The Big Reveal: Book Cover & Interview
Plus April's avalanche of immigration news, in brief
April was a full-on avalanche of immigration news. For this historian and storyteller, who thinks better on reflection rather than in the immediate, it’s been a challenge to keep up with the pace of change coming out of the US and UK.
Or has there been any change at all?
Bear with me while I consider this question and how it relates to my forthcoming book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.
Or skip ahead to The Big Reveal and the latest book news, as well as this author interview with yours truly…
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Immigration advocates and attorneys began April 2023 exhausted from March’s 30-day comment campaign to stop the Biden administration’s “proposed” rule, requiring all asylum seekers to apply — and be denied — protection in a “safe third country” through which they transit en route to the US southern border. This so-called test of eligibility for asylum in the US echoes a Trump-era ban that we know had disastrous human rights ramifications and was ultimately deemed illegal by US courts.
No Central American country is safe, least of all for migrants — a topic I illustrate in chapter 17 of Crossing the Line: How Much is a Migrant's Life Worth. What’s more, no transit country in the Americas is known to have a robust asylum system.
Taking its cues from their US counterparts, UK policymakers brought the 2023 Migration Bill to Parliament, calling for the detention and removal to a “safe third country” of all folks seeking asylum in the UK.
Their so-called safe place is — wait for it — Rwanda.
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In border towns across northern Mexico, where asylum seekers are routinely preyed upon by traffickers and cartel-affiliated gangs, the CBP One “smart” phone app — which forces the world’s most vulnerable people to schedule an appointment to request asylum then wait their turn in acute danger — continues to be plagued by programming glitches. It’s actually racist, disadvantaging those with dark skin. It also remains inaccessible to the most vulnerable of the world’s most vulnerable: women and, of course, children.
My conclusion: CBP One is just another word for “metering” a practice tested and abandoned by Obama-Biden, then reinstituted as policing by Trump & Co to disappear people in search of safety to the other side of the line. The human rights implications were myriad.
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And speaking of women and children, there have been rumors that the Biden administration may bring back family detention. A moral stain that I wrote about for Aljazeera English. Fortunately, those plans appear to be off the table for now.
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There was the build-up, still ongoing, of the re-rollout of a fast-tracked asylum screening process, also reminiscent of Trump-era policies, which allows credible fear interviews (CFIs) to occur inside the un-surveilled black boxes that are Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facilities… over the phone. Accompanying this likely due process catastrophe are reports that those asylum seekers who fail to pass their CFIs — a predictable outcome for many given their trauma, lack of legal representation, and the alarmingly inhumane conditions inside CBP holding pens — will be returned to Mexico within 72 hours.
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Then came the fire that burned alive 40 asylum seekers locked up for no other reason than to get the backlog of humanity off Ciudad Juarez streets by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Migratión. This avoidable tragedy occurred just as The Guardian broke the news that the worst Channel disaster in 30 years happened when the UK’s coastguard deliberately failed to respond to distress signals from boats carrying migrants in November 2021.
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Finally, just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, April 2023 closed with Secretaries Blinken and Mayorkas confirming the start of Biden’s version of Trump’s asylum-transit ban — no longer “proposed.” It comes with the lifting of Title 42 on May 11, despite objections from a wide range of faith-based, human rights, civil rights, and other civil society organizations, Members of Congress, the UN Refugee Agency, and the asylum officers’ union that the ban violates US and international law as well as treaties to which the US is bound. The secretaries also disclosed their intent to externalize the asylum-seeking process by creating processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala, with other far-flung countries to sign on soon.
Then, just today, I woke up to the news that Biden is preparing to send 1,500 active-duty troops to the border to aid Customs and Border Protection agents and National Guard troops already deployed there. It’s as if he, too, believes that unarmed folks in search of safety and a better life — most fleeing miseries caused by US foreign and economic policies — constitute an “invasion.”
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So, has there been any change at all?
Nope. It’s groundhog day at the US-Mexico border. We’re back in 2017, 2018, and 2019, with metering, Remain in Mexico (aka MPP), rocket dockets, and asylum bans posing as transit requirements, though with different names and imposed by an administration that campaigned on bringing humanity to the borderlands. And the UK continues to just follow the US lead in this great global turning-of-the-back on humans and their rights.
And now for…
THE BIG REVEAL!
CROSSING THE LINE: FINDING AMERICA IN THE BORDERLANDS has a cover and a pub date: April 2, 2024
It is now available for pre-order from Bookshop and Amazon…
But wait, there’s one fun thing more…
Learn all about the book, its mission, contents, and hoped-for goals in this audio interview between me and ace audio storyteller and producer, Livia Brock. Enjoy!
