The agents peer at everyone crossing, looking for people they think might be candidates for asylum. If the people say anything suggesting they might be requesting asylum — if they’re not Mexicans, and especially if they’re from Central America — the agents block their way and say to come back another time.

Local people who frequently cross the border started noticing the agents in early May, but did not know why they were on the bridge. Some people started calling Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a migrant shelter which encompasses a network of satellite shelters. The shelters have for years maintained a close relationship with ICE. They regularly take in immigrants who’ve been picked up by the Border Patrol, processed, and released by ICE pending the results of their immigration cases. Garcia says he is very familiar with how many people the government picks up from week to week, and with how much of their own space CBP and ICE have to process people.

…Garcia said he asked a low-level CBP agent, who was working at an international bridge, why Central Americans were being blocked. “This is a borderwide policy,” Garcia said the agent answered. Garcia believes the policy is connected to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s “zero tolerance” policy initiated in early May.

That is when the Trump administration began routinely splitting up immigrant adults and children who were caught crossing into the U.S. Most were families from Central America.

By blocking asylum-seekers from crossing legally, CBP is pressuring them to cross illegally. Garcia believes that this new practice gives the government an excuse to split up even more families.

…Ramirez, 25, crosses frequently between El Paso and Juárez. On her way to El Paso one day after looking at Facebook, Ramirez saw a group of people who looked distressed. Speaking with them, she learned that all were from Guatemala: a 16-year-old girl and a woman with a frightened preschool-aged daughter. The teenager told Ramirez they had been prevented from crossing for days. They said they were considering coming into the U.S. by wading and walking under the bridge.

Ramirez knew that the wading and walking would result in the mother being criminally prosecuted and separated from her child, so she decided to act, even though she felt shaky. “My whole life, I’ve been scared and intimated” by border agents, she said. She gathered the teenager, the woman, and the child. She walked them to the top of the bridge.

…A supervisor arrived and seemed angry. Ramirez tried hard to remember the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the part about “aliens” in U.S. territory having the right to claim asylum. She wanted to quote it to the supervisor, but apparently he already knew the law. She remembers him scowling but waving the Central Americans past the blockade and toward the port of entry.

…But without advocates or press at their sides, other immigrants are still not getting past the bridge blockade. On June 9, two journalists — Bob Moore, a freelancer, and Claudia Tristán, of El Paso’s KFOX-TV — stood on the southbound side of the bridge, where they were not immediately visible to the CBP officials. Each pointed their phones toward the northbound side and filmed a woman — whom they later determined was a Honduran asylum-seeker — and her small son walking several feet into the United States. Their videos show the two being turned back to Mexico.

Karolina Walters is a staff attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based American Immigration Council, one of three groups representing plaintiffs in the Al Otro Lado lawsuit. She says these turn-backs of people already on U.S. soil constitute civil rights violations and “get to the heart of the lawsuit.”

…Garcia is training some of his recruits to go to the bridges in shifts and take notes when they see refugees being turned back from requesting asylum. He has another group that is learning to accompany the immigrants to the invisible line. He hopes those volunteers will be able to help asylum-seekers exercise their rights in the face of blockading border agents.

Desperate Asylum-Seekers Are Being Turned Away by U.S. Border Agents Claiming There’s “No Room”

Jeezus….

The Center for Effective Public Management has assembled the following key statistics on immigration to examine his claims and his policies.

Immigration by the numbers

hmmm

Notes from a town hall held for Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers on Feb. 2, 2017, show that the agency’s asylum chief, John Lafferty, told the officers they might have to “hold mothers longer” and “hold children in HHR/ORR,” an acronym for facilities for children run by HHS.

…In the town hall two weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Lafferty laid out a number of policies specifically intended to lower the number of immigrants claiming asylum. According to the notes, he provided attendees with the latest asylum numbers, which were at their highest point in 20 years in 2016, and then said the administration was “in the process of reviewing” a number of policies, including separation of parents and children, to try to curb those numbers.

…Some of the proposals, like raising the bar for passing the initial interview for claiming asylum, have already been implemented. Other policies, like detaining “almost everyone coming over,” have run into logistical difficulties.

…NBC News has found that some women are separated from their children even if they are legally claiming asylum and not being referred for prosecution. [emphasis: mine] In those cases, the children are kept in the same facility, but they are still separated for days without being told whether they will be reunited.

Former USCIS Director Leon Rodriguez, who served under the Obama administration, said families who presented themselves for asylum between ports of entry were not previously prosecuted.

Trump admin discussed separating moms, kids to deter asylum-seekers in Feb. 2017

Aggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh!

All four living former first ladies — Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama — have stepped out of political retirement to condemn the Trump administration’s practice of separating parents and children at the border.

…”Those who selectively use the Bible to justify this cruelty are ignoring a central tenet of Christianity,” the former first lady said. “These policies are not rooted in religion. What is being done using the name of religion is contrary to everything I was ever taught.”

Clinton added, “Jesus Christ said, ‘Suffer the children unto me,’ not ‘let the children suffer.'”

…Meanwhile, Bush, who almost never speaks out on political issues, broke partisan ranks in a Washington Post op-ed.

“I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” she wrote.

…Bush laid the blame squarely on the president’s policies — namely, the Department of Justice’s “zero tolerance” policy with which it began.

…”These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned,” she wrote.

Rosalynn Carter called the policy of separating families “disgraceful and a shame to our country.”

Michelle Obama also weighed in to support Bush.

The current first lady, Melania Trump, commented over the weekend on what’s happening at the border, pushing for bipartisan cooperation to end the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border.

“Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” according to a statement from her spokeswoman. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.”

All four living former first ladies condemn Trump border policy

hmmmm

“We are being boarded by Border Patrol. Please be prepared to show your documentation upon request,” the driver said, according to her June 7 Facebook post, written a day after the incident.

An unabashed Smalls, who knew her rights, immediately sprang into action, informing other passengers that the agents’ actions were illegal.

“This is a violation of your 4th amendment rights. You don’t have to show them *s- -t*!!! This is illegal,” she said, according to her Facebook post.

…She even used Google translate to help her deliver the same message in Spanish.

Smalls said the woman seated next to her, who didn’t speak English, “looked terrified.”

Smalls loudly accused the agents of harassment and racial profiling, exclaiming they had “no legal right or jurisdiction here,” she wrote in the Facebook post.

Her resistance paid off — the Border Patrol agents allegedly retreated and told the bus driver to “go ahead.”

California woman who knows her rights forces Border Patrol off Greyhound bus at agricultural checkpoint – NY Daily News

Go Girl!

Kirstjen Nielsen jeered at by protesters at Mexican restaurant – CNNPolitics

Mexican restaurant? Seriously?!