Trump's "Remain in Mexico" Asylum Policy Causes Kidnapping, Rape, Murder With Children Watching

The United States asylum policy is to demand children sleep on the streets in Mexico in encampments while tricking them because they're never going to give them asylum. This is pure evil trickery happening on our watch with little awareness and outrage.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled Central America over the past year, many of them seeking asylum in the United States from threats of extortion, murder and forced recruitment into gangs. But instead of allowing them to enter, the Trump administration has forced more than 55,000 asylum seekers to wait for months in lawless Mexican border towns like Reynosa while it considers their requests for protection, according to Mexican officials and those who study the border.

Drug-related violence has long plagued these areas but this bottleneck of migrants is new — and because many asylum seekers have relatives in the United States, criminal cartels have begun kidnapping them and demanding ransoms, sometimes subjecting them to violence as bad or worse than what they fled.

In the past, migrants from places like Central America, Africa and Asia seeking asylum were allowed to enter the United States while their claims were adjudicated. Those who could not demonstrate a fear of persecution usually were ordered deported to their home countries. That changed earlier this year with the adoption of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which most asylum applicants are prevented from entering the United States except for their court hearings.

Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy is forcing families into camps at our border—leaving them vulnerable to kidnapping, extortion, and even murder. WE MUST END this policy on day one and restore our commitment to asylum seekers.

There have been 636 documented cases of violent attacks, including abduction and rape, against migrants who were returned to Mexico by United States authorities since the Remain in Mexico policy began in January, with 293 attacks in the last month alone, according to Human Rights First. The advocacy group based its tally on credible reports from researchers, lawyers and media outlets, but said the actual numbers were likely higher because most incidents go unreported.

Here is a haunting story of the violence migrant families face trying to secure better lives. 

A 28-year-old woman from El Salvador and her 3-year-old son were abducted — not once but twice — after arriving at the border. The woman, who gave her name as Nora, said that in August they were held hostage until a family member in Houston transferred $2,200 to their captors.

Then in October, Nora said, she took her son to use the bathroom outside the encampment where they were staying and encountered three men. She was blindfolded, she said, and the men took turns raping her over several hours, in front of her son, before dumping the two of them on the side of a road.  “I surrendered to American immigration and thought we would be safe,” she said in a recent interview at a shelter in Reynosa.

Here's another:

He remembers being on his knees, gagged and blinded with duct tape, his hands tied behind his back. One of his captors struck his left thigh with a bat and scraped his neck with an ax, threatening to cut him.  His 3-year-old son watched and wailed.  “Tell the boy to shut up. Make him shut up,” one of the men barked, ripping the duct tape from his mouth.

A few hours earlier, the 28-year-old migrant from Honduras, whose name is José, had been walking with his son down a street in Reynosa, Mexico, having been turned back at the border by the United States. Suddenly three men grabbed him, shoved a hood over his head and thrust him and his son into a vehicle.

This is a crisis in our power to end.  We need elected officials and to elect officials that have the empathy to change our immoral immigration policies.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/us/border-migrants-kidnapping-mexico.html