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Hi John,
I’m Danilo Zak, Policy and Advocacy Manager at the National Immigration Forum. This month I’m taking over The Forum newsletter to share with you my reflections from a recent visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. I hope you enjoy traveling alongside me!
 Forum staff and partners at the border. I’m the one on the far, right-hand side.
In late September, after years of studying and working on border policy, I was able to visit the border for the first time. In El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Forum staff — along with partners from across the country who lead our Bibles, Badges, and Business and Women of Welcome initiatives — met with pastors running shelters for vulnerable migrants on both sides of the border. We also met with the local migration officials in Juárez, and with three seasoned Border Patrol agents in a small park in El Paso.
We met with those who hear "one million migrants expelled" and can think only of
individual, human stories — the woman who was forced to send her child across alone, the family who had waited in metering lines for months before the pandemic hit and the border crossings closed down.
I wasn’t under any illusion that a single visit to the border would yield a comprehensive view of the situation, but I learned three valuable lessons there that I would not have been able to sitting at my desk in Washington.
Border fence separating El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
1. There is new ground here for compromise and innovation.
If you listen to much of the politically charged media coverage of immigration, the situation can feel entrenched, like the battle lines were drawn years ago, the debate calcified by a string of almost-reforms that never quite found a way to pass. But at the border itself, it felt to me as if the opposite is true. The challenges — and the potential solutions — are rapidly changing. There is new ground here for compromise and for innovation.
Only a few years ago, the
demographics of migrants arriving at the border began to shift from being mostly single adults seeking economic opportunity to include far more families and unaccompanied children seeking asylum.
In Mexico, an official we spoke to at the local Chihuahua state migrant reception agency (COESPO), said that when more and more families began to arrive in 2019, no one was prepared. A pastor we met who runs a migrant shelter in Juárez said that in a span of just months, he went from housing 60 adult males to 280 mothers and children.
But a lot has changed in a short time. From a few uncoordinated shelters in Juárez, COESPO now organizes reception and placement to a network of more than 15 locations. Pastor Fierro is hard at work expanding his own space, proudly showing us a new building next to the shelter with room for more beds and a space to conduct language and employment assistance classes. In El Paso, the same: An organized shelter network — led
by local faith leaders — has emerged and now works directly with CBP to help process arriving asylum seekers on the U.S. side of the border.
There are new challenges at the border, and communities in El Paso and Juárez are responding dynamically to create more orderly, more welcoming spaces for vulnerable migrants.
The outside of a Migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez.
2. We need more orderly, more secure, and more humane processes at the border.
Despite this progress, another theme we heard again and again was the urgent need for a more orderly, more humane process for those seeking protection at the border.
For over a year, Mexican officials told us, the El Paso crossing points have been closed to asylum seekers. There is no line to join. And for those who do make it across, the use of a Trump-era rule called Title 42 has meant that most arriving migrants since March of 2020 have been immediately forced back into Mexico without any chance to apply for asylum. The expulsions happen rapidly, sometimes in the dead of night, often after a "lateral flight" to a completely different part of the border.
The policy seems designed to create chaos. It prevents asylum seekers from accessing protection, but it also encourages attempts to cross from those who are determined to enter without inspection. There are no punishments for repeat crossings under the protocol, and as the Border Patrol agents
told us, the rapid nature of the expulsions means many try to cross repeatedly in quick succession.
The whole thing plays right into the hands of the cartels. The going rate for three trips is $12,000, one shelter organizer told us.
3. It’s time for a new approach.
As demographics change, the infrastructure at our border — which was designed to treat asylum seekers as exceptions — is increasingly out of date.
The Border Patrol agents we spoke to — each of whom have spent more than a decade in the distinctive olive green — shared how when they were trainees in a post-9/11 environment, the agency was all about chasing down bad guys in the desert. Their mission was to stop terrorists and hard drugs from crossing the border.
But now, they noted, much of their work is about rescuing asylum seekers who have come to turn themselves in. These agents, trained to secure the border against threats, now serve as the first line of welcome for unaccompanied children fleeing violence. One spoke of a post he held recently where he spent 10 hours a day in a chair processing asylum claims.
I left the border more convinced of the need for a new approach: Can we use trained personnel with childcare experience to
help process asylum seekers while CBP focuses on securing the border? Can we find a way to open ports of entry to asylum seekers safely and securely? And can we find a more orderly, more humane process to replace Title 42?
You can read my full reflection piece here.
Thanks for reading,
Danilo Zak
Policy & Advocacy Manager
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