After a long, steady decline in overall Mexican immigration following its peak in 2000, the number of Mexican asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border has been steadily rising in recent months.
Mexican nationals now account for slightly more than half of the 21,000 or so people on various asylum waiting lists in Mexican border towns,last month by researchers at the University of Texas and UC San Diego. A year ago, relatively few Mexican nationals were in the bulging border asylum queues.
For U.S. officials, the Mexican influx poses a special challenge: Unlike Central Americans and other Spanish-speaking asylum aspirants, Mexicans cannot be dispatched back to Mexico to await future court hearings, the fate of more than 50,000 asylum applicants under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. International law has long banned sending people back to countries where they may face persecution.
The Mexican asylum seekers say they are fleeing their homeland’s endemic gang violence as well as deeply entrenched poverty. Some have previously resided in the United States and have close relatives there, or have U.S.-born children reared in Mexico.till fields of opium poppies — many Mexican asylum seekers come from the southern state of Chiapas, a place not known for rampant cartel violence.
The camp — where the smell of burning wood on open cooking fires wafts through the air and women wash clothes in the contaminated waters of the Rio Grande — has becomeMany of the Central Americans stranded have been on the road for almost a year, and have already had several U.S. court appearances. Some view the Mexicans, relative newcomers, as line-jumpers — even though the Mexicans face a different initial process than the Central Americans, since they cannot be sent back to Mexico.
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