immigration
US: Big drop in migrant kids at largest emergency shelter
The number of migrant children housed at the Biden administration’s largest emergency shelter for those who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone has dropped by more than 40% since mid-June, a top U.S. official said Monday, touting progress at the facility that has been criticized by child welfare advocates.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters that 790 boys were housed at Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas, and the last girl left Monday. All the girls were reunited either with relatives in the U.S. or a sponsor such as a family friend or sent to licensed facilities, which have a higher standard of care, according to the agency responsible for caring for migrant children.
In mid-June, the administration reported about 2,000 boys and girls were at the Fort Bliss facility amid child welfare advocates’ concerns about inadequate conditions. A high of 4,800 children were housed there in May.
Becerra said his agency was evaluating whether it can close some of the emergency shelters that the government opened in the spring as record numbers of unaccompanied children crossed the border. He declined to say whether Fort Bliss would be among them.
Read:Uprooted again: Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves
“Because we’ve been successful in managing the flow, we are prepared to begin the demobilization of several of our emergency intake sites,” Becerra said.
He made his second visit to Fort Bliss since it opened in March and said more services and staffing have been added, including case managers who have helped get children released to relatives in the U.S. or placed in licensed facilities more quickly.
In transcripts of interviews done by attorneys and filed in federal court in Los Angeles last week, migrant children described their desperation to get out of Fort Bliss and the other large shelters set up by the Biden administration.
The children were interviewed from March to June by attorneys monitoring a longstanding settlement governing custody conditions for migrant children.
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Some of the children said they did not know if anyone was working to reunite them with their families, giving them anxiety. Others did not have enough access to a mental health counselor, had trouble sleeping because lights were kept on at night and were avoiding meals because the food smelled foul. Several said they spent their days sleeping and had been in the facilities, like Fort Bliss, for more than a month.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited El Paso on Friday, and her spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, told reporters that President Joe Biden has instructed Becerra to “do a thorough investigation” and report back about the conditions at Fort Bliss, which advocates have called particularly troubling.
“The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously,” Sanders said.
Shaw Drake, staff attorney and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, applauded the reduction in the number of children housed at Fort Bliss but questioned why it has taken this long to see real progress in releasing kids from the government’s unlicensed shelters.
Drake praised the Biden administration for helping get children out of overcrowded holding facilities for adult migrants by opening more than dozen emergency shelters quickly. But he said “immediately after that, the focus should have been to reunify children with sponsors, and it seemed like that languished and left kids in places like Fort Bliss far too long.”
Read:Migrant kids crowded into Texas facility as space runs low
A rise in the number of migrant children crossing the southwest border alone has challenged the Biden administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has more than 14,200 migrant children in its care, down from 22,000 two months ago.
Becerra said more children are in licensed shelters now than unlicensed facilities, a reversal from a government report in May. He said officials are working to get more beds made available at licensed facilities.
“We have continued to expand our capacity, and as a result, we’re able to discharge more of these children into the hands of a responsible, vetted custodian, which then frees up a bed for another child,” he said.
Despite the improvements, Becerra said the shelters are not a solution and urged Congress to fix what he called a broken immigration system.
Uprooted again: Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves
Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with her fellow migrants, a tearful respite after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing onto someone’s backyard lawn, where, seconds before, she stepped on American soil for the first time.
“I won’t say it again,” interrupts a U.S. Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish for Rojas and a dozen others to get into an idling detention van. “Only passports and money in your hands. Everything else — earrings, chains, rings, watches — in your backpacks. Hats and shoelaces too.”
It’s a frequent scene across the U.S.-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these aren’t farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. They’re bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and they’re arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America.
Two days after Rojas crossed, she left detention and rushed to catch a bus out of the Texas town of Del Rio. Between phone calls to loved ones who didn’t know where she was, the 54-year-old recounted fleeing hardship in Venezuela a few years ago, leaving a paid-off home and once-solid career as an elementary school teacher for a fresh start in Ecuador.
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But when the little work she found cleaning houses dried up, she decided to uproot again — this time without her children.
“It’s over, it’s all over,” she said into the phone recently, crying as her toddler grandson appeared shirtless on screen. “Everything was perfect. I didn’t stop moving for one second.”
Last month, 7,484 Venezuelans were encountered by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border — more than all 14 years for which records exist.
The surprise increase has drawn comparisons to the midcentury influx of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist rule. It’s also a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.
Many of the nearly 17,306 Venezuelans who have crossed the southern border illegally since January had been living for years in other South American countries, part of an exodus of nearly 6 million Venezuelans since President Nicolás Maduro took power in 2013.
While some are government opponents fearing harassment and jailing, the vast majority are escaping long-running economic devastation marked by blackouts and shortages of food and medicine.
With the pandemic still raging in many parts of South America, they have had to relocate again. Increasingly, they’re being joined at the U.S. border by people from the countries they initially fled to — even larger numbers of Ecuadorians and Brazilians have arrived this year — as well as far-flung nations hit hard by the virus, like India and Uzbekistan.
U.S. government data shows that 42% of all families encountered along the border in May hailed from places other than Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the traditional drivers of migratory trends. That compares with just 8% during the last sharp increase in migration in 2019. The Border Patrol recorded more than 180,000 encounters in May, a two-decade high that includes migrants’ repeated attempts to cross.
Compared with other migrants, Venezuelans garner certain privileges — a reflection of their firmer financial standing, higher education levels and U.S. policies that have failed to remove Maduro but nonetheless made deportation all but impossible.
The vast majority enter the U.S. near Del Rio, a town of 35,000 people, and they don’t try to evade detention but rather turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents to seek asylum.
Like many of the dozens of Venezuelans The Associated Press spoke to this month in Del Rio, 27-year-old Lis Briceno had already migrated once before. After graduating with a degree in petroleum engineering, she couldn’t get hired in the oil fields near her hometown of Maracaibo without declaring her loyalty to Venezuela’s socialist leadership. So she moved to Chile a few years ago, finding work with a technology company.
But as anti-government unrest and the pandemic tanked Chile’s economy, sales plunged and her company shuttered.
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Briceno sold what she could — a refrigerator, a telephone, her bed — to raise the $4,000 needed for her journey to the U.S. She filled a backpack and set out with a heart lock amulet she got from a friend to ward off evil spirits.
“I always thought I’d come here on vacation, to visit the places you see in the movies,” Briceno said. “But doing this? Never.”
While Central Americans and others can spend months trekking through the jungle, stowing away on freight trains and sleeping in makeshift camps run by cartels on their way north, most Venezuelans reach the U.S. in as little as four days.
“This is a journey they’re definitely prepared for from a financial standpoint,” said Tiffany Burrow, who runs the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition’s shelter in Del Rio, where migrants can eat, clean up and buy bus tickets to Miami, Houston and other cities with large Venezuelan communities.
They first fly to Mexico City or Cancun, where foreign visitors are down sharply but nearly 45,000 Venezuelans arrived in the first four months of 2021. Smugglers promoting themselves as “travel agencies” have cropped up on Facebook, claiming to offer hassle-free transport to the U.S. in exchange for about $3,000.
“We’re doing things the way they do things here — under the table,” a smuggler said in a voice message a migrant shared with the AP. “You’ll never be alone. Someone will always be with you.”
The steep price includes a guided sendoff from Ciudad Acuna, where the bulk of Venezuelans cross the Rio Grande. The hardscrabble town a few hundred wet steps from Del Rio is attractive to both smugglers and migrants with deeper pockets because it had been largely spared the violence seen elsewhere on the border.
“If you’re a smuggler in the business of moving a commodity — because that’s how they view money, guns, people, drugs and everything they move, as a product — then you want to move it through the safest area possible charging the highest price,” said Austin L. Skero II, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector.
But the number of smugglers caught with weapons has recently increased in the area, and agents who normally hunt down criminals are tied up processing migrants.
The uptick in migrants crossing is “purely a diversion tactic used by the cartels” to carry out crime, Skero said as a group of Haitians carrying young children emerged from a thicket of tall carrizo cane on the riverbank.
Once in the U.S., Venezuelans tend to fare better than other groups. In March, Biden granted Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 320,000 Venezuelans. The designation allows people coming from countries ravaged by war or disaster to work legally in the U.S. and gives protection from deportation.
While new arrivals don’t qualify, Venezuelans requesting asylum — as almost all do — tend to succeed, partly because the U.S. government corroborates reports of political repression. Only 26% of asylum requests from Venezuelans have been denied this year, compared with an 80% rejection rate for asylum-seekers from poorer, violence-plagued countries in Central America, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
“I can write their asylum requests almost by heart,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in Harlingen, Texas, who has represented over 100 Venezuelans. “These are higher-educated people who can advocate for themselves and tell their story in a chronological, clean way that judges are accustomed to thinking.”
Read: In post-pandemic Europe, migrants will face digital fortress
Even Venezuelans facing deportation have hope. The Trump administration broke diplomatic relations with Maduro when it recognized Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader in 2019. Air travel is suspended, even charter flights, making removal next to impossible.
Meanwhile, as the migrants leave Del Rio to reconnect with loved ones in the U.S., they are confident that with sacrifice and hard work, they’ll get an opportunity denied them back home.
Briceno said that if she had stayed in Venezuela, she would earn the equivalent of $50 a month — barely enough to scrape by.
“The truth is,” says Briceno, hustling to catch a bus to Houston where her boyfriend landed a well-paying oil industry job, “it’s better to wash toilets here than being an engineer over there.”
Trudeau denounces truck attack that targeted Muslim family
A pickup truck attack that killed four members of an immigrant family has shaken Canada, a country where immigrants are largely accepted, and drew denunciations Tuesday from Canada’s prime minister, who called it a hate crime directed at Muslims.
The victims — two parents, two children and a grandmother — were on an evening walk when the driver of the truck struck them at an intersection in London, Ontario. The sole survivor was a 9-year-old boy, who was hospitalized.
“This was a terrorist attack, motivated by hatred, in the heart of one of our communities,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Parliament. “If anyone thinks racism and hatred don’t exist in this country, I want to say this: How do we explain such violence to a child in a hospital? How can we look families in the eye and say “Islamophobia isn’t real”?
Read:Canadian police say Muslim family targeted by deadly attack
The victims’ extended family issued a statement identifying the dead as Salman Afzal, 46; his wife Madiha, 44; their daughter Yumna, 15; and a 74-year-old grandmother whose name was withheld. The hospitalized boy was identified as the couple’s son, Fayez. Friends said the family immigrated to Canada 14 years ago.
Many Canadians have been enjoying evening walks to get fresh air after long days at home during the pandemic, Trudeau said.
“But unlike every other night, this family never made it home,” Trudeau said. “Their lives were taken in a brutal, cowardly and brazen act of violence. This killing was no accident. ... Canadians are outraged by what happened on Sunday. And many Muslim Canadians are scared.”
Trudeau said words matter and in part blamed rhetoric, disinformation and extremism online and in politics.
“They can be a seed that grows into an ugly, pervasive trend. And sometimes, they lead to real violence,” the prime minister said.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Twitter that the attack revealed the growing Islamophobia in Western countries.
A 20-year-old suspect, Nathaniel Veltman, was arrested in the parking lot of a nearby mall. He was facing four counts of first-degree murder. Police were inside the suspect’s London apartment on Tuesday.
Read:Canada lowers flags after discovery of bodies at school site
Police said Veltman did not know the victims. Detective Supt. Paul Waight said it was not clear if he belonged to any specific hate group, but that local police were working with federal authorities to investigate potential terrorism charges. He said the attack was planned.
Veltman worked part time at an egg farm in nearby Strathroy, Ontario. The chief executive of Gray Ridge Eggs Inc., William Gray, gave no details about Veltman’s job. He said the company was “shocked and saddened” by the attack, and he expressed sympathy for the victims’ relatives and the Muslim community.
Arman Moradpourian, a friend who worked with Veltman, called Veltman a very devout Christian and said he was home schooled. Moradpourian said Veltman didn’t have a problem with him being Persian and raised Muslim.
“He never judged me,” Moradpourian told The Associated Press. “He would give his shirt off his back for you.”
Moradpourian said Veltman helped him with rides to grocery stores and helped him mediate family issues. He said Veltman deleted his social media years ago and remade it a few months ago. He said he used the same name but said it was deactivated after he was arrested. He said Veltman was into video games and fishing.
Everyone who knew the Afzal family knew “the model family they were as Muslims, Canadians and Pakistanis,” the statement from the extended family said. “They worked extremely hard in their fields and excelled. Their children were top students in their school and connected strongly with their spiritual identity.”
A fundraising webpage said the father was a physiotherapist and cricket enthusiast and his wife was working on a doctorate in civil engineering at Western University in London. Their daughter was finishing ninth grade, and the grandmother was a “pillar” of the family, the page said.
Read:More than 200 bodies found at Indigenous school in Canada
Thousands of mourners including Trudeau and the leaders of all of Canada’s political parties attended a vigil Tuesday night at the mosque the family attended. Pandemic restrictions were eased to allow mourners to attend the outdoor vigil.
“There are no words that can ease the grief of having three generations murdered in their neighborhood,” Trudeau told the crowd. “There are no words that can undo the pain and yes the anger of this community. There are no words that can fix the future of that little boy who has had his future taken away. But know this: You are not alone. All Canadians mourn with you and stand with you.”
Imam Abd Alfatah Twakkal of the London Muslim Mosque said he hoped the vigil would be a pivotal moment for his community and country in the fight against the scourge of racism and discrimination.
“Every single one of us need to do our part,” he said.
Rauf Ahmad and three friends earlier watched the growing tribute at the intersection in the day.
“I didn’t think there was racism in Canada, and I felt very safe when I came here two years ago, but I do not feel safe now,” Ahmad said. “Humanity is first. We should not care about whether someone is a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian.”
Near the crash scene, Zahid Khan, a family friend, said through tears: “They were just out for their walk that they would go out for every day. I just wanted to see.”
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Mayor Ed Holder said flags would be lowered for three days in London, which he said has 30,000 to 40,000 Muslims among its more than 400,000 residents.
Canada is generally welcoming toward immigrants and all religions, but in 2017 a French Canadian man known for far-right, nationalist views went on a shooting rampage at a Quebec City mosque that killed six people.
“Canada is not immune to the kind of intolerance and division we have seen elsewhere in the world,” Trudeau said.
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