Border agents are promising some Venezuelan asylum seekers a greater chance to stay in the US if they agree to first return to Mexico and make appointments to re-enter from there – or otherwise be deported – but then the migrants are flown to the Mexican interior and stranded there without any way to access the US asylum system, immigration advocates have warned.
People report being pressured by American federal agents into signing up for the arrangement, called “voluntary return” which involves a choice between going back across the US-Mexico border or to the countries they originally fled, with the US government employing a kind of stick and carrot approach, as they seek to deal with fewer people in the US immigration system. The “stick” is being threatened with deportation and related consequences such as a five-year ban on returning to the US, unless they agree to leave – before they go through the interview that screens for a credible fear of going home. And the “carrot” is asylum seekers being told they will have a better chance of being granted refuge if they try again through a specific Biden administration-approved process from another country.
Many have been signing up for voluntary return in recent weeks but after being taken across the border by the US authorities, without warning they end up being flown by the Mexican authorities hundreds of miles from the border, to places like the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, according to advocates. There they are dropped off, often penniless, and find there is no access to the US government asylum process.
“It’s huge … it’s scary. It’s happening to thousands of people,” Priscilla Orta, an immigration attorney with the advocacy group Lawyers for Good Government, based in Brownsville, on the Texas-Mexico border, said.
Official figures for how many are signing up for voluntary return are not publicly available.
Danelis Benita Perez Rosas knew something was wrong at her initial interview, after turning herself in to US officials in Texas, when they presented a document in English on a screen and told her to sign it.
“I was told because I entered the country illegally they had to deport me,” Rosas said earlier this month. “They said I could either be deported back to Venezuela or I had the option to be sent to Mexico if I signed the document.”
The Venezuelan was reliant on the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials to translate it to her and initially said she wouldn’t sign something she could not understand, she said.
“But they kept on saying ‘if you don’t sign it then we have to deport you back home’ And they said, ‘if you sign this it makes it so we take you to Mexico,’” she said.
Rosas wanted to avoid going back to Venezuela so she opted for being removed back across the border to Mexico, also based on officials telling her she could apply for an appointment to reach the US and petition for asylum using the official CPB One smartphone app while in Mexico.
On 12 May, Rosas said, she was transported to Villahermosa, the capital city of the Mexican state of Tabasco, more than 450 miles south-west of Mexico City, towards the Guatemala border.
Once there she immediately found she could not access CPB One because the app is based on geolocation and mainly works at the US-Mexico border and in Mexico City, but not that far south of the capital.
Rosas was left out on a limb, in a totally unfamiliar city, and she had run out of money reaching the Mexican border the first time.
For her it has been bewildering and desperate. For the US authorities it was one less migrant going through the asylum process. Leading advocacy groups say Rosas’s experience is not an isolated one.
Orta said: “We are returning people to a place where they have no legal authority to be” and when they inevitably try to earn some money to make it to Mexico City or back to the Mexican border “they are more likely to be extorted” by criminals or corrupt officials. Orta slammed the Biden administration’s tactics as “randomly cruel”.
The voluntary return documents in English that asylum seekers are signing and that Orta has seen include the admission that “I do not fear return to my own country” – which also makes any future attempt to claim asylum in the US much more difficult, she said.
In addition, Tom Cartwright, a volunteer with the Witness at the Border advocacy group, who monitors all Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) deportation flights, said that the US government was not operating deportation flights to Venezuela as the US does not have diplomatic relations with that country.
“There are no deportation flights to Venezuela,” he said. Asked about Rosas and others being threatened with being deported to the crisis-hit country, which has been hemorrhaging millions of its own people, Cartwright said: “If that is in fact what was said then that is a false statement.”
The Guardian reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the umbrella for CBP and Ice, as well as those individual agencies, which deal with people who cross the US-Mexico border without authorization, and also to the Mexican immigration authorities, but did not receive any responses.
“These troubling reports are consistent with the Biden administration’s cruel and illegal new asylum ban,” Cody Wofsy, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said.
He added: “It’s fair to say that we are hearing that people are being misled … it’s deeply disappointing.”
Late last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its restrictions on people being able to exercise their right to claim asylum in the US at the border, suing on behalf of individual asylum seekers and the groups Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.
In a statement, the ACLU said the lawsuit “focuses on changes to a rapid deportation process that dramatically alter the screening interview process for asylum seekers and wrongfully return many back to persecution and grave danger”.
It added that the new lawsuit complements an ongoing challenge to the asylum rules but homes in what the groups say is the illegal raising of the bar so that an asylum seeker has to show, during an initial interview that “the ban doesn’t apply to them”.
A 19-year-old Venezuelan man whose identity and exact location are being withheld to protect his status found himself in a similar situation after he and his brother waded across the waters of the Rio Grande and crossed the border into Brownsville, Texas.
They were held separately in cramped detention facilities, but were each given the same choice, with no access to legal advice, the 19-year-old said. “They just told us you have two options: one, voluntary removal to Mexico or, two, be deported to your country of origin,” he said.
“We had both signed the [voluntary return] form and figured they would just transfer us back along the border of Mexico – maybe back to Matamoros,” he said, naming the Mexican city across from Brownsville. “We also asked if our voluntary removal would impede our application for re-entry on the CBP One app. They told us, separately, that there wouldn’t be any issues with it,” he said. He added that the agents said the app would work all over Mexico. Instead, the brothers were turned over to the Mexican authorities and were both put on a plane, also to Villahermosa, in Tabasco.
“They just left us so far south. And we were unable to recover our belongings. We just had the clothes on our back. We complied with what they wanted, and our rights were trampled on,” he said.
The 19-year-old and Rosas have been stuck in Mexico for weeks, in dire straits, so far unable to get access to the asylum system.
“What you’re hearing is true,” said Leinnette Cabrera, a border-based representative of the American Bar Association’s Immigration Justice Project. “Immigration officials are targeting Venezuelan asylum seekers and telling them that if they voluntarily return to Mexico they can apply for the humanitarian parole program or apply for asylum using the CPB One App. But what we’re finding is that they get returned to Mexico and then they can not re-enter the United States.”
She added: “This is not all immigration officials, but we’re seeing it in a number of clients.”
Cabrera said her clients are advised not to opt for voluntary return.
Those who fail a credible fear interview – and Biden has raised the bar for passing the screening – they may be ordered deported and barred from returning to the US for five years.
But Orta advises clients not to take voluntary return but to insist on continuing with the asylum process in the US and take their chances.
Joanna Walters contributed reporting.
