U.S. Immigration Policy is Making Regional Migration More Dangerous
On March 27, a fire broke out at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, eventually claiming the lives of 40 migrants and injuring 28 others from Central and South America. The fire allegedly started when a migrant ignited a mattress as a sign of protest when he thought the migrants were going to be moved to another facility or deported from Mexico back to their home countries. Security footage showed Mexican guards running past locked cells housing detained migrants as they exited the building – contributing to one of the largest losses of life in recent years. The Mexican government announced in the days following the fire that it was investigating the event as a homicide case. They ended up charging multiple individuals with homicide, including the migrant who ignited the mattress, a detention center guard, three Mexican immigration officials, and the head of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute (Instituto Nacional de Migración).
This is not the first mass-scale loss of life related to migration or migrant detention in Mexico. A major criticism of the Mexican authorities’ response to the fire in Ciudad Juárez was that no apparent reforms were made after a similar incident occurred in the state of Tabasco in 2020 where a fire set at a migrant detention center killed one migrant and injured a further 14. Further, additional events occurred in December 2022 when 55 migrants were killed when a truck crashed in Chiapas and in 2010 when 72 migrants were murdered in Tamaulipas.
Regionally, the story is the same. In February 2023, at least 39 migrants were killed when their bus crashed in Panama after they made the arduous journey across the Darién Gap. Since 2014, over 5,000 migrant deaths have been recorded with the over 3,500 deaths on the U.S.-Mexico border – the largest single death toll of any border in the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Missing Migrants Project database.
Advocacy organizations and human rights defenders argue that these deaths were preventable. They argue that they are the consequences of a regional shift towards more restrictive and inhumane migration policies, particularly regarding refugee and asylum policies. In a statement released after the fire, Amnesty International blamed the U.S. and other regional countries for “establish[ing] shared migration policies that are increasingly inhumane, making it almost impossible to access the right to seek asylum, and forcing people to seek more dangerous routes that place them in even more vulnerable situations.” Another human rights organization, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, concurred while asserting “this tragedy, like the many others that have become a normal feature of our immigration and asylum systems, will continue to happen if policymakers are unwilling to transition to rights-centered policies to address international migration.”
Policy changes in the U.S. and regionally back up these assertions. In February 2023, the U.S. government announced a proposed rule “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” that would reform the way migrants who arrive at the border apply for asylum. Among the proposed changes are requirements that migrants are presumed to be ineligible to apply for asylum if they had passed through a considered “safe” third country and had not applied for protection there. Additionally, they must have applied for an asylum appointment through a smartphone application named CBPOne. It is these requirements that have led advocates to refer to this proposed rule as an asylum ban.
Another country that has followed the U.S. lead of implementing restrictive immigration policies is Costa Rica. In November 2022, Costa Rica announced a reform to its refugee system that is similar to the one the U.S. proposed above. The new regulation, passed by presidential decree, requires migrants to travel directly from their home country to Costa Rica if they want to request protection or explain why they did not do so in a previous country. Additionally, migrants only have one month to apply for protection in-person once arriving in Costa Rica or they will be permanently barred from doing so. Finally, they would not be allowed to leave the country while their application was being processed although this part has been stopped due to a court order.
These actions from traditional destination countries are making accessing protection more difficult for migrants who need it. Migrants are now being forced to make even more dangerous journeys which is leading to more deaths and violence, as shown above. Without any reforms to the asylum and refugee systems of countries throughout the region, one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world will only get worse. Given that the vast majority of migrants in the Western hemisphere are heading to the United States, U.S. policy reform is crucial to addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis. The U.S. government should remove or modify the anti-protection elements in its new proposed asylum rule and preserve existing, legal asylum pathways and application methods. Doing so would provide a signal to other countries in the region to hopefully do the same and prevent migrants from undertaking dangerous and deadly journeys, preventing the tragedy in Ciudad Juárez in March from happening again.
Author: Joshua Rodriguez
Managing Editor: Aidan Christopherson
Web Editor: Isaiah Nielsen