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Legal Victory Brings Hope to Asylum Seekers Turned Away at the Border

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Asylum seekers got a major win in a lawsuit challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) illegal policy of turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry. In Al Otro Lado v. Wolf, a federal judge decided that the case may proceed as a class action.

This decision means that the named plaintiffs—14 individuals and an organization that assists asylum seekers—can seek relief for both themselves and the thousands of asylum seekers that have been turned away since 2016 or will be turned away in the future. In two ports of entry alone, over 57,640 asylum seekers were turned back in 2018 and 2019.

Asylum seekers’ victory in this case is a welcome development in the face of an otherwise grim situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Expelling Asylum Seekers From the Border

The Trump administration has used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to impose a near-complete shutdown of the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time, the administration has rapidly “expelled” thousands of unaccompanied minors in the name of public health, even when they test negative for COVID-19.

Over 105,000 adults and children have been expelled through July. Hundreds of those who were not expelled have been sent back to Mexico to wait an unknown period of time for their U.S. immigration court hearings under the indefinitely-suspended “Migrant Protection Protocols.”

Metering Asylum Seekers in Mexico

Since 2016, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has turned back asylum seekers at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border with a combination of lies, coercion, physical force, and obstruction, and its “metering” policy.

Under the metering policy, CBP officers claim that ports are “full,” forcing asylum seekers to put their names on waitlists and spend months in dangerous conditions in Mexico.

Metering is one of several current policies that collectively make it nearly impossible to access the asylum process and place people’s lives in danger.

Unlike asylum seekers subject to other policies, CBP officers do not acknowledge asylum seekers’ claims for protection at all under metering. This leaves them in legal limbo and puts them in physical, financial, and emotional distress in Mexico.

Where the Al Otro Lado v. Wolf Case Leaves Asylum Seekers

In the recent decision in Al Otro Lado v. Wolf, the federal judge recognized that plaintiffs’ evidence demonstrates that CBP’s different methods of turning back asylum seekers were all part of an “overarching policy” that furthers the “administration’s objection of restricting asylum access.”

Notably, this decision will not affect those individuals who are being rapidly “expelled” at the border. When the expulsion policy ends, either by court order or a new administration, asylum seekers who get turned away will be for the first time part of a class action lawsuit seeking to ensure their right to seek protection.

Last week’s order is an important step forward in the fight to ensure that the United States continues to be a nation that welcomes asylum seekers.

Source: Legal Victory Brings Hope to Asylum Seekers Turned Away at the Border

New York Judge Blocks ‘Public-Charge’ Rule, Again

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U.S. District Judge George Daniels clearly has a thing about the Trump administration’s public charge rule for immigrants.

For the second time in less than a year, Daniels knocked down administration efforts to strengthen the rules. Though his judicial district is confined to Manhattan, Daniels’s decision will affect public charge policy nationally.

Under the revised definition, any non-U.S. citizen who receives government assistance such as food stamps, public housing vouchers, Medicaid or welfare payments for 12 months or more over a three-year period can be considered a public charge ineligible for legal presence in the country.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began applying the new rule in late February. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the agency made an exception for people seeking medical help related to COVID-19.

That wasn’t nearly good enough for Judge Daniels.

In a spasm of expansive speculation, he opined, “There is a question of whether [the rule]should be applied to future deadly plagues, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or other natural and manmade disasters that threaten the health and safety of citizens and immigrants alike, through no fault of their own.”

Daniels then went back to block a 2018 State Department rule requiring foreigners applying for immigrant visas to have “approved health insurance” to avoid a public charge designation. The micromanaging judge objected, saying the government’s accepted insurance plans may “not actually provide comprehensive coverage.” Harrumph!

The Bill Clinton appointee attempted to halt the public charge rule last year, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the administration’s position in January. Daniels now asserts that coronavirus changed everything, providing the justification for his latest injunctions.

The judge’s “blistering decisions” were enthusiastically reported by National Public Radio and other like-minded news organizations. As FAIR observed about coverage of the public charge issue, mainstream media outlets lard their stories with comments from Democratic politicians, pro-illegal alien activists and ethnic advocacy groups to distort the administration’s position and all but dismiss the public interest.

Daniels’ ongoing campaign against public charge reform illustrates how one district judge can dictate (and muddle) U.S. immigration policy. If, as Daniels contends, coronavirus is a national emergency that demands judicial intervention on public charge cases, the American public should expect higher courts to move expeditiously to affirm or reject his contentions.

Source: New York Judge Blocks ‘Public-Charge’ Rule, Again

Photo by Tania Fernandez on Unsplash

Legal scholars dispute Trump’s claim to power ‘nobody thought the president had’

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President Trump has routinely asserted his outsize view of presidential power, but his claim to unprecedented clout in recent weeks springs from an unlikely source: one of his defeats at the Supreme Court.

Trump has asserted that with the stroke of a pen he can break through gridlock on immigration, health care, the stalemate on relief for those hurt economically by the coronavirus pandemic, even mail-in balloting.

“The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had,” Trump told Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace on July 19.

On Wednesday, he said he might employ them on the payroll tax. “I have the right to suspend it, and I may do it myself. I have the absolute right,” the president said on “Fox & Friends,” reviving an idea he floated months ago but which has faced opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Trump had promised Wallace an “exciting two weeks,” but so far it’s been all executive talk and no executive action.

The source of Trump’s recent bravado appears to be provocative articles by a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley whose expansive views of presidential power match Trump’s.

John Yoo, the professor, has proclaimed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s opinion stopping the Trump administration from dismantling the Obama-era program protecting young undocumented immigrants a blessing in disguise. He contends that it allows presidents to take even unlawful actions that can require years of legal battles to undo.

To say that Yoo’s view of the court’s 5-to-4 decision on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is an outlier would be an understatement.

“I think he must be on some kind of drug,” said Laurence Tribe, a longtime constitutional scholar at Harvard. The court’s decision “did not even remotely provide a blueprint for the kind of lawlessness John Yoo seems to be trying to convince this president” to undertake, Tribe said.

The Supreme Court’s decision was seen by most analysts as a check on presidential power. It said that the administration must show it considered the consequences of undoing a program on which 700,000 “dreamers” had come to rely, and that the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end it because of its purported unlawfulness was inadequate under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Leah Litman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan, said the Trump administration’s tendency to cut corners on such legal requirements has had consequences.

“The administration has a horrendous track record in the Supreme Court and in the lower federal courts in cases involving the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires the administration to give reasonable arguments and legitimate explanations for its policy choices,” Litman said.

“Yoo’s argument is based on a misunderstanding of the DACA policy, and an even worse misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s decision in the DACA case,” she said. “Neither would stand up in court under any kind of scrutiny.”

It is hard at times to separate the vehemence of opposition to Yoo’s views from personal objections to Yoo himself. He will always be known in Washington as author of the “torture memos,” which condoned tactics such as severe sleep deprivation and waterboarding for terrorism suspects taken into custody during the George W. Bush administration — measures later renounced.

“That the administration plans to use John Yoo’s tortured (yes that’s intentional) arguments is a pretty good indication of why this administration frequently loses in court on administrative law,” Litman wrote in an email.

Yoo met with the president last week in the Oval Office, to discuss the theory and a new book he has written. “Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight For Presidential Power” makes the case for an “energetic unitary executive” with constitutional authority to act decisively and resist overreach by Congress and the courts.

Yoo told The Washington Post that Trump asked about his articles. Because the Supreme Court majority said then-President Barack Obama’s decision to not enforce certain immigration laws could not be quickly undone without satisfying the APA, Yoo argues, presidents have sweeping authority to take all sorts of actions — even legally questionable ones — and keep them in place for years while legal battles slowly proceed.

“If you can choose not to enforce the immigration laws, here are the other things you could not enforce — such as not collecting taxes because we’re in the middle of this Great Depression,” Yoo said he told the president, summarizing his arguments in Newsweek and the National Review.

“We talked about the article and what it said, but I don’t want to say anything about what potentially they want to apply it to. They have the right to ask people for advice confidentially,” Yoo said.

One White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail internal discussions, cautioned against the implication that the administration would use Yoo’s theory in advancing the executive actions the president has said he is planning, and played down the significance of the professor’s Oval Office visit.

The president hardly needs encouragement to act unilaterally. One of his first directives in office was a ban on entry to the United States by citizens of several majority-Muslim countries, which went through three editions before being approved by the Supreme Court. His administration has moved aggressively on other issues, such as changing asylum rules and declaring a national emergency to shift money from the Pentagon to fund construction of a southern border wall.

Yoo’s articles said there was no reason to stop there. In the National Review article, Yoo theorized that Trump could create a national right to openly carry weapons.

“Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency,” Yoo wrote. “And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two.”

That is “essentially” what happened in the Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, Yoo wrote.

Michael W. McConnell, the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, said he considered Yoo’s pieces more of a “tongue-in-cheek critique” of Roberts’s reasoning than a blueprint for presidential action.

Trump has done a 180-degree turn on the issue. He initially tweeted that it and other “horrible” decisions by the court were “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.”

But in the days afterward, the president said the decision required him only to fill out “paperwork” to get the plan to end DACA back on track. Since then, he has declared the ruling a boon.

Most, though, see the decision as of a piece with a previous ruling by Roberts, also joined by liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, that the administration had not properly complied with law in trying to attach a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

David Cole is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has clashed repeatedly with the president’s desire to expand executive discretion. He said it was clear the Regents decision limited executive action.

“The case did not question whether Trump had the authority to rescind DACA, it challenged only the way he did it,” Cole said. “And the court found he did it illegally.”

The court’s four most consistent conservatives dissented. But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, one of Trump’s two nominees to the bench, wrote that “all nine members of the court accept, as do the DACA plaintiffs themselves, that the executive branch possesses the legal authority to rescind DACA and to resume pre-DACA enforcement of the immigration laws enacted by Congress.”

Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Trump appointee Neil M. Gorsuch, provides some support for Yoo’s theory. Under the majority’s rule, Thomas wrote, there could be “perverse incentives” for outgoing administrations to make questionable policy decisions it would be hard for the next administration to reverse.

“Even if the agency lacked authority to effectuate the changes, the changes cannot be undone by the same agency in a successor administration unless the successor provides sufficient policy justifications to the satisfaction of this court,” Thomas wrote. “In other words, the majority erroneously holds that the agency is not only permitted, but required, to continue administering unlawful programs that it inherited from a previous administration.”

Other legal scholars have made a similar point. Zachary Price, a professor at UC Hastings Law School in San Francisco, said the decision “may carry implications that progressives will regret.”

Writing in Scotusblog, Price said the Trump administration “might use its remaining time in office to adopt permissive enforcement policies across any number of areas, from gun control to labor regulation, the environment and public corruption.” A new administration would be foreclosed from changing them without meeting the court’s standards.

But Price doesn’t think that is likely. Roberts and the liberals, he said, seemed to have created a decision so narrow that it “seems deliberately designed for one day and case only.”

Cole said the real lesson of the decision is “what is done by unilateral executive order can be undone by unilateral executive order — so the real check on President Trump will be the November election.”

Carol D. Leonnig, Jeff Stein, John Wagner and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

Source: Legal scholars dispute Trump’s claim to power ‘nobody thought the president had’

Updates to USCIS Policy Manual Give Broad Discretion to Issue More Denials

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has imposed new requirements on its officers for exercising discretion that will substantially increase time and expense for the agency and applicants. Applications for work authorization will be particularly impacted.

On July 15, USCIS issued updates to its Policy Manual. This manual contains the agency’s official policies and “assists immigration officers in rendering decisions.”

USCIS claimed it was “consolidating” prior guidance about how officers apply discretion when they decide petitions or applications. Instead, the agency has created a chart of applications and petitions it considers to be subject to its discretionary analysis and imposed new decision-making procedures.

Under this new guidance, when making a decision on a petition or application, an officer must perform a separate analysis weighing “all positive factors” in a case against “any negative factors” in the applicant’s entire record. The Policy Manual has a non-exhaustive list of more than 20 possible factors an officer can consider.

Previously, officers would assess eligibility—and if ineligible, deny solely on that basis. If a person established eligibility but discretion a discretionary analysis also was required, the officer would exercise discretion favorably in the absence of negative information.

But gathering documentation to highlight positive factors and minimize negative ones is an enormous burden for applicants. Those who are most at risk—like asylum applicants or victims of domestic violence—may be unable to get such documents. This leaves them incapable of getting work authorization and supporting themselves and their families while they wait for a decision on their application.

Work authorization for a person applying to become a lawful permanent resident (LPR) is one example of the unnecessary burden and delay that this policy imposes. In the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. corridor, USCIS’ posted processing time for LPR applications is 11 to 36 months.

Under past agency practice, USCIS would decide the work authorization application based on a relatively manageable amount of documentation, such as photo identification.

But the factors listed in the Policy Manual include the “likelihood [LPR] status will ensue soon,” employment history, and “history of taxes paid.” What purpose—other than delay—is served by having an applicant submit documentation that will be reviewed in making the final decision on the LPR application? The time it takes for the officer to analyze the documentation also adds to the delay.

The delay and expense to the agency is compounded by the Policy Manual’s directive that the officer prepare a written analysis of the evidence—for a benefit requested while the LPR application is pending. USCIS has imposed these new burdensome requirements at the same time it has asked Congress for money to continue operations and has sent furlough notices to 13,000 workers.

The Policy Manual changes also exceed USCIS’ authority for deciding various categories of petitions and applications. For example, the Immigration and Nationality Act provides that the agency “shall” approve employment-based immigrant petitions after finding that the facts presented are true. This is not a discretionary action.

The Policy Manual changes are one more example of USCIS restricting access to our legal immigration system in ways that are unlawful. By shifting the agency adjudication process to make immigration status and work authorization harder to attain, the United States is sending a clear signal that we are no longer a welcoming country.

Source: Updates to USCIS Policy Manual Give Broad Discretion to Issue More Denials

USCIS Rule Strengthens Employment Eligibility Requirements for Asylum Seekers

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WASHINGTON—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services today announced a regulatory change to deter aliens from illegally entering the United States and from filing frivolous, fraudulent, or otherwise non-meritorious claims for asylum to obtain an employment authorization document. This rule does not alter asylum eligibility criteria in any way and will be effective on Aug. 25.

This rule stems from the April 29, 2019, Presidential Memorandum on Additional Measures to Enhance Border Security and Restore Integrity to Our Immigration System, which emphasizes that it is the policy of the United States to manage humanitarian immigration programs in a safe and orderly manner, and to promptly deny benefits to those who do not qualify.

“Safeguarding the integrity of our nation’s legal immigration system from those who seek to exploit or abuse it is key to the USCIS mission,” said Joseph Edlow, the USCIS Deputy Director for Policy. “The reforms in this rule are designed to restore integrity to the asylum system and to reduce any incentive to file an asylum application for the primary purpose of obtaining work authorization. It also deters frivolous and non-meritorious applications by eliminating employment authorization for aliens who have failed to file for asylum within one year of their last entry until USCIS or an immigration judge determines the alien’s eligibility for asylum.”

The rule prevents aliens who, absent good cause, illegally entered the United States from obtaining employment authorization based on a pending asylum application. Additionally, the rule defines new bars and denials for employment authorization, such as for certain criminal behavior; extends the wait time before an asylum applicant can apply for employment authorization from 150 days to 365 calendar days; limits the employment authorization validity period to a maximum of two years; and automatically terminates employment authorization when an applicant’s asylum denial is administratively final.

For more information read the final rule, scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on June 26.

For more information on USCIS and our programs, please visit

uscis

.gov or follow us on Twitter (@uscis), Instagram (/uscis), YouTube (/uscis), Facebook (/uscis), and LinkedIn (/uscis).

Source: USCIS Rule Strengthens Employment Eligibility Requirements for Asylum Seekers

Application Period Open for Citizenship and Assimilation Grant Programs

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WASHINGTON—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is accepting applications for two funding opportunities under the Citizenship and Assimilation Grant Program. The grant opportunities, mandated by Congress and funded with appropriations rather than the agency’s operating funds, will provide up to $10 million in grants for citizenship preparation programs in communities across the country.

These competitive grant opportunities are open to organizations that prepare lawful permanent residents for naturalization and promote civic assimilation through increased knowledge of English, U.S. history, and civics.

USCIS expects to announce award recipients in September 2020, if agency staff are available to review applications and oversee the program. However, should agency staff be furloughed in late August, USCIS anticipates that the grant program could be impacted or even terminated for the fiscal year.

USCIS seeks to expand availability of high-quality citizenship and assimilation services throughout the country with these two grant opportunities:

USCIS will consider various program and organizational factors, including past grantee performance, when making final award decisions. In addition, all funded grant recipients must enroll in E-Verify as a regular employer within 30 days of receiving the award and remain as a participant in good standing with E-Verify throughout the entire period of grant performance. Funded grant recipients will be required to verify all new hires at hiring locations performing work on a program or activity that is funded in whole or in part under the grant. New to this year’s program is a prerequisite that applicants and sub-awardees certified under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) must comply with all SEVP requirements at the time of application.

Since it began in 2009, the USCIS Citizenship and Assimilation Grant Program has awarded approximately $92 million through 434 grants to immigrant-serving organizations in 39 states and the District of Columbia.

To apply for one of these funding opportunities, visit grants.gov. For additional information on the Citizenship and Assimilation Grant Program for fiscal year 2020, visit uscis.gov/grants or email the USCIS Office of Citizenship at citizenshipgrantprogram@uscis.dhs.gov.

For more information on USCIS and our programs, please visit uscis.gov or follow us on Twitter (@uscis), Instagram (/uscis), YouTube (/uscis) and Facebook (/uscis).

Source: Application Period Open for Citizenship and Assimilation Grant Programs

In California, It Will Take More Than a Parade to Save an Imperiled Census

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PERRIS, Calif. — For one day at least, as a 10-car parade of vehicles with honking horns, pompoms and signs reading “Get Counted” crawled through this predominantly Latino agricultural town about 70 miles east of Los Angeles on Friday, it was hard to forget that the 2020 census was going on and that it mattered.

Daniel Cordero, 63, a Mexican immigrant who shares a home with 15 people, including his wife, children and grandchildren, was just the kind of person that the event, billed as “Get Out the Count,” was intended to reach.

But as he stepped out of his kitchenware store on D Street in downtown Perris on Friday to observe the parade, he wasn’t quite sold. “We’re working so hard, we don’t have time to be filling out questionnaires,” he said.

“I haven’t filled it out,” he added. “I have never filled it out.” He took a flier from one of the volunteers, examining it like one of his customers contemplating his wares, and said that he might consider it. “It’d be the first time,” he said without much enthusiasm, before returning to work in his store stocked with pots, pans, brooms and other household items.

It has always been a challenge to get an accurate count of people in places like this dusty working-class town of 80,000 people, where about three quarters of the population is Hispanic, many of them immigrants. Throw in a pandemic and a cascade of messages from President Trump making many Latinos wary of the census, and the challenge grows exponentially.

But when the Census Bureau on Monday said it would lop off four weeks from the 10 it had allocated for a door-to-door count of the hardest to reach communities, the move added a new sense of urgency to efforts to reach farmworkers and undocumented immigrants in Perris as well as other communities with different challenges around the country. The situation is likely to be even worse in communities and states where there is less government involvement in the census and fewer organizations on the ground to press for participation.

“We have to keep dodging bullets to reach our community, and now we have limited time,” said Luz Gallegos, the director of TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant services provider that operates in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. “We are going to continue to push until the deadline.”

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The Census Bureau announced on Monday that it will halt counting on Sept. 30, four weeks earlier than planned, cutting short door-knocking, which begins nationwide on Aug. 11, and the time people have to submit responses online, over the phone and by mail.

In March, the Census Bureau sent out invitations by mail to people across the country asking them to respond to the 2020 census. Next week, after a delay in outreach because of the coronavirus, census workers will start knocking on doors of homes whose residents have not yet participated.

The numbers are enormously important, especially in a poor community in need of all available federal resources. The count is used to reapportion all 435 House seats and thousands of state and local districts, as well as to divvy up trillions of dollars in federal grants and aid.

Census officials say they can still do an accurate count with the new deadline. “We will be hiring more people to knock on those doors so we can get to all of the households that haven’t responded yet,” a Census Bureau spokeswoman said. “Our recruiting pool, which is very large, puts us in a good position to do this.”

But experts are skeptical.

“We will have a flawed census that will be fatal to certain groups,” said Paul Ong, a researcher at U.C.L.A.’s Luskin School of Public Affairs who studies census participation and has served as an adviser to the Census Bureau.

Despite an unprecedented $187 million investment in outreach by the state and nonprofits in California, residents of Latino communities have been responding at lower rates than in 2010. Nationally, the trend is the same.

Volunteers handed out flyers in downtown Perris, a largely Latino community, where many people are wary of participating in the census. Credit…Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times

In some census tracts in far-flung areas of Riverside County, the response rate is hovering between 40 and 50 percent, about 10 percentage points behind the response rate a decade ago.

Even before the coronavirus hit, the census faced extraordinary challenges.

The Constitution requires a count of all residents, regardless of nationality or immigration status. California is home to almost 11 million immigrants, including about two million who are undocumented.

But President Trump pushed for 19 months, starting in 2018, to include a citizenship question on the decennial census, despite widespread criticism that it would dramatically depress responses, particularly from Latino immigrants. After the Supreme Court opposed the plan last year, Mr. Trump backed down.

Then last month he directed the government not to count undocumented immigrants for the purposes of reapportioning congressional seats. His policy memorandum would have the Census Bureau remove the immigrants from each state’s count using data estimates. While the move is being challenged in court, it has sown confusion anew in immigrant communities.

For many immigrants, documented and undocumented, his repeated insistence on not counting undocumented people has sent what seemed like a clear message: Your participation is not wanted.

Liz and Daniel Rivera, undocumented Mexicans who have lived in Riverside County for 18 years, were too nervous to fill out the 2010 census, they said. But this year, after attending workshops at TODEC, they were persuaded to fill out the form.

“We understood that it was safe and that it was important to participate if we want funding to improve our schools, parks and roads,” said Ms. Rivera, who said that she shared the information with friends and family.

But the couple delayed completing the online form after they, their two children and Ms. Rivera’s father, who is living with them, fell ill with Covid-19. While at home, they heard about Mr. Trump’s new presidential order to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count.

“We were so confused. We thought we weren’t supposed to participate anymore,” Ms. Rivera recalled.

She decided to call TODEC to inquire, just to be sure, and a staff member assured her that the Rivera household still had every right to take part. The couple plan to fill out the form next week.

Maria and Ramon Garcia, who have lived in the United States for two decades, said they had intended to complete the census until Mr. Trump’s recent announcement. Now they fear that participating could land them in the cross hairs of immigration enforcement.

“We were told that we should be counted,” said Mrs. Garcia, 50. “But then, just recently, we heard that the president doesn’t want us to be counted, and we’re worried that we could be deported if we participate.”

The Garcias called TODEC’s hotline on Friday to seek the legal center’s advice but could not be convinced that participating was safe.

“We came here from Mexico many years ago. We pay taxes, we work hard and we don’t want to put that in jeopardy,” said Mr. Garcia, 57, who has a gardening business with his wife. “I don’t think we should participate in the census.”

Adán Chávez, deputy director of the national census program at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, said that reaction was widespread.

“We have had to contend with challenge after challenge, attack after attack that threatens our census work,” he said.

The group has responded by intensifying its “¡Hagase Contar!” (“Be Counted”) campaign, working with Spanish-language television to promote participation and calls to a hotline that answers questions and helps people complete the census in Spanish.

“Our lift was already much heavier in the middle of a pandemic,” Mr. Chávez said. “Now we’re having to tell people that everyone gets counted, it’s your right. Don’t worry.”

According to an analysis of census data to be released next week by Mr. Ong’s team, the estimated median response rate for Hispanics nationwide was 50 percent by August, down by nearly 13 percentage points from 2010. Among non-Hispanic whites, the estimated response rate was 69 percent, compared with 71 percent a decade ago.

States with large undocumented populations — California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois — stand to lose the most from an undercount.

TODEC volunteers began last year to go door-to-door in hard-to-count neighborhoods, in the rural reaches of Riverside County, to educate immigrants about the census. They erected booths at health fairs and hosted information sessions to educate people about the census.

But like other groups working in the field, it was forced to shift strategy — to phone banking, social media and Zoom info sessions in March, when the coronavirus began coursing through California.

On a Zoom call last Thursday titled, “The Census and My Community,“ which was also streamed on Facebook, TODEC staff and a Census Bureau representative spent a full hour trying to motivate Latinos to participate.

“If we respond, our community will get money. But if we aren’t counted, it’s as if we don’t exist,” said Lupe Camacho, the bureau’s representative.

She appealed to their commonality as immigrants. “I’m from Mexico,” said Ms. Camacho, who spoke in Spanish throughout the session. “I’m a naturalized citizen. But citizenship has nothing to do with this.”

During the session, she described the census as “pure statistics,” “completely confidential” and “posing no danger,” all but pleading for participation.

“We don’t pass on any information about anyone — not to the DMV, not to ICE, not to any city, state or federal authority,” she said, referring to the department of motor vehicles and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In Perris, there were bright moments as well as cautionary ones.

Maria Estela Perez Gomez, 55, emerged from her beige house at the sight of the caravan. “We filled out our census form,” she said excitedly, doing a little dance as a Mexican band that was part of the parade and procession played.

The hurdles have also motivated some people.

Montserrat Gomez, a 19-year-old college student, said the decision to curtail the count was one reason she joined the group of young adults, mostly children of immigrants, who marched through downtown Perris on Friday waving signs and distributing fliers.

“We need to convince them that they need to be counted so that the community receives the political representation and financial resources that it deserves,” she said. “And now we have less time to do it.”

Source: In California, It Will Take More Than a Parade to Save an Imperiled Census

By Miriam Jordan

Photo Credit…Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times

Obama Forecasts How Biden Administration Will Enact Amnesty

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On his website, former Vice President (and presumptive Democratic candidate for president) Joe Biden vows, if elected, to pass legislation “providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants”. Last week, his old boss, former

President Barack Obama

, explained how Biden (or whoever controls him) will do it: by eliminating the filibuster.By way of background, and simply put, the filibuster (from the Dutch for “pirate”) is a way to block or delay the passage of legislation in the Senate. Under Senate rules, it requires a supermajority of 60 votes to end a filibuster and move to consideration of a bill.

To get more complicated, the practice comes from an 1806 rules change in the Upper Body (at the behest of then-Vice

President and President of the Senate Aaron Burr, best remembered as the man who killed Alexander Hamilton) that removed a provision (the “previous question motion”), which had allowed senators to pass a bill with a simple majority (still the rule in the House).

Senators may speak as long as they want on any issue, and if they refuse to yield, a vote on a bill cannot be taken until debate on the question is ended by means of a “cloture” vote (under Senate Rule 22).

Cloture is a more modern idea, promoted by then-President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, to bypass filibusters. It used to take two-thirds of the Senators “present and voting” to vote for cloture, but in 1975, that was reduced to “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn” (60 of the current 100 senators).

The classic version of the filibuster is a major plot point in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington“, the classic 1939 Frank Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart as the title character, Sen. Jefferson Smith. As IMDB describes the film: “A naive man is appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. His plans promptly collide with political corruption, but he doesn’t back down.” Plainly fiction.

The naïve Sen. Smith is made the patsy in a corrupt scheme, and false evidence is used to frame him. He takes to the Senate floor and speaks for hours in an attempt to block a vote to expel him, refusing to yield until he is overcome with exhaustion and faints. Sen. Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), overcome with guilt at his part in the plot, runs off to kill himself and then confesses on the floor. Justice prevails.

 

In its more modern (and mundane) iteration, as noted, a bill cannot be passed in the Senate until debate is ended, which again requires 60 senators to invoke cloture.

Speaking at the funeral service of former Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on Thursday, Obama suggested that Lewis could be honored by passing a number of legislative proposals (which the former president not surprisingly supports). He continued: “And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”

With respect to the middle proposition in that sentence (the one separated by dashes), the Senate website notes: “Filibusters were particularly useful to southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching legislation, until cloture was invoked after a 60-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Twentieth century civil-rights legislation has a complex and somewhat surprising history. Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) voted against President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act of 1957 — the first since Reconstruction — which dealt with voting rights. Senate icons Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), Al Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.), John Stennis (D-Miss.), James Fulbright (D-Ark.), Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.), and Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) all voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That bill passed with an overwhelming majority of Republican votes (just fewer than 82 percent of the 33 Republican senators voted in favor, as compared to just fewer than 69 percent of Democrats). The Senate website notes: “Republican Leader Everett Dirksen [R-Ill.] delivered the most significant speech in his career in support of civil rights legislation. Dirksen gained key votes for cloture from Republicans with a powerful speech calling racial integration ‘an idea whose time has come.'”

The filibuster, however, has not been limited in its use to civil rights legislation. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched an eight-and-a-half-hour filibuster in 2010 to block bipartisan tax legislation (described by NPR as “The Speech” that elevated Sanders’ “Progressive Profile”). Populist Sen. Huey Long’s (D-La.) filibuster of New Deal legislation in 1935 (to prevent his political opponents from obtaining positions in Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration) included recipes for oysters and “potlikker”.

Despite modern floor-speech filibusters of the Bernie Sanders sort, such theatrics have largely been obviated by a change that then-Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) introduced in 1970: the two-track system, by which a filibustered bill can be set aside and the Senate can move on to other business, either with unanimous consent or with the agreement of the Minority Leader.

This, coupled with the aforementioned 1975 cloture change to “three-fifths of Senators duly chosen and sworn”, has led to what one observer has called the “faux-filibuster”, in which “a Senator at home in bed is a vote to continue the filibuster.” In other words, it takes 60 votes to get a bill moving in the Senate.

Among supporters of the filibuster in the past were Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and (by my count) a bipartisan group of 59 other senators, who sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2017, following the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

And, as David Harsanyi noted in National Review, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), in 2005 argued in favor of it:

What they don’t expect is for one party — be it Republican or Democrat — to change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet. The American people want less partisanship in this town, but everyone in this chamber knows that if the majority chooses to end the filibuster — if they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate – then the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse.

Of course, consistency in politics is a rare virtue (Obama himself filibustered the nomination of then-Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in 2006, an action he stated a decade later he regretted). But why would the former president change his mind now?

Simple: Obama believes that Biden will be elected, and that the Democrats will win a majority in the Senate in November, as the Wall Street Journal postulated on July 30. That will enable both to push for legislation that they want — like statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. And amnesty for illegal aliens.

Each of these actions will solidify a Democratic majority into the foreseeable future, and give the party of Jackson the White House for as long.

Keep in mind that amnesty has come close to passage on more than one occasion in the recent past. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 passed the Senate in May 2006 by a 62-36 margin, only to die in the then-Republican controlled House (which countered with the enforcement-heavy Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, which passed the House 239-182).

The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (the “Gang of Eight” bill) passed the Democratic-controlled Senate in June 2013, only again to die in a Republican-controlled House.

Most significantly, the so-called DREAM Act was included in the Removal Clarification Act of 2010, which passed the Democratic-controlled House in a lame-duck session on December 8, 2010, 216-198. A cloture motion on the House amendment failed in the Senate on December 18, 2010, by a 55-41 vote (four senators did not vote), nine days after the DREAM Act of 2010 itself failed by one vote to gain the 60 votes needed in the Senate to proceed to debate.

If the Democrats maintain control of the House, win the White House, and gain control of the Senate and end the filibuster, amnesty would be among the first bills that would be rammed through to signature in the 117th Congress, for that most basic (and base) of reasons: power.

Assuming that there are 10.5 million illegal aliens in the United States (a conservative estimate the Pew Research Center in June 2019 made of the population in 2017), and depending on the parameters of the amnesty, that would mean that there could be that many new voters (or more) in 2026.

Most could be expected to vote Democratic. In a footnote in a separate Pew Research Center study in February 2020 (“Naturalized Citizens Make Up Record One-in-Ten U.S. Eligible Voters in 2020”), Pew noted that 53 percent of Hispanic immigrants who are eligible to vote identify with or lean toward the Democratic party, while 39 percent identify or lean toward the GOP. In 2012, Pew determined that 50 percent of “Asian Americans” identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 28 percent were Republican.

The number of immigrant Hispanic Republicans seems high, given the fact that (again) Pew found that Hillary Clinton won 66 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2016 election, as opposed to 28 percent for Donald Trump. That was actually lower than Obama’s share of the Hispanic vote in 2012 (71 percent to 27 percent for Romney) or 2008 (67 percent to 31 percent for McCain). The high-water mark for Republicans among this demographic was 40 percent (once more, Pew) in 2004, but that was an outlier.

Given the fact that DHS estimated in December 2018 that 70 percent of the illegal-alien population in the United States in 2015 (which it estimated at 11.96 million) was Hispanic (59 percent from Mexico, 6 percent from El Salvador, 5 percent from Guatemala, and 4 percent from Honduras), even Pew’s 14-point voting differential between Hispanic-immigrant Democrats and Republicans is huge.

There are more Salvadoran nationals illegally present in the United States (750,000) than there are residents of Alaska (735,720), the District of Columbia (711,571), Vermont (627,180), or Wyoming (572,381). And, more Mexican nationals here illegally (6,580,000) than residents in 32 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and D.C.

In addition, there are large numbers of illegal aliens in swing states: 810,000 in Florida, 390,000 in North Carolina, and 380,000 in Arizona. Trump won Florida in 2016 by 119,770, North Carolina by 177,529, and Arizona by 84,904. Fourteen percent here and there starts to add up.

Nothing in Washington happens in a vacuum. Were the polls in favor of the president and Republicans in Congress, former President Obama likely would have stuck to his 2005 principles. Given that is not the case, the 2020 elections provide Dems an opportunity to change the rules, and thereby to change the electorate. All politics might be local, but it is usually self-serving, too.

Poor Jefferson Smith. As he said: “I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too.” He can probably keep his money.

Source: Obama Forecasts How Biden Administration Will Enact Amnesty

CBP Chief: Personnel in Contact with Covid-Infected Illegal Immigrants Dying of Virus in the Line of Duty

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Amid profound Covid-19 hospitalization spikes in border states that are universally blamed on lifted lock-downs, acting Customs and Border Protection Chief Mark Morgan confirmed yesterday that his agents are transporting some infected apprehended illegal migrants to U.S. hospitals, that probably many more are getting away into the interior, and that his agents are dying of the virus “in the line of duty”.

At a tele-press conference Thursday (August 6), Morgan offered that CBP had lost 10 personnel “in the line of duty because of Covid.” The acknowledgement of 10 fallen CBP personnel comes as two Border Patrol agents who died of the virus in the Del Rio, Texas, area have just been buried.

“If anyone’s showing signs or symptoms, we’re going to provide them that appropriate test. We’ll take them to the local healthcare provider, and we’ve done that,” Morgan said.

Morgan told national media that some among the sharply increasing numbers of apprehended migrants “know or highly suspect that they have Covid” and are hiring human smugglers to transport them over anyway, or climb the border wall on their own, or enter in other ways. Under emergency pandemic-control provisions of Title 42, the Border Patrol has returned 91 percent of Mexican citizens who are caught.

But in line with longstanding Border Patrol policy exemptions, Morgan acknowledged that agents are transporting those with Covid symptoms or who admit they have the virus to U.S. hospitals along the Mexican border. Those facilities have become so overrun with virus patients in recent weeks that they have been transporting patients by helicopter, fixed-wing aircraft, and ambulance fleets to hospitals throughout the interiors of California, Texas, and Arizona, where all blame typically is attributed only to the lifting of lock-downs and community spread.

Some of the illegal immigrants Border Patrol agents transport profess that they are ill with Covid while others are found with symptoms, injured from falling off the wall, or wandering lost and dehydrated and later test positive at the hospital, Morgan explained.

“We get to them right away,” Morgan said. “And we’re taking them directly to the hospital and once they get to the hospital then they’re being tested later and we find out they were Covid.”

Confirmation of CIS Reporting

Morgan said he wasn’t sure how many transported migrants turned out later to have tested positive, although he was aware of at least 60 reports that came back. (CBP may never learn of positive tests, a spokesman said.) But he also suggested that other numbers of infected illegal migrants (40,000 were apprehended in July) were using evasion tactics “for their own economic endeavors” and are presumed to be infecting large numbers of working illegal migrants they later join inside the United States.

“They’re running. They’re fighting. They’re doing everything that they can to avoid apprehension,” he said. “Even though some of the illegal aliens know, or highly suspect, that they have Covid … they’re still coming. They’re exposing everyone they come in contact with during their journey, as they illegally try to enter this country.”

In doing so, “They endanger the lives of CBP personnel and their families and those in our border communities and beyond. They don’t just remain in the border towns and cities. A single Covid illegal alien could infect hundreds of other illegal aliens as well as our workforce.”

Morgan’s comments provide the first official confirmation of a June 18 CIS post that reported on three anonymous Border Patrol agents who said the agency was transporting sick illegal immigrants to overcrowded area hospitals, rather than returning them to Mexico under Title 42, and also were becoming infected themselves. But the suggestion that infected migrant workers who evade Border Patrol are infecting interior migrant worker communities is new, if unconfirmed yet by tracing data.

Separately, in a July 19 interview with Breitbart Texas, Morgan confirmed reporting by CIS and others that a broader kaleidoscope of Covid patients legally fleeing across the border from collapsing Mexican hospitals also were responsible for part of the border-state hospitalization crisis, which state hospitalization data consistently shows is the nation’s most profound. Those legally crossing a supposedly closed border for Covid treatment include Mexican legal permanent residents, visa and border-crossing card holders, Mexicans with dual U.S. citizenship, and Americans living in Mexico. Current provisions of the March 20 border closure include an exemption for legal crossings for medical care.

Charges of Xenophobia and Racism Aside, Why All This Matters

At stake in understanding and acknowledging the extent of Mexico as an aggravating source of U.S. border-state hospitalizations is whether state and federal officials should consider policies beyond reinstituting U.S.-side lock-down and social distancing measures, and instead to consider changes to the federal March 20 border shutdown restrictions or to Border Patrol hospital transport policy in light of Title 42, or acting to relieve Mexico’s ongoing hospital capacity crisis, which is clearly bleeding over to the U.S. hospital system.

But U.S. and state officials rarely acknowledge the Mexico contribution or talk about it as Morgan did Thursday. That’s because, when they have, illegal immigration activists have excoriated them as xenophobic or racist, as happened to Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey when he cited Mexico as a significant source of Covid hospitalizations, and also when Trump administration officials discussed what to do about it privately.

As a result of such criticism, federal and state government officials have shied away from calculating the extent to which Mexico and the border shutdown policy are sources of the U.S. border-state hospitalization crisis, and reconfiguring public policies as necessary to counter it.

In mid-July, three members of Congress sent a letter to Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, requesting data that would indicate Mexico’s contribution to border hospitalizations, including how often the Border Patrol transports patients to hospitals. The information was due July 24 to Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Ted Budd (R-N.C.). Roy’s office said DHS had missed the deadlines but seemed to be gathering the information.

CIS has filed a Freedom of Information Act request and two Texas Public Information Act requests for similar information. All are pending.

Fallen Soldiers on the Covid Battlefield

Morgan’s remarks Thursday about Border Patrol transports of illegal immigrants to hospitals, and also that at least 10 CBP personnel have died of Covid in the line of duty, went unreported in the major media as of Friday morning.

But the deaths in the line of duty speak to an element of the nation’s tragedy with Covid-19 that may be lost to widespread failure of the media and public officials, fearful of social condemnation for saying it, to acknowledge the role of current border policy in this, too. Last month, in remarks that went largely unreported nationally, Morgan told a Senate subcommittee that illegal immigrants had exposed “several hundred” of his agents to Covid due to “high-risk contact”.

The names of the fallen are shrouded in silence. But local Texas media this week named two of the fallen agents:

Marco Gonzales, 49, died last month in a San Antonio hospital and was saluted and honored in a funeral procession of 50 vehicles that stopped in towns along the route to Del Rio, where he was buried Thursday.

Agustin Aguilar, another Border Patrol agent who worked in the Eagle Pass region and died of Covid, was buried in Del Rio the prior Saturday after another funeral procession where hundreds of people lined up to pay respects. Both agents were husbands and fathers.

Source: CBP Chief: Personnel in Contact with Covid-Infected Illegal Immigrants Dying of Virus in the Line of Duty

After a Lull, the Number of Migrants Trying to Enter the U.S. Has Soared

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The number of immigrants arrested at the southwestern border has more than doubled since the spring, fueled by Mexico’s economic slump and a Trump administration policy that migrants say works in their favor.

 

NOGALES, Mexico — Illegal migration along the southwest border of the United States has surged after a period of stagnation, as economic hardship, made worse by the pandemic, has driven thousands northward seeking work.

After plunging in the spring, when nations went into lockdown and shut down borders in an effort to curb the spread of the virus, the number of migrants arrested along the United States border with Mexico more than doubled between April and July, according to the U.S. government.

As the numbers rise, immigration is becoming once again a primary rallying cry for President Trump, who is trailing in the polls in his bid for re-election and looking for purchase with an electorate that is increasingly unhappy with his handling of the pandemic and the economy.

“Despite the dangers posed by Covid-19, illegal immigration — it continues,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said on Thursday.

Undocumented migrants were “putting American lives at risk,” he added, although the United States leads the world in the number of deaths from the coronavirus.

Mr. Morgan touted the necessity of continuing to build the border wall, a project central to Mr. Trump’s political identity, to forestall illegal migration and the further spread of the coronavirus by infected undocumented immigrants.

The Mexico side of the border wall in Nogales. In remote areas, far from cities, the wall becomes a fence, or sometimes no barrier at all. Photo Credit : Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

The numbers are still far below the peak of the migration crisis in 2019, and also far lower than the record highs set in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, when annual tallies of migrants apprehended at the southwest border often topped 1,000,000.

And while undocumented migration is rebounding from a brief lull, who is coming — and why — has changed significantly since the pandemic. Many say they have been inspired to try to migrate now because of a new Trump administration policy that returns them to Mexico quickly, often within hours of being captured, but has the unintended effect of giving them more chances to cross the border illegally.

During the past several years, Central Americans dominated the flow of migrants trying to cross the southwest border, with many seeking asylum. They often traveled as families, frequently with children, and peacefully surrendered to American border agents in the hope of getting a chance to apply for sanctuary.

Now, many Central Americans who might otherwise have sought to migrate have been discouraged from leaving home by closed borders and other pandemic-related travel restrictions, migrants’ advocates said. And word has gotten back to potential refugees fleeing persecution that under the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies, there is little chance now of securing asylum in the United States.

Instead, the vast majority of those caught trying to cross into the United States in recent months are Mexican, officials and migrants’ advocates said. And their encounters with the authorities were often chaotic, with migrants scattering into the desert to evade capture.

“They’re running, they’re fighting,” Mr. Morgan said. “They absolutely have no appreciation for the deadly consequences of their actions while we’re navigating a global, deadly pandemic.”

Mexico has been among the countries worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with nearly 49,000 reported dead — behind only much larger Brazil and the United States. The real number of lives lost is believed to be much higher because of a dearth of testing and a significant undercount of cases.

Millions lost their jobs amid a mounting recession that economists expect to be the deepest in nearly a century, but the government has eschewed the stimulus measures that other nations used to prop up economies as they buckled under the weight of the pandemic.

In July, 78 percent of those apprehended on the southwestern border were from Mexico, mainly single adult men, Mr. Morgan said.

The number of migrants detained along the border with Mexico jumped to 38,347 in July from 16,162 in April, a 137 percent increase, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

That is still a far cry from last year, when there were more than 99,000 apprehensions in April of 2019 and nearly 133,000 that May. But the steep rise in recent months reflects a resurgence of the migratory stream.

While migrants and their advocates say that job losses and deepening poverty have been principal drivers of the recent increase from Mexico, a recent Trump administration border policy has also been inspiring migrants to try their luck now.

In March, the administration issued an order that allowed American immigration agents to suspend normal procedures and swiftly expel illegal border crossers, often in a matter of hours, citing the public health need to keep detention centers as empty as possible and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The new policy also extended to refugees seeking asylum.

For about 91 percent of those arrests in July, the administration used the special rule to rapidly return a migrant to Mexico.

Numerous migrants interviewed in this border city in recent days said the policy had been an incentive for them: If they failed in their bid to enter the United States, they said, they would be spared the hardship of detention and would be quickly sent back to Mexico, putting them in position to try again.

“What’s encouraging us now is that because of the pandemic, they are letting us go quickly,” said Jacobo, 27, a carpenter from the Mexican port city of Veracruz who tried, unsuccessfully, to cross the border at Nogales late last month.

He requested partial anonymity to avoid drawing attention from the American and Mexican authorities.

Migrants say that along this stretch of the border, it is easy to find a smuggler to show you the way across. Most crossings occur outside the cities and towns, in remote areas where the towering metal border barrier gives way to low wire fencing, in some places, or nothing at all.

But it is also a fiercely unforgiving environment: Migration routes wend through a vast wilderness desert region in southern Arizona that puts migrants at great risk of dehydration, heatstroke and starvation. Thousands of travelers have died in recent decades trying to cross.

Jacobo, who decided to migrate after the pandemic cost him his job at a construction firm, tried to cross one night late last month in the company of four other migrants, guided by a smuggler who communicated with them by cellphone.

He had already paid about $450 to the criminal group that controlled the smuggling routes along that stretch of the border, and promised to pay another $6,700 to the smuggler if he successfully made it into the interior of the United States.

Somewhere outside the small Mexican border town of Sásabe, Jacobo and the four others crawled under a low wire fence that demarcated the border. For two days, they trudged north across the Arizona desert, moving mostly at night and during the cooler morning hours, and resting when daytime temperatures became severe.

Late on the second night, they were intercepted by American border agents. The migrants fled. But over the next five hours they were all rounded up, then marched back to Nogales and handed over to Mexican immigration officials, who processed and released them.

That evening, Jacobo rested at the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, and waited for his brother, an undocumented immigrant living in the United States, to send him money for another attempt. He was going to keep trying until he was successful, he said; giving up would be foolish.

“The possibilities of entering are good,” he said, adding that the quick processing at the border was “in our favor.”

The shelter’s population reflected the recent shifts in the migratory flow. Last year, during the peak of the migration crisis, as many as 200 migrants slept there a night, most hoping to present themselves at the border and apply for asylum, said Gilda Irene Esquer Félix, who runs the shelter.

But since the Trump administration had effectively suspended access to the asylum program, nearly all of those migrants who had been waiting for an opportunity to cross had left the shelter, returning to their home countries, melting into Mexican society or trying to find an illegal route across the border.

In recent months, only a handful of migrants have been showing up at the shelter each day, Ms. Esquer said, with most being failed border crossers who needed a place to rest for a night or two after being caught in the United States and sent back to Mexico.

Two Mexican women traveling together were among about a dozen residents there one night last week. They had met during a failed crossing several weeks ago and had since tried three other times, to no avail.

“Various friends have been successful,” lamented Dinora, 24, who allowed publication of only her first name. She had been compelled to migrate, she said, after she lost her job as a seamstress in a factory in her home state of Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico.

She had heard that the Americans were not detaining people, making it much easier to try again. But after four failed crossings, and the duress of trying to cross the desert, she had decided to head back home.

“No more,” she said.

Her friend, however, was determined to try again.

Source: After a Lull, the Number of Migrants Trying to Enter the U.S. Has Soared

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.

also By Kirk Semple
Cover Photo: Men who had been returned to Nogales, Mexico, after trying to cross the border. They were part of an increase in the number of migrants trying to cross the southwest border. Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times