Friend,

The message was loud and clear: “Do not come.”

This would be the Biden administration’s initial attempt to deter migrants who fled danger in their home countries from seeking protection in the U.S.

First, President Biden in March discouraged migrants from trekking north to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. He suggested they stay in their home countries – where many face violence and persecution – as the administration addressed an increase in the number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the southwestern border.

Then, the administration continued to rely on the contested Trump-era Title 42 order by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reject migrants at ports of entry and expel those who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization, thereby denying their legal right to seek asylum.

And in June, the administration delivered another warning to would-be asylum seekers from Guatemala: “Do not come,” said Vice President Kamala Harris during a news conference alongside Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

Sarah Rich, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, said the vice president’s comments were strikingly similar to rhetoric employed by the Trump administration.

“Seeking protection from violence and persecution is a fundamental human right, and the right to seek asylum is protected by U.S. and international law,” Rich said. “These remarks fly in the face of the right to seek asylum in the U.S. and indicate a disturbing continuity between the Trump administration and the Biden-Harris administration.”

For many migrants in peril, waiting in their home countries for a better time to seek asylum in the U.S. is not – nor could ever be – a viable option.

“I fled my country because I wanted to survive,” Emiliana Doe, whose name has been changed in this story to protect her identity, told the SPLC in Spanish. “I want to live. I want to be somebody. Nobody wants to die.”

Denying access

Doe – a transgender woman from Honduras – is one of 13 plaintiffs in the SPLC’s class action lawsuit Al Otro Lado, Inc. v. Mayorkas.

Filed in July 2017, the suit alleges that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have illegally and deliberately restricted the number of people who could access the asylum process at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.

This so-called “Turnback Policy” encompasses a range of practices that CBP has been using since at least 2016 to prevent migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S., according to the lawsuit’s allegations. For example, during the Trump administration, CBP misinformed many migrants by telling them President Donald Trump had signed new laws saying, in effect, that there was no longer asylum for anyone.

Doe fled Honduras and endured a dangerous and difficult journey through Central America and Mexico, during which she was sexually assaulted and threatened with death.

She eventually arrived in Tijuana, Mexico, where word had spread regarding the Turnback Policy. Other migrants told Doe that she needed to put her name on a waiting list if she wanted to seek asylum in the U.S.

Doe then went to the San Ysidro port of entry near Tijuana, where two women gave her a piece of a paper with the number “1014” and told her to return in six weeks. Feeling desperate and unsafe, Doe returned to the port of entry just a few weeks later.

But CBP turned her away under the policy.

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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center