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Mass shootings have simply become a part of American life. We have had more mass shootings than days so far in 2023. More broadly, gun-related tragedies happen every day across America, including the shooting of an unarmed African American teenager last week in Kansas City, Mo. There are simply too many tragedies caused by firearms for ordinary Americans to keep track of them. Gun violence now seems so woven into the fabric of our culture that, for the most part, it recedes from sight, only gaining attention when a shooting is deemed so troubling or unexpected that it makes national news for a few days. We as a society have grown numb to daily, horrific, preventable tragedy.
The problem of guns in America is vast and complex. In a chilling 2022 piece, The Times named our age the “era of the gun,” with gun violence as the leading cause of death among children in the United States. This is a national crisis. Studies have shown comprehensively that more guns and easier access to guns leads, inevitably, to more gun deaths, which is why America is a global outlier when it comes to rates of gun violence. As German Lopez wrote for The Times last year: “In every country, people get into arguments, hold racist views or suffer from mental health issues. But in the U.S., it is easier for those people to pick up a gun and shoot someone.”
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Don Lemon during the second night of CNN’s Democratic presidential primary debate in Detroit in 2019. Mr. Lemon had a reputation as a fiery political commentator at the network. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
Mr. Lemon, one of the network’s most recognizable stars, had been under scrutiny since an uproar over on-air remarks he made about women and aging in February.
CNN said on Monday that it was parting ways with Mr. Lemon, a star anchor who was a fixture of the network’s prime-time lineup before enduring a short but controversial tenure as a morning show co-host.
“CNN and Don have parted ways,” the network said in a statement on Monday. “Don will forever be a part of the CNN family, and we thank him for his contributions over the past 17 years. We wish him well and will be cheering him on in his future endeavors.”
The network said Mr. Lemon’s morning show, which he hosted with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins, would continue. “‘CNN This Morning’ has been on the air for nearly six months, and we are committed to its success,” CNN said.
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A view of the destroyed Antonivsky Road Bridge over the Dnieper River in Kherson, Ukraine. Russia has denied reports that Ukrainian forces have crossed the river, which is seen as a potential goal for an anticipated counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces. (photo: LIBKOS/AP)
Russian-installed official denies reports that Kyiv’s forces have taken up positions on river’s east bank.
The US Institute for the Study of War said on Sunday that published geodata and reports by Russian military bloggers indicated that Ukrainian forces have taken up positions on the east bank of the river.
However, the extent and objectives of these Ukrainian successes, recorded for the first time, were unclear, according to the US-based think tank.
Russian military forces withdrew from the regional capital, also called Kherson, and from the Dnieper’s west bank in the region during a Ukrainian offensive late last year.
Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern command, neither confirmed nor denied the report of the riverbank advance, which she told Ukrainian television foreshadowed “very powerful shelling” in districts around the west bank cities of Kherson and Beryslav.
“Reacting to such information, the enemy has significantly intensified its attacks on the opposite bank,” she said, referring to the reported river crossing. Civilians had been injured and about 30 buildings destroyed, including a school, she said.
She also called for “informational silence” to ensure operational security.
“I want everyone to understand that it is very difficult work to cross an obstacle like the Dnieper, for example, when the front line runs along such a wide, powerful river,” she said.
“It’s necessary to gather up some patience.”
The Dnieper has for months marked the contact line in the Kherson region, where its capital is regularly pummelled by shelling from Russian forces stationed on the other side of the river.
Ukrainian forces have reportedly established a foothold near the town of Oleshky across the Dnieper River Delta from Kherson, and the Institute for the Study of War said they were also approaching the nearby village of Dachi. The think tank cited data from Russian military bloggers for this assessment.
The Kremlin-installed head of the Kherson region denied that Ukrainian forces have established a foothold on the river’s east bank.
Vladimir Saldo said on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces are “in full control” of the area, and he speculated that the images referenced by the Institute for the Study of War may have depicted Ukrainian sabotage units that “managed to take a selfie” across the Dnieper before being forced back.
Analysts widely believe that if Ukraine goes ahead with a spring counteroffensive, a major goal would be to break through the land corridor that Russia managed to capture early in the war between its territory and the annexed Crimean Peninsula. Such an operation would require crossing the Dnieper River.
According to the military bloggers referenced by the ISW, Ukrainian forces have been operating on the east bank for weeks and have established positions west of the Antonivsky bridge where they have “established stable supply lines”. One blogger claimed that Russian forces control an area 1.5 km (a little less than a mile) behind the bridge but that Ukrainian forces are in control of the rest, according to the ISW.
Fighting more than a year into Russia’s invasion has become a war of attrition with neither side able to gain momentum. The fiercest battles have been in the eastern region of Donetsk, where Russia is struggling to encircle the city of Bakhmut in the face of dogged Ukrainian resistance.
Russian Ministry of Defence spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Sunday that Moscow’s forces had captured two more neighbourhoods in the western part of Bakhmut without providing details or clarifying what areas were still in Ukrainian hands.
Ukraine has recently received sophisticated weapons from its Western allies and soldiers newly trained in the West, giving rise to growing anticipation of a counteroffensive in the coming months.
US-made Patriot missiles arrived in Ukraine last week, and Ukrainian military spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said in a television report that some have already gone into battlefield service.
Russia is also expected to launch more intensive attacks in the spring, but the Institute for the Study of War reported that top Russian defence figures are showing signs that they may be pushing for a consolidation of existing gains in Ukraine rather than costly new operations as Moscow struggles with supplies of both material and manpower.
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Medication abortions are considered as safe as surgical abortions administered by a doctor in a clinic. (photo: Meridith Kohut/NYT)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We are now turning to the U.S. Supreme Court decision, that closely watched decision, where the Supreme Court Friday halted a ban and other restrictions on the abortion medication mifespristone on Friday, keeping the nation’s most popular abortion method available for now as an appeal of the nationwide ban on the pill plays out. The ban was issued earlier this month by the Trump-appointed, right-wing Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, who ruled the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone was invalid. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the only ones to dissent in the 7-to-2 ruling. The case is still likely to end up in front of the Supreme Court after making its way through a lower appeals court.
This has led to mounting calls to restructure the nation’s highest court. On Friday, New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “The court has devolved into a highly politicized entity that is rapidly delegitimizing. Open discussion of checking the court’s abuse of power … defying Kacsmaryk possibly contributed to pause/consideration.The court has devolved into a highly politicized entity that is rapidly delegitimizing. Open discussion of checking the court’s abuse of power and defying Kacsmaryk possibly contributed to pause/consideration.” AOC and others had called on the federal government to defy the Texas judge’s order. Arguments in the challenge to the mifespristone ban are scheduled for May 17th.
For more, we go to Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King professor of law at the University of California, Davis, author of six books, including Roe: The History of a National Obsession and Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment. Her new piece for The Atlantic is headlined “The Justices Pass on an Abortion-Pill Ban…Until they hear a better case.”
Welcome back, Professor Ziegler, to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Explain what you mean. Talk about the significance of the Supreme Court ruling on Friday.
MARY ZIEGLER: Well, the significance on the ground is hard to underestimate, because, of course, this means that people will have access to this pill, mifespristone, on the same terms they did before this litigation began. But we don’t want to read too much into it, either. This is what’s considered a shadow docket ruling, meaning there was no oral argument, meaning we don’t really know why the majority of the justices did what they did. And, of course, it’s early in the litigation.
But I think most of us are probably correct to assume that this doesn’t bode well for the anti-abortion groups that are the plaintiffs in this suit. Seven of the justices sided with the FDA, and that’s a preview of what they think of the merits of the case. But that doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is generally any less hostile to abortion or any less conservative than was the case before. Most likely, it just means that this was a lousy case. There were real questions about whether these plaintiffs had standing to sue. They brought this case 23 years after the FDA approved mifespristone, so there were questions about whether it was a timely lawsuit. And so, it may just be that no matter how conservative the justices are, they thought this case is procedurally so flawed that we can’t sign off on it. But there are lots of, unsurprisingly, anti-abortion lawsuits in the pipeline, because anti-abortion lawyers understand how conservative the Supreme Court is right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can explain — you had Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting. Explain what that meant and what it signifies for the future. And, of course, I mean, you have this Supreme Court that’s completely bogged down other ways, as well. And the serious questions being asked about Clarence Thomas, if you think that weighed in? And this isn’t separate from — I mean, that would be levels of corruption, not reporting financial support from this billionaire donor. It’s not separate from this story, because he’s deeply tied to Leonard Leo, Leonard Leo who was key to getting Kacsmaryk seated as a Trump appointee, a judge in Amarillo, Texas.
MARY ZIEGLER: Yeah, I mean, the dissent, again, I think, was bad news for these anti-abortion plaintiffs, in the sense that we don’t — we don’t know why Thomas dissented. He just dissented. He didn’t explain what he was doing. Alito dissented, essentially, to say not that he thought that the plaintiffs had standing to sue, not that he thought that the FDA didn’t have authority to approve mifespristone, not to allude to this 19th century anti-vice law called the Comstock Act, but basically to say, “I don’t think the FDA is going to suffer any harm here, because I don’t think the FDA would basically enforce any order against mifespristone anyway, because the FDA thinks mifespristone is safe and effective,” so essentially saying the FDA is either going to use its discretion to ignore anything we say or the FDA is going to be somehow kind of lawless — which was a weird thing to write. But again, bad news for the plaintiffs, because even Justice Alito wasn’t taking the time to express any kind of sympathy for any of the plaintiffs’ arguments about mifespristone itself, right?
In terms of whether Clarence Thomas’s ongoing scandals had anything to do with this, I’d be a little — a little skeptical of that. I mean, it may be that some of the justices who are now considered often the ones holding deciding votes, like Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, maybe they’re concerned with the court as an institution and the perceived legitimacy of the court. But I think there are some signs that a lot of the justices on this court are not concerned with the court’s legitimacy, don’t see themselves as stewards of the institution. I certainly think that’s true of Thomas, who at various points has sort of presented himself in very populist terms as sort of an outsider who’s opposed to institutions, not some like Chief Justice John Roberts, who, for all that he’s very conservative, does seem very anxious about perceptions of the court. Some of the other members of the current conservative majority don’t seem to share those concerns. And so, it would surprise me, for example, if someone like Neil Gorsuch, who joined the opinion staying this, the 5th Circuit’s ruling, if he was concerned about what’s going on with Clarence Thomas. I think it may be more that within the conservative legal community, there are a lot of sort of pet arguments that people like Leonard Leo have cultivated over the years, and those include arguments about standing. And these plaintiffs, I just don’t think, had standing. But I don’t know if this augurs a sort of broader shift in the court or broader concern about the legitimacy of the court that might slow down some of the really revolutionary changes the court is making in jurisprudence across the board, not just, of course, when it comes to abortion.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the Supreme Court is aware of the effect it’s having, for example, even on the elections to come, and how deeply unpopular these decisions around abortion are, that across the political spectrum the vast majority of Americans are against an anti-abortion ban?
MARY ZIEGLER: Yeah, you know, it’s hard to say. I mean, so, do I think they’re aware? Absolutely. I mean, these are intelligent people. The question is more: Do they care? Right? And there’s sort of different ways you could view the role of a deeply conservative justice, right? You could see yourself as a sort of partisan soldier, so you could see your role as being to facilitate, in part, outcomes that the Republican Party is invested in, or not, right? You could see your role as being faithful to some kind of ideology or interpretive set of commitments that have nothing to do with the GOP or nothing to do with the people who nominated you.
And I think at least some of the justices — and this was very clear in Justice Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs case last summer. Essentially, Justice Alito says, you know, people are raising the idea that this opinion will damage our legitimacy, and, one, I don’t know if that’s true, but, two, and more importantly, if it is true, we shouldn’t care about that, because the court’s legitimacy and the public perception of the court is not our job. And I think there are a number of conservative justices who really feel that way when they’re doing things that are unpopular. That’s really none of anyone else’s concern. Of course, that puts the court in some tension with the Republican leadership, because the Republican leadership wants to be able to cut its own path when it comes to abortion, and not be pushed into defending things like nationwide bans from the 19th century that the courts are bringing to the fore — right? — that people like Judge Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit are going to bring to the fore. And I think we’re going to continue to see that at least from the 5th Circuit, as the 5th Circuit continues to look at this case in May. And it may well be that the Supreme Court takes that up, as well. But I don’t know, right? I don’t know if the Supreme Court cares about its effect on elections or not. My guess is no.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Ziegler, where the access to the abortion pill? The majority of Americans who — the majority of people who use this — who get abortions use the abortion pill. Its access right now?
MARY ZIEGLER: Right now it’s the same it’s been before this litigation began. So, if you are in a blue state that has no restrictions or bans on abortion, you can get access to this pill via telehealth up to the 10th week of pregnancy. If you’re in a state that’s criminalized abortion, of course, this outcome hasn’t changed that. You’re not able to get access to the pill in your state. You would have to travel to a different state or use something like Aid Access. And so nothing has changed at the national level.
But I think this suit and, I think, the references to the Comstock Act make clear that people who are in progressive states can’t be complacent in the sense of assuming that their access to abortion will be determined by their state governments, because this is one of a series of suits that are trying to take the question out of the hands of voters and lawmakers in progressive states, essentially to kind of nationalize outcomes via the federal courts.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you, Mary Ziegler, for joining us, Martin Luther King professor of law at the University of California, Davis. We’ll link to your piece in The Atlantic, “The Justices Pass on an Abortion-Pill Ban…Until they hear a better case.”
We’re going to go to a 30-second break, then hopefully we’ll be able to connect with the Norwegian Refugee Council about Sudan and Honduras. Stay with us.
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks during a press conference at the US-Mexico border in Cochise County, Arizona, on February 16, 2023. (photo: Rebecca Noble/AFP)
Proposed GOP immigration legislation is too harsh, even for some Republicans.
The GOP’s extreme border package — which includes an effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — is unlikely to gain enough votes to pass with the Republicans’ slim majority, but time is running out to pass comprehensive immigration legislation before the Covid-era Title 42 order is set to expire May 11. That order allows the government to deport migrants for public health reasons, without giving them the opportunity to apply for asylum.
The end of Title 42 likely portends a fresh wave of migrants coming to the US border to apply for asylum protections — an event for which the system has long been ill-equipped. But instead of providing resources to speed up asylum hearings, for example, perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Republicans’ legislation is that it targets the ability to even seek asylum, which is affirmed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The US, as a signatory to the declaration, has an obligation to uphold its principles, but the UDHR is not a legally binding document.
Previous legislation, introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), set out similarly harsh policies; his bill would allow the DHS head to stop all border crossings of undocumented people through any point of entry so DHS could maintain “operational control” of the border. That legislation, first introduced in January, proved shocking even to some within Roy’s party, including Rep. Tony Gonzalez of Texas.
“Trying to ban legitimate asylum claims — one, it’s not Christian, and two, to me, it’s very anti-American,” Gonzalez said. “So a lot is at stake.” Vox reached out to Gonzalez’s office for a comment on Wednesday’s legislation but did not receive a response by press time.
The latest package is divisive among House Republicans, too, for its attempt to impeach Mayorkas — something House Speaker Kevin McCarthy threatened to do as part of his turbulent leadership campaign. But in a sharply divided majority, some Republicans see the impeachment efforts as misplaced: “This is really Joe Biden’s policies, more than Mayorkas, and are we going to impeach the president on this? No,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told the New York Times.
Some Republicans also object to changes to a program called E-Verify, which businesses use to cross-check employees’ documentation against DHS and Social Security records. Requiring businesses to use E-Verify could dramatically affect the functioning of the agricultural industry, which relies on undocumented migrant labor.
The end of Title 42 means more people seeking asylum
With the likely end of the Title 42 policy fast approaching, there will be a probable corresponding uptick in asylum seekers, too, as the government won’t be able to use the public health order to remove them. As of December 2022, Title 42 had been used an estimated 2.5 million times to expel migrants since it was put in place in March 2020, the Associated Press reported at the time.
But, as both Democrats and Republicans have said, the immigration system is unprepared to manage the thousands of people who will attempt a border crossing after Title 42 ends. As Vox reported in December,
The fact remains that the immigration system is overstretched and inefficient; the average wait time for immigration cases has skyrocketed from around a year in 1998 to around two and a half years in 2021, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration system. Migrants are held in substandard, unsafe conditions under the Remain in Mexico program, and both nonprofit and government resources designed to assist them after they reach the US are already overwhelmed.
US immigration policy has not seen significant changes since the Immigration Act of 1990, and the pre-Title 42 asylum system had not been altered since 1980. The Obama administration introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program, to protect undocumented people brought to the US as children, but otherwise, there’s been almost no movement to reform the immigration system since 1990. There has been an overall increase in people attempting to enter the US via the southern border — which the right has turned into a culture war bogeyman, best exemplified by former President Donald Trump’s attempt to build a border wall.
Under the proposed GOP legislation, migrants would be barred from applying for asylum in the US for a broad swathe of reasons, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, wrote in an April 19 blog post.
Almost all migrants who lived in the US undocumented for more than a year or did not apply for asylum in a third transit country would be barred from the asylum process, as would many people fleeing persecution in their home countries, Reichlin-Melnick wrote. That’s because the bill significantly narrows the definition of who can apply for asylum based on political opinion, and would cut off paths to asylum for those fleeing threats from non-state actors, guerrilla or terrorist groups, or gangs.
“Taken together, these provisions would eliminate the U.S. asylum system as it has existed since the Refugee Act of 1980,” he wrote. “Only those who have the money to buy a direct flight to the United States would have any real chance of access [to] the asylum system—and even then, most would be unable to win given the proposed narrowing of asylum law.”
What are the alternatives?
Menendez, the Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set out his own plan for managing the influx of migrants on Tuesday, relying primarily on executive orders, rather than congressional action.
“Successive U.S. administrations have designed their domestic and foreign policies to respond to shifting needs at the border, an approach that has not created a sustainable long-term solution to a mixed flow of migrants and refugees,” Menendez told CNN This Morning on Wednesday. “If we continue down the road where we’ve been, which is reactive and responsive and an enforcement-only mechanism, we’re going to continue to have the same problem.”
Menendez’s plan suggests Biden issue executive orders which would increase resources to process asylum seekers at the border — as well as provide for expedited removal for those who don’t qualify. Menendez’s plan also calls for increased access to free legal aid and for people to await asylum hearings in humane conditions, or “non-detention settings.”
The plan also calls for increased cooperation with Latin American nations to reduce the conditions, like economic necessity and violence, that cause migration, as well as help Latin American and Caribbean nations manage migration more safely. To that end, the US, Colombia, and Panama have also agreed to work on limiting migration and smuggling through the perilous Darien Gap, which has recently become a popular route for people attempting to enter the US.
Menendez’s tactic of going around Congress and advising the White House to issue these orders does, at this point, seem to be the only likely way to make any changes on immigration for the time being. But unless and until there’s any effort from Congress to address the US’s immigration system as well as the causal factors that drive it, these programs are always in danger of elimination by the next administration. With just a year and a half till the 2024 elections, the programs Menendez suggests could be eliminated before they can prove their effectiveness.
In the meantime, the GOP is continuing to move forward with its extremist immigration policies — without a guaranteed winning strategy, but also without a clear legislative alternative that can manage the arrival of thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants over the next several months.
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Ciudad Juárez, where a detention center fire killed 40 people on March 27. (photo: Alejandro Rosales/Wikimedia Commons)
The fire that killed 40 people on March 27 is the foreseeable consequence of binational immigration enforcement measures by the United States and Mexico.
Because asylum traditionally applies to people physically in the United States, an asylum claim often begins when individuals are apprehended on the U.S. side of the border. That process is now being pushed into Mexico under inadequate systems of management and enforcement. The overcrowding in detention centers like Estación Lerdo was the direct result of orders to arrest migrants in downtown Ciudad Juárez, many of whom had legal status in Mexico. But multiple orchestrated policies from both countries placed these men in a Mexican government migration building with locked doors, where they were trapped in a terrible fire.
The United States is complicit in these deaths and current policy problematically incorporates Mexico as a key component of border enforcement. Our analysis draws on current research coauthor Jeremy Slack is conducting with asylum seekers in Ciudad Juárez.
The United States’ Asylum Ban
Currently, United States border policy involves near-immediate expulsions with no due process and no asylum options for many unauthorized border crossers. This occurs under Title 42, a U.S. public health law provision restricting the entry of non-citizens if they pose a “serious danger” of introducing a communicable disease. Under Title 42, migrants are either expelled to their home country or Mexico. The expulsion of non-Mexicans to Mexico, by agreement between the two countries, includes individuals from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti. Migrants from the first four countries compose the bulk of the dead and injured in the fire.
While it is possible that the fire victims were all expelled under Title 42, some may have been waiting to attempt entry through the heavily guarded border. Regardless, without Title 42, those individuals would likely not have been in Mexico for the extended period that led to their apprehension in the streets of Juárez and detention in the “shelter.”
Title 42 is set to expire on May 11, the date set by the Biden administration to end the Covid-19 public health emergency, although lawsuits are underway attempting to keep it in place. Many other people are expelled at the border under immigration law provision Title 8, which enables limited due-process and the “expedited removal” of unauthorized entrants. A claim of asylum to the standard of credible fear, or in some cases reasonable fear, can halt the Title 8 expulsion, but U.S. pattern and practice at the border involves inconsistent application of asylum law. Furthermore, not all people have a basis for asylum, and may be rapidly expelled to Mexico.
For a limited portion of asylum seekers waiting in northern Mexico, a flawed alternative is to seek an appointment with U.S. authorities on a smart phone application called CBP One. If successful, applicants will have an asylum screening appointment directly at a U.S. port of entry. This app replaced advocacy organization staff who screened people waiting in Mexican northern border cities, identifying people with safety and health risks to be screened for asylum.
Our research and other evidence shows that the app has worked poorly, with constant glitches and insufficient appointment slots. High quality data service and adequate phones are hard to come by, and due to the high demand, any data or software failure can deny access to an appointment for the day. Users report that the portal often halts a few minutes after launching it in the morning. Facial recognition of darker skinned people is hampered by racial bias in the software, preventing some applicants from obtaining an appointment. The application was not designed to make joint appointments for family members, requiring multiple appointments even for young children who must apply alone (some agents will turn people away when this happens, while others allow them to apply). Due to security fears related to China, Huawei phones are incompatible with CBP One even though these phones are more affordable and frequently used by asylum seekers. Even when people complete their application in the allotted two minutes, the appointment is invalid without a confirmation email. Applicants have described trying to arrive for their appointments with screen shots only to be turned away by U.S. officials. The health and security risk criteria for asylum seekers is narrow and does not include important factors, such as LGBTQIA+ status. Furthermore, as the Ciudad Juárez fire shows, being an outsider under these strained circumstance poses increased risks. Non-Mexicans are often discriminated against in Mexico, and people lacking local social connections are readily victimized in northern border cities.
The United States’ bureaucratic response to these problems has been slow at best and malicious at worst. There is little recourse for asylum seekers to file complaints about the application. Resolving the issues with the app—providing adequate appointment slots, technical functionality, and clear expectations—could reduce risks for asylum seekers. An appointment at the port of entry is far superior to the expensive and dangerous crossing now needed for people to flag down authorities and begin an asylum claim. Even with substantial wait times, a reliable date would allow asylum seekers to find a safer and more comfortable place to await their appointments. As it stands, potential applicants have to be physically present in border cities, tracked by geolocation, and obligated to live in shelters, abandoned buildings, or encampments where they experience insecurity and exposure to the elements. This has escalated tensions between residents of Ciudad Juárez and asylum seekers, particularly Venezuelans who can be seen begging in the street throughout the downtown area. In response, state and local authorities have escalated anti-immigrant operations throughout the city.
The U.S. government has opened another route to temporary refuge in the United States: two-year humanitarian parole, which should reduce the need for people to cross Mexico and converge on the border. Parole is generally applied for in one’s country of origin and involves flying to the United States. However, it has serious limitations and applies only to applicants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Of these, only Venezuelans appear on the list of victims in Ciudad Juárez. The other main nationalities—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—are not eligible, even though compelling cases for asylum can be made for individuals coming from each of these countries (and Mexico). Humanitarian parole also requires a sponsor with economic resources in the United States, an airplane ticket, and a passport, which many potential asylum seekers do not have. These factors favor wealthier and more privileged applicants. Furthermore, people who irregularly crossed either the Panamanian or Mexican borders are not eligible for humanitarian parole, meaning this provision does not address the many people trapped in Mexico.
Looming on the horizon, the Biden administration has proposed a draconian reduction to the legal right to claim asylum, which would largely revive measures proposed during the Trump years that were blocked in the courts. These include the need to apply for asylum in third countries and restrictions on applying for asylum between ports of entry. For many migrants, immediate expulsion under these distortions of asylum policy will replace Title 42 if and when it ends. A continuation of these policies will undoubtedly lead to future tragedies akin to the Estación Lerdo fire as many thousands of people remain trapped in Mexico.
Mexico as Immigration Enforcer
Mexico’s role in this tragedy goes beyond accepting U.S. policies that send asylum seekers back to Mexico. Mexico’s increase in immigration and border policing centers largely on the formation of the National Guard (GN). In 2019, as Trump threatened to cut off trade from Mexico, President Andres Manuel López Obrador dissolved the federal police and incorporated its members and sectors of the armed forces into the GN, whose principal mission has been to impede asylum seekers from crossing through Mexico. The GN collaborates closely with the Nacional Migration Institute (INM) but has been plagued with scandals. Some 8,565 complaints have been filed about criminal behavior by the GN between 2019 and 2022, but only 1,135 investigations carried out during this period. Complaints include ties to criminal organizations, extortion, kidnapping, and even murder. On the northern border, asylum seekers indicate that the GN has worked closely with criminal organizations to control human smuggling, often stopping people to collect bribes and demanding they cross with “approved” smugglers.
With tensions rising, the police, GN, and INM agents began arresting people for vagrancy or immigration violations in the weeks leading up to the fire. Generally, asylum seekers thought of authorities at the border as fairly benign, unlikely to send people back to their home country. In a February interview conducted in Ciudad Juárez, an asylum seeker from Venezuela said “If they catch you before Mexico City, they send you to Guatemala. If they catch you in Chihuahua [city] they send you to Mexico City, but up here they don’t bother you.”
However, this has begun to change as people are increasingly swept up, detained, and threatened with deportation if they cannot pay a bribe. While local sentiment has been heavily focused on Venezuelans, the largely Indigenous and poorer asylum seekers from Guatemala have born the brunt of enforcement, likely because they have less money for bribes. Title 42 and other restrictive U.S. policies have largely targeted asylum seekers from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The last three nationalities made up three-quarters of those killed and injured in the fire.
Mexico has frequently changed course on the passage of migrants and asylum seekers through their territory, at times cracking down, forcing people on top of trains, and in other moments allowing people to take buses and travel safely through the country. With the recent increase in arrests, there have been considerable concerns about detention conditions in Mexico. The country has little oversight over security forces and is unprepared to detain foreign nationals in INM facilities. A recent report by researchers at the Universidad Iberoamericano de Puebla has shown abuses, lack of due process, minors detained without adults, suicide attempts, and lack of access to healthcare. Mexico’s rapid militarization of immigration enforcement means that migrants will continue to suffer in inhumane conditions with limited oversight and accountability.
Lessons to be Learned
The true cost of these policies must also consider those individuals that were turned back and killed in their home countries, and those kidnapped and killed along the border that aren’t included in official figures.The lack of direction, sudden policy changes, and inhumane conditions faced by migrants in violent border cities make the tragedy at Estación Lerdo foreseeable and preventable. It is imperative that both the United States and Mexico engage in good faith efforts to uphold the law and provide a clear process for asylum-seekers. Restrictive and chaotic border policies have led to many deaths, far beyond the 40 who died in the fire. Of the record 853 deaths reported on the border in 2022, many would not have taken those risks if allowed to apply for asylum at a legal port of entry. The true cost of these policies must also consider those individuals that were turned back and killed in their home countries, and those kidnapped and killed along the border that aren’t included in official figures. Attention has focused on the inexcusable INM orders to maintain the building locked while the fire burned, but a deeper understanding of the causes of this tragedy implicates the increasingly joined repressive immigration policies of both the United States and Mexico.
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Munduruku leader Alessandra Korap in San Francisco, on April 19, 2023. (photo: Eric Risberg/AP)
Alessandra Korap's defense of her ancestral Munduruku territory recognized how she and others overturned the traditionally all-male leadership to organize, helping to halt mining.
It wasn’t just her village feeling the encroachment of non-Indigenous outsiders. Two major federal highways paved the way for tens of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners and loggers into the region’s vast Indigenous territories, which cover a forested area roughly the size of Belgium.
The influx posed a grave threat to Korap’s Munduruku people, 14,000-strong and spread throughout the Tapajos River Basin, in Para and Mato Grosso states. Soon illegal mining, hydroelectric dams, a major railway and river ports for soybean exports choked their lands — lands they were still struggling to have recognized.
Korap and other Munduruku women took up the responsibility of defending their people, overturning the traditionally all-male leadership. Organizing in their communities, they orchestrated demonstrations, presented compelling evidence of environmental crime to the Federal Attorney General and Federal Police, and vehemently opposed illicit agreements and incentives offered to the Munduruku by unscrupulous miners, loggers, corporations, and politicians seeking access to their land.
Korap’s defense of her ancestral territory was recognized with the Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday. The award honors grassroots activists around the world who are dedicated to protecting the environment and promoting sustainability.
“This award is an opportunity to draw attention to the demarcation of the Sawre Muybu territory,” Korap told The Associated Press. “It is our top priority, along with the expulsion of illegal miners.”
Sawre Muybu is an area of virgin rainforest along the Tapajos River spanning 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres). Official recognition for the land, or demarcation, began in 2007 but was frozen during the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, which ended in January.
Still, the Munduruku people celebrated a victory in 2021 when the British mining company Anglo American gave up trying to mine inside Indigenous territories in Brazil, including Sawre Muybu.
Studies have shown that Indigenous-controlled forests are the best preserved the in Brazilian Amazon.
Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation. The destruction is so vast now that the eastern Amazon, not far from the Munduruku, has ceased to be a carbon sink, or net absorber of the gas and is now a carbon source, according to a study published in 2021 in the journal Nature.
Korap, however, knows that land rights alone don’t protect the land.
In the neighboring Munduruku Indigenous Territory, illegal miners have destroyed and contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways in search of gold, even though it was officially recognized in 2004.
Now Brazil’s new government has created the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and more recently mounted operations to drive out miners. But Korap remains skeptical of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She sees his actions as contradictory, noting that while he advocates for forest protection, he also negotiates trade deals with other countries to sell more of the country’s top exports — beef and soybeans — which are the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil.
“When Lula travels abroad, he is sitting with rich people and not with forest defenders. A ministry is useless if the government negotiates our lands without acknowledging we are here,” she said.
Other Goldman Environmental Prize recipients this year are:
— Tero Mustonen, a university professor and environmental activist from Finland, who led the purchase of peatland damaged by state-sponsored industrial activity.
—Delima Silalahi, a Batak woman from North Sumatra, Indonesia, who organized Indigenous communities across the country to advocate for their rights to traditional forests.
—Chilekwa Mumba, a Zambian community organizer who has fought for and won compensation for residents harmed by copper mining before the UK Supreme Court.
—Zafer Kizilkaya of Turkey, a marine conservationist and conservation photographer who established Turkey’s first community-managed marine protected area in the Mediterranean.
—Diane Wilson, an American shrimp boat captain who won a landmark case against petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics over the discharge of plastic waste on the Texas Gulf Coast.
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