Under the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), the Trump administration has returned more than 48,000 asylum-seekers since January to await their court dates in Mexico, a country where kidnapping and assault of migrants is rampant. Over the course of two months, the Observer has uncovered multiple stories showing that the program includes no meaningful screening for even the most obvious threats to migrants’ safety and lives.
Mario Rodríguez, a 27-year-old from Nicaragua, was in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in May when he was attacked the first time. According to a police report, he was knocked unconscious and robbed of $70 by an unknown assailant. He experienced a second attack in late July, when he was in Matamoros, a Mexican border city across from Brownsville, waiting his turn to request asylum legally at the bridge under the Trump policy known as “metering.” One evening, Rodríguez—who, like the other migrants in this story, requested a pseudonym for his protection—walked downtown to buy some churros. Night fell, so he decided to take a taxi back to the bridge, where he lived in a migrant encampment.
By Rodríguez’s account, the taxi driver recognized him as a foreigner, pulled a crescent wrench from the floorboard, and slammed him over the head three times in an attempt to knock him unconscious. The driver grabbed Rodríguez’s cell phone and said he was going to turn him over to the local Gulf Cartel. Rodríguez, an ex-cop, says he fought back, wresting away the wrench and fleeing to the bridge on foot, blood pouring down his face. He reached the bridge’s midpoint, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials stand guard, and begged to be let through. But, he says, the agents just confiscated the bloody wrench from him and turned him away. About two weeks later, it was his turn to request asylum at the bridge. Though he told a CBP officer he was afraid of Mexico, the agent said nothing could be done, and Rodríguez was returned to Matamoros under MPP. Now he rarely leaves the area right by the bridge. “I feel a fear here,” he told me in August. “I have this premonition that something’s going to happen to me.”
