US and Mexico fail to fulfill promise to women seeking asylum: specialists

Emir Olivares Alonso

Newspaper La Jornada
Thursday, February 3, 2022, p. eleven

Jéssica fled Honduras because of the violence. She applied for asylum in the United States and was sent to Mexican territory under the controversial Stay in Mexico program. In Ciudad Juárez, she and a friend of hers were detained and raped by members of the National Guard. They were confined in an immigration station, and months later they were deported without giving them the opportunity to report the crime.

Her testimony is part of a report prepared by the Commission for Refugee Women and the Institute for Women in Migration, which concludes that due to the immigration policies of the governments of Mexico and the United States, women asylum seekers suffer kidnapping, sexual assault, extortion, family separation, gender violence, discrimination, lack of access to health and education services for their children, among other scenarios.

The investigation –carried out based on interviews with the victims and monitoring of cases– indicates that both administrations have broken their promises of safe, orderly and humane migration, leaving thousands of women trapped in uncertainty and danger.

The results of the report, titled Trapped in uncertainty and exposed to violence. The impact of the immigration policies of the United States and Mexico on women applicants for international protection in 2021were released yesterday in the context of the first anniversary of President Joe Biden’s executive orders on migration and asylum.

In 2019, Mariana and her two children fled Honduras. Her husband beat them and was involved with a gang. Months later they arrived at the southern border of the United States and applied for asylum. Under the Stay in Mexico program, they were sent to our country and lived on the streets. Mariana was raped in Monterrey and she became pregnant. A Mexican sheltered them in her house until the baby was born in October 2020. All that year her other two little ones did not go to school. When Biden decreed the end of Stay in Mexico – which was reactivated last December by order of a judge – he registered on the UNHCR portal, but they did not call him to give him entry to US territory.

I have been trying for two years to follow the rules, my children are two years older now, I have a baby and I don’t know what to do. I cannot return to Honduras, I am afraid of being in Mexico and they do not allow me to request asylum in the United States. I feel losthe says in his testimony.

The abuses do not only occur in Mexico, the report takes up the attacks in September 2021 by Border Patrol agents against Haitian migrants.

Another documented case is that of a Central American woman who was promised a job in Chiapas, but in reality it was a deception to subject her to human trafficking. For six months she was the victim of constant sexual abuse until she escaped from it. The Mexican authorities did not respond to her complaints. In October 2021, four Chiapas police officers raped and murdered a Haitian woman. They were arrested for femicide.