Originally published by Houston Landing; republished with permission.
JUÁREZ – Dayana staked out a spot in the shade at marker 36 along the Juárez border Tuesday afternoon to try to cross into the U.S. for the fourth time in 24 hours.
The clock was ticking for the 33-year-old Venezuelan mother to get across with her husband and their two daughters, ages 10 and 7 months. At midnight, new restrictions go into place that will immediately expel people crossing between ports of entry.
“We don’t want to get stuck in Mexico,” Dayana, who is being identified by first name only because she fled political persecution in Venezuela, said in Spanish.
Dayana and her family are trying to cross from Juárez hours after President Joe Biden announced an executive order on Tuesday that will suspend asylum at the southern border. The highly anticipated announcement comes as Biden hopes to prove he’s tough on immigration, one of the most important issues to voters in the upcoming November election.
The new rule, which will go into effect on midnight Tuesday, will trigger a ban on asylum when daily crossings hit 2,500, according to the White House. This will allow border officers to quickly deport migrants to Mexico or their home country after they cross between ports of entry. Asylum processing would resume 14 days after daily crossings dip to below 1,500. With crossings at a daily average of 3,500 in recent weeks, the change would go into effect immediately.
The Biden administration has emphasized the need to streamline the asylum process to deter immigration and cut down an immigration court backlog, which has reached more than 3 million cases nationwide. But human rights groups and lawyers criticize the decision as politically motivated.
“This is not a response to the high number of crossings, it is a purely political move to seem tough on the border in advance of the debates,” Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, told the Houston Landing in a statement.
The new policy would function similarly to a COVID-era rule known as Title 42, which immediately expelled migrants to Mexico after crossing the border.
Some migrants are exempt under the new rule, including children under 18 traveling alone. Migrants seeking an appointment for screening at a port of entry through the government smartphone app CBP One will still be eligible for asylum. However, the app’s months-long wait times and constant technical glitches have been criticized as a barrier to asylum.
The executive order cites a statute known as 212 (f), which grants the president the power to suspend people from entering the country. Trump invoked this same authority, including when he issued the controversial Muslim travel ban. But the courts determined that the president’s 212 (f) authority cannot override other immigration law, such as the right to seek asylum.
The new rule is already being contested, and the ACLU announced Tuesday it plans to sue the administration over the law. “It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, in a statement.
Meanwhile, advocates are expecting increased chaos at the border in coming days, and increased violations of human rights and due process.
“Narrowing access to asylum at the border doesn’t make it more orderly. It makes it unnecessarily complicated,” said Amy Grenier, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
At a shelter in Juárez on Tuesday, immigrants didn’t know much about the policy laid out by Washington. But the rumblings of change worried them.
The migrants from across Latin America including Mexico, Honduras, and Colombia were waiting for an appointment to seek asylum through the CBP One app. After waiting up to seven months, some were thinking of crossing illegally, which would make them ineligible for asylum through the new rules.
A 21-year-old woman from Guatemala said she had grown anxious after waiting six months for an appointment.
“It’s mental and physical stress to be here waiting and you don’t know when you can get an appointment,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she was receiving threats and sexual harassment in her hometown. “But if you turn yourself in, they can deport you.”
Friends and family keep telling 46-year-old Honduran migrant Fidelina Pineda that she should cross illegally, but she’s trying to remain steadfast in her decision to wait for an appointment.
“I have to be patient but sometimes I lose hope,” said Pineda, who fled Honduras in November 2023 after her teenage son was murdered and hopes to reunite with her brother and sister in Houston.
Policy changes always cause uncertainty among the migrants, said shelter director Pastor Juan Fierro.
“Even though they’re using CBP One and they request their appointment every day, they’re scared about what will happen,” Fierro said.
The U.S. government often engages in so-called “deterrence policies,” under the assumption migrants won’t cross if it’s too difficult.
“Migrants do not, as far as I’m aware, know the details of these extremely complicated rules, or how their interaction affects them,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, lawyer and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “At the end of the day, people make decisions based on their individual circumstances.”
Dayana said she had been requesting an appointment through CBP One for five months, which would allow her to seek asylum. But her husband’s phone barely held a charge and the app often glitched, making her lose hope of ever getting an appointment. So she decided to cross even though it could hurt her chance at asylum.
The new rule comes as migrants like Dayana already have limited access to asylum. Since May 2023, migrants have needed to request an appointment through a government smartphone app known as CBP One in order to be eligible for asylum. The government offers about 1,500 appointments per day through the app, using a lottery system that has been criticized for violating human rights and exposing migrants to danger in Mexican border cities.
Lawyers and advocates only expect the operational bottleneck and risks to migrants caused by the current asylum restrictions to get worse under the new rules.
Now, many migrants who are ineligible under the May 2023 rule still end up released into the U.S. because of a lack of asylum officers to screen everyone. Others cannot be deported because their home countries, such as Venezuela, will not accept deportations. These immigrants often end up in Houston’s immigration court, which currently has more than 93,000 pending cases according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
“Even though the administration would like to be turning around everybody at the border who’s ineligible for asylum, they can’t do that because they don’t have enough asylum officers to be screening people so that they can quickly return them,” Bush-Joseph said. The White House announcement does not mention any increased funding or hiring for asylum screening.
These operational issues highlight the challenges of shutting down asylum, which is a right under U.S. and international law.
“Everyone wants a quick fix for the border, but immigration is really complicated,” Grenier of AILA said. “We’re not going to have a fix for the border without looking at the whole immigration system, which is going to involve Congress.”
The White House criticized Republicans Tuesday for failing to approve a border bill earlier this year. “Republicans in Congress chose to put partisan politics ahead of our national security, twice voting against the toughest and fairest set of reforms in decades,” the White House statement said.
Migrants like Dayana can’t wait any longer.
“I have hope and faith that they’ll still let us in,” she said.
