021. Se espera que la administración Biden vuelva al orden establecido antes de Trump y continúe con las prórrogas.

Sin embargo la saga fue un recordatorio escalofriante de lo frágil que es vivir con un TPS. En el otoño de 2017, incluso antes de que la administración de Trump se moviera para cancelar el TPS para los salvadoreños, un estudio de padres inmigrantes centroamericanos encontró que la abrumadora mayoría de quienes tienen TPS estaban ansiosos por su futuro y la perspectiva de ser separados de sus hijos. Casi la mitad de estos encuestados tuvieron la calificación de “muy angustiados”, el doble que los inmigrantes no autorizados.

Vivir como residente temporal confina a las personas a los márgenes también de otras maneras. Los poseedores del TPS ganan más dinero que los inmigrantes no autorizados, pero tienen menos probabilidades de ser propietarios de una vivienda, lo que indica, según escribió Menjívar en un informe del año pasado, que “la incertidumbre a largo plazo socava los planes para un futuro”. Y, aunque la inmensa mayoría trabaja, no muestran los mismos patrones de integración económica a lo largo del tiempo que los inmigrantes permanentes: los titulares del TPS con más estudios, por ejemplo, no necesariamente tienen empleos más lucrativos o especializados que sus homólogos con menos educación, lo que indica que no son capaces de aprovechar plenamente su formación.

Al mismo tiempo han florecido nuevas formas de “legalidad liminar”. El programa de Acción Diferida para los Llegados en la Infancia (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA), otro amparo ejecutivo que requiere renovaciones regulares, es otra calidad migratoria frágil que podría ser cancelada o anulada por los tribunales federales en cualquier momento. Los solicitantes de asilo suelen pasar años en el limbo esperando a que se revisen sus solicitudes, ya que tanto los tribunales de inmigración como las oficinas del Servicio de Ciudadanía e Inmigración de Estados Unidos van seriamente atrasados con la tramitación de casos.

Biden y los demócratas del Congreso quieren dar a la mayoría de las personas de estos grupos la posibilidad de solicitar el estatus legal permanente, con la opción de buscar eventualmente la ciudadanía. Últimamente, los demócratas han acogido la idea de permitir que los inmigrantes con TPS aceleren su camino hacia la ciudadanía, y que deberían legalizarse aunque esa legalidad no se le concediera al total de la población de inmigrantes no autorizados.

Una opción para abordar la cuestión que plantea la ampliación del TPS a los venezolanos y birmanos sería modificar los proyectos de ley de legalización que se encuentran actualmente en el Congreso. Incluso, mientras la Cámara de Representantes vota la Ley del Sueño y la Promesa, los demócratas siguen debatiendo si esta y otros proyectos de ley similares que legalizan a ciertos grupos de inmigrantes deberían ser la prioridad legislativa, o si se debería impulsar una actualización única y más amplia del sistema de inmigración, como la Ley de Ciudadanía Estadounidense que se basa en el plan migratorio “del día uno” de Biden. En 2019, una versión anterior de la Ley del Sueño y la Promesa obtuvo siete votos republicanos ; muchos miembros de ese partido actualmente se oponen a cualquier proyecto de ley que legalice a los inmigrantes no autorizados sin que se aumente la financiación para el control fronterizo o se restrinja el asilo para quienes lleguen a Estados Unidos.

Un representante de Bob Menéndez, senador demócrata de Nueva Jersey y promotor principal de la Ley de Ciudadanía Estadounidense en el Senado, dijo que “explorará formas” de asegurar el amparo para los venezolanos con TPS. Los patrocinadores de la Ley del Sueño y la Promesa no respondieron a las solicitudes de comentarios.

No obstante, aun si se incluye los inmigrantes que ya cuentan con el TPS en el proyecto de ley que avanza en el Congreso, ninguna de las dos propuestas incluye una disposición que cambie el programa del TPS en sí mismo, lo cual significa que cualquier inmigrante que quede protegido después de la firma del proyecto de ley seguiría estando en peligro de quedar atrapado en esta calidad migratoria intermedia.

by Dara Lind

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are working to rescue immigrants who’ve been living in the U.S. for decades under a “temporary” legal status. But the Biden administration is simultaneously extending that same status to hundreds of thousands more immigrants — putting them at risk of getting caught in a similar limbo.

The problems posed by the temporary protective status program came into focus last week when the administration used executive authority to grant the status to as many as 300,000 Venezuelans and about 1,600 Burmese currently in the U.S. who are deemed unable to safely return home because of humanitarian emergencies in their countries. Activists and some elected Democrats are pushing the Biden administration to issue more TPS grants for immigrants whose home countries are suffering from war, natural disasters or other emergencies, including Haitians who arrived in the U.S. after 2011 and Cameroonians.

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But right now, there is nothing to ensure that any of these immigrants will have a path to eventual citizenship. Although the House of Representatives is working on bills that would create such a path for those who already hold TPS — most prominently the Dream and Promise Act, which the House will vote on this week — those proposals do not apply to the people who are getting temporary status now, or who might get it in the future.

This threatens to leave them in a state of uncertainty that has become all too common in the 30 years since Congress created the TPS program: The relief is often not exactly temporary, but it’s not exactly permanent either.

Where the 400,000 People Already Granted Temporary Protected Status Come From

Source: Federal Register and Congressional Research Service via [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/01/immigrants-with-temporary-protected-status-could-be-offered-a-path-to-u-s-citizenship/) (Graphic: Dara Lind/ProPublica)

Anthropologist Cecilia Menjívar of UCLA calls TPS “liminal legality,” a fragile status that leaves immigrants at the mercy of changing political winds. Many of those holding TPS have lived in the U.S. for nearly half their lives, hampered in their careers and ability to plan for the future with no hope of ever achieving citizenship under current law (despite working legally and becoming the backbone of key sectors like construction in many parts of the U.S.).

President Donald Trump threw the tenuousness of TPS into sharp relief when he attempted to strip protections from 95% of the immigrants who benefited from it, providing what Erik Villalobos of the National TPS Alliance called a “wake-up call” for many immigrants who had grown comfortable in the U.S. and relied on TPS to remain there. (Among them were Villalobos’ own parents, Salvadoran immigrants at risk of losing their TPS under Trump before Villalobos was able to sponsor them for green cards in 2018.)

A lawsuit successfully ran out the clock on Trump’s efforts, and the Biden administration thus far has taken a generous approach, extending TPS to new countries and renewing existing grants. But the uncertainties of the last four years have led both immigrants and elected Democrats to realize that, in Villalobos’ words, “we might need to look at what ‘temporary’ really means.”

Under current law, the “temporary” in TPS is supposed to be a stopgap solution for migrants who may return home in the foreseeable future, after their country bounces back from a momentary crisis. Congress created the program in 1990, after years of frustration with President Ronald Reagan’s refusal to grant relief to Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. who’d fled that country’s brutal civil war. Congress mandated TPS’s use for El Salvador and authorized the executive branch to add countries to the list if they went through armed conflict, natural disasters or some other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that made return unsafe. It set no caps on the number of people who could be granted the status.

After 18 months, the government is supposed to reevaluate and decide anew whether a given country is still in crisis and needs its TPS extended. If so, TPS holders are able to apply for another work permit (with its attendant $500 fee). If not, they are forced to choose between staying in the U.S. as unauthorized immigrants or going back.

But over its history, TPS has often morphed into something beyond a stopgap. Recovery, in practice, takes a long time.

The last time a country in the Western Hemisphere was designated for temporary protections was in 2010, when TPS was granted for Haitians in the United States after a debilitating earthquake. The status was extended three times by the Obama administration. When the Federal Register announced the third extension, it noted that while “most of the earthquake rubble has been cleared” a half-decade after the event, government buildings hadn’t yet been rebuilt and most ministries were still operating from temporary facilities.

Venezuela’s crisis appears just as intractable. Its economic and medical systems had collapsed even before the COVID-19 pandemic, causing the largest refugee crisis in the Western Hemisphere. In December 2019, the United Nations refugee office estimated that over 4.5 million Venezuelans had fled the country. It currently estimates that 5.4 million Venezuelans are displaced abroad, most of them in neighboring Colombia.

Advocates and some politicians spent years urging the Trump administration to extend TPS to Venezuelans currently in the U.S., to no avail. Finally, on Trump’s last night in office — with no explanation for the delay or the last-minute change of heart — he issued a proclamation giving them a similar but less formalized grant of protection (known as deferred enforced departure). Trump’s move attracted so little fanfare that Venezuelans celebrating Biden’s TPS grant last week often appeared unaware they were already allowed to seek work permits.

Meanwhile, immigrants with TPS are living their lives in the United States — working, settling down, getting married, raising U.S.-born children. Some immigrants have held TPS for decades — 79,290 Hondurans with TPS have been living in the U.S. since 1998, and 247,412 Salvadorans since 2001. In a survey of these two groups in 2016, researchers found that the median TPS holder was 43 and had been in the U.S. for 20 years — nearly half their life. Nearly one-third owned homes; nearly two-thirds had children who were U.S. citizens.

“For TPS holders, the fact that many of them have been here for so long — I think it just proves that nothing is temporary, if you’re giving someone the opportunity to create a livelihood here,” Villalobos said.

Asked what would happen to such people if they lost their status, Menjívar balked: “Goodness, I cannot even fathom.” For one thing, she said, they’d be unlikely to leave on their own if stripped of protections; they’d just become unauthorized immigrants living in the shadows, and they’d have to be “shackled and forced on planes” if the U.S. wanted to ensure their departures. Deportees would find themselves isolated. “They wouldn’t have a source of living, they’d lose everything they have, their family,” Menjívar said. “It amounts to a social death in many ways.”

But while living in the U.S., they’re continually reminded of their marginal status. By bureaucratic definition, they’re not even immigrants — technically that term is reserved for someone who is on track to reside permanently in the United States. “Even the fact that they have to renew it every 18 months,” said Menjívar, “indicates to them that it’s not secure.”

That threat became much more real under the Trump administration. “Temporary means temporary,” Trump’s first Department of Homeland Security secretary, John Kelly (later the White House chief of staff), said when warning that Haitians would likely lose their protections in 2017.

In its first 18 months, the administration announced end dates for TPS for Haitians, Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Sudanese people and Nepalis, amounting to 95% of TPS holders. Often, while the administration pushed for declaring the countries “recovered” from their temporary crises, diplomats lobbied for their citizens to be allowed to stay in the U.S. In 2019, Salvadoran foreign minister Alexandra Hill used a joint press conference with then-acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan — which was ostensibly held to celebrate the countries signing a “cooperative agreement” that would allow the U.S. to send asylum-seekers to El Salvador — to stress the importance of continuing TPS for Salvadorans.

Meanwhile, TPS holders from different countries organized to protect themselves, ultimately forming the National TPS Alliance and spurring a lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Federal judges prevented Trump from stripping TPS designations while they evaluated whether his administration had violated federal law by not properly deliberating the options and weighing expert opinion. (Emails produced as part of the lawsuit revealed that DHS had asked analysts to supply evidence that conditions in Haiti were improving to justify terminating TPS; a Trump appointee complained that a memo on Sudan, meanwhile, “reads like one person who strongly supports extending TPS for Sudan wrote everything up to the recommendation section, and then someone who opposes extension snuck up behind the first guy, clubbed him over the head, pushed his senseless body out of the way, and finished the memo.”)

While the matter played out in court, the DHS kept extending the validity of TPS holders’ work permits. When the 2nd Circuit ruled last fall that the Trump administration could end TPS for the affected countries, DHS had already extended immigrants’ work permits through October 2021. The Biden administration is expected to return to the pre-Trump status quo and continue the extensions.

But the saga was a chilling reminder of life’s fragility under TPS. In the fall of 2017, even before the Trump administration moved to terminate TPS for Salvadorans, a study of Central American immigrant parents found that the overwhelming majority of TPS holders were anxious about their futures and the prospect of being separated from their children. Nearly half of TPS holders surveyed scored as “highly distressed” — twice the rate of unauthorized immigrants.

Living as a temporary resident confines people to the margins in other ways as well. TPS holders make more money than unauthorized immigrants, but they’re less likely to be homeowners — an indication, Menjívar wrote in a report last year, that “long-term uncertainty undermines plans for the future.” And while the overwhelming majority work, they don’t show the same patterns of economic integration over time that permanent immigrants do — more-educated TPS holders, for example, don’t necessarily hold more lucrative or skilled jobs than their less-educated counterparts, indicating that they’re not able to fully put their education to use.

At the same time, new forms of liminal legality have blossomed. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, another form of executive relief that requires regular renewals, is another fragile status that could be terminated or struck down by the federal courts at any time. Asylum-seekers often spend years in limbo waiting for their applications to be reviewed, since both immigration courts and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices are severely backlogged.

Biden and congressional Democrats want to give most people in these groups the ability to apply for permanent legal status, with the option of eventually seeking citizenship. Democrats have recently embraced the idea that immigrants with TPS should be allowed to expedite their path to citizenship — and that they should be legalized even if the unauthorized-immigrant population in its entirety is not.

One option for addressing the issue posed by extending TPS to Venezuelans and Burmese people would be to amend the existing legalization bills in Congress. Even as the House votes on the Dream and Promise Act, Democrats are still debating whether it and similar piecemeal bills legalizing some groups of immigrants should be the legislative priority, or whether they should push for a single broader overhaul of the immigration system — like the U.S. Citizenship Act, based on Biden’s “day one” immigration plan. A previous version of the Dream and Promise Act got seven Republican votes in 2019; many Republicans currently oppose any bill that would legalize unauthorized immigrants without increasing funding for border enforcement or restricting asylum for those arriving in the United States.

A representative for Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the lead sponsor of the U.S. Citizenship Act in the Senate, said that he’ll be “exploring ways” to ensure relief for Venezuelan TPS holders. Sponsors of the Dream and Promise Act did not reply to requests for comment.

But even if immigrants granted TPS are included in the bill as it goes through Congress, neither bill includes any provision that would change the TPS program itself, meaning that any immigrants protected after the bill was signed would still be in danger of getting stuck in that in-between status.

by Dara Lind

The cause of the collision between an SUV and a semitruck that left 13 dead in Holtville, California, on Tuesday morning is still a horrific mystery. But federal investigators are exploring a likely explanation for why the overloaded car sped through an intersection in the rural area: a case of human smuggling turned deadly.

Surveillance footage shows the 1997 Ford Expedition and another SUV loaded with people entering the U.S. through a breach in the border fence shortly before the crash. Ten victims were Mexican nationals; the other three were women from Guatemala. While consular officers keep working to confirm victims’ names, special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began piecing together how 25 adults came to be crammed into a vehicle meant for no more than eight.

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It’s an all-too-familiar story, and one that has not become less common as the world fights a global pandemic and migrants south of the border wait to see the effects of immigration changes promised by the administration of President Joe Biden. Clandestine migration to the U.S. has accelerated through last fall and into the early weeks of the new administration, as poverty, crime and public health conditions across the border have grown more desperate.

“You’ve lost your source of income, whatever it is. People — especially in the informal economy, which are the ones that drive local economies, as we know — you’ve lost those sources of income. Their own relatives who could have afforded to support them are probably also broke,” says Gabriella Sanchez, a migration researcher with the Danish Institute for International Studies.

“People who might not have thought about migrating, now are like, ‘Well, at this point, I really don’t have anything else to lose. Anything I could have lost, I already lost.’”

For the last year, the U.S. has used an obscure public health law to expel anyone caught trying to cross the border rather than formally deporting them. That keeps the federal government from having to detain migrants for days (and often months or years) after their arrival on the U.S. side of the border. But it also further incentivizes evading detection by the authorities, which is where the smugglers come in.

The crash occurred about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border; United Farm Workers members said the victims weren’t among the 6,000 farmworkers who commute from Mexico to tend crops in the Imperial Valley. The SUV’s passengers ranged in age from 16 to 65, packed into a vehicle manufactured to carry a passenger weight of no more than 2,000 pounds. (All but the front seats of the Ford had been removed to create space.)

An ICE spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times , which has been the authoritative news source on the incident, that Homeland Security investigations agents “responded to the scene of today’s fatal crash” and began their smuggling investigation. The surveillance footage showed a second SUV, which held 19 people, also crossing the border around the same time. It subsequently caught fire; the Holtville fire chief speculated to the Lo s Angeles Times that the combined weight of the passengers caused the vehicle to malfunction.

There are plenty of ways for migrants to be killed trying to come to the United States. People suffocate in locked tractor trailers , die of heat or cold in the Arizona desert, or drown off the California shore . Migrants die in crashes while being chased by the Border Patrol, a phenomenon that ProPublica and the Times investigated in 2019. Even when they’re not being pursued — as they weren’t in this case — vehicles overstuffed with people can be hard to steer and dangerous to drive, which may have been the case here .

When Sanchez first heard about the crash, she immediately recognized the hallmarks of a smuggling accident. The case “reminded me of when I lived in California, growing up,” says Sanchez. “The trucks are packed, and then immigration coming over or chasing them.”

Circumstantial evidence suggests the crash could be a case of human smuggling turned deadly. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)

The need to evade apprehension by border agents creates danger. That’s part of the logic of deterrence — a logic that has guided U.S. border policy for decades . If the point of border security is to make it as difficult and unappealing as possible to enter the United States, the only possible routes will be the most dangerous ones, and the people who are willing to take them will be the most desperate.

For the last few years, national attention has focused on the relatively recent phenomenon of large numbers of children and families coming to the United States, mostly from Central America and mostly to seek asylum. There’s a reason for that: The deterrence system was not built for families and children, so it didn’t have the resources to address them.

The Biden administration is simultaneously trying to expand its capacity to keep unaccompanied children in custody (before releasing them to sponsors, usually relatives, in the U.S.) and trying to slowly unwind some of the policies imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump to expel families from U.S. soil as quickly as possible.

American policymakers can sometimes speak as if the most important factor in migration is U.S. government policy — or at least how welcoming the country is perceived to be. Biden officials take every opportunity to tell would-be migrants explicitly not to come; the new administration’s critics (such as Trump immigration czar Stephen Miller ) say that any loosening of immigration restrictions is encouraging a flood of new migrants. But the fact is that beyond U.S. borders, the rest of the world changes too, often in ways that make emigration seem not just appealing but necessary.

In the early months of the pandemic, it seemed that tight restrictions on international travel — including the Trump administration’s mass-expulsion policy under the public health law — had all but frozen migration. But smugglers of drugs and people quickly rebounded , modifying their tactics, taking fewer trips with bigger loads , for example, to adapt to the pandemic while meeting demand. And the demand was very much there.

In Central America, the U.N.’s World Food Program estimates that hunger quadrupled from 2018 to 2020, and that was before the region was pummelled by hurricanes at the end of last year. Interviews with emigrants reveal that many of them have simply lost hope that things will ever get better in their home countries. In Mexico, meanwhile, things have gotten worse. The country’s economy shrank by 8.5% in 2020 ; its national coronavirus czar was hospitalized last week with the virus , epitomizing a disastrous government response that’s contributed to 186,000 Mexican deaths in the pandemic; and homicides in the first 11 months of 2020 had already passed the record for a full year (set in 2019).

While we don’t know the whole story of migrants like the victims in Imperial County — or any other unknown victims of deadly migrations — it is possible they knew they could be killed on the journey and still felt that it was their best or only option.

Do you know something about human smuggling? Are there immigration policy stories we should be covering? Please reach out to us on Signal or fill out the form below.

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