What's really happening at the US-Mexico border -- and how we can do better

At the US-Mexico border, policies of prolonged detention and family separation have made seeking asylum in the United States difficult and dangerous. In this raw and heartfelt talk, immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro offers a glimpse into her daily work on both sides of the border and shares some of the stories behind the statistics -- including her own story of being detained and separated from her son. It's a clear-eyed call to remember the humanity that's impacted by policy -- and a warning: "History shows us that the first population to be vilified and stripped of their rights is rarely the last," she says.

Twice a week,

I drive from my home near Tijuana, Mexico,

over the US border,
to my office in San Diego.

The stark contrast between the poverty
and desperation on one side of the border

and the conspicuous wealth on the other

always feels jarring.

But what makes this contrast
feel even starker

is when I pass by the building
that those of us who work on the border

unaffectionately refer to
as the black hole.

The black hole is the Customs
and Border Protection,

or CBP facility,

at the San Ysidro port of entry,

right next to a luxury outlet mall.

It's also where, at any one time,

there's likely 800 immigrants

locked in freezing, filthy,
concrete cells below the building.

Up top: shopping bags and frappuccinos.

Downstairs: the reality
of the US immigration system.

And it's where, one day
in September of 2018,

I found myself trying to reach Anna,

a woman who CBP had recently separated
from her seven-year-old son.

I'm an immigration attorney

and the policy and litigation director
of Al Otro Lado,

a binational nonprofit helping immigrants
on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

We'd met Anna several weeks earlier
at our Tijuana office,

where she explained that she feared
she and her son would be killed in Mexico.

So we prepared her for the process
of turning herself over to CBP

to ask for asylum.

A few days after she'd gone
to the port of entry to ask for help,

we received a frantic phone call

from her family members
in the United States,

telling us that CBP officials
had taken Anna's son from her.

Now, not that this should matter,

but I knew that Anna's son
had special needs.

And once again,

this news filled me with the sense
of panic and foreboding

that has unfortunately become
a hallmark of my daily work.

I had a signed authorization
to act as Anna's attorney,

so I rushed over to the port of entry

to see if I could speak with my client.

Not only would CBP officials
not let me speak to Anna,

but they wouldn't even tell me
if she was there.

I went from supervisor to supervisor,

begging to submit evidence
of Anna's son's special needs,

but no one would even
talk to me about the case.

It felt surreal to watch
the shoppers strolling idly by

what felt like a life-and-death situation.

After several hours
of being stonewalled by CBP,

I left.

Several days later,

I found Anna's son
in the foster-care system.

But I didn't know what happened to Anna

until over a week later,

when she turned up
at a detention camp a few miles east.

Now, Anna didn't have a criminal record,

and she followed the law
when asking for asylum.

Still, immigration officials
held her for three more months,

until we could win her release

and help her reunify with her son.

Anna's story is not
the only story I could tell you.

There's Mateo, an 18-month-old boy,

who was ripped from his father's arms

and sent to a government shelter
thousands of miles away,

where they failed
to properly bathe him for months.

There's Amadou,

an unaccompanied African child,

who was held with adults for 28 days
in CBP's horrific facilities.

Most disturbingly, there's Maria,

a pregnant refugee who begged
for medical attention for eight hours

before she miscarried in CBP custody.

CBP officials held her
for three more weeks

before they sent her back to Mexico,

where she is being forced to wait months

for an asylum hearing
in the United States.

Seeing these horrors
day in and day out has changed me.

I used to be fun at parties,

but now, I inevitably
find myself telling people

about how our government
tortures refugees at the border

and in the detention camps.

Now, people try to change the subject

and congratulate me for the great work
I'm doing in helping people like Anna.

But I don't know
how to make them understand

that unless they start fighting,
harder than they ever thought possible,

we don't know which of us
will be the next to suffer Anna's fate.

Trump's mass separations
of refugee families

at the southern border

shocked the conscience of the world

and woke many to the cruelties
of the US immigration system.

It seems like today,

more people than ever are involved
in the fight for immigrant rights.

But unfortunately, the situation
is just not getting better.

Thousands protested
to end family separations,

but the government
is still separating families.

More than 900 children
have been taken from their parents

since June of 2018.

Thousands more refugee children
have been taken from their grandparents,

siblings and other
family members at the border.

Since 2017,

at least two dozen people have died
in immigration custody.

And more will die, including children.

Now, we lawyers can
and will keep filing lawsuits

to stop the government
from brutalizing our clients,

but we can't keep tinkering
around the edges of the law

if we want migrants
to be treated humanely.

This administration would have you believe
that we have to separate families

and we have to detain children,

because it will stop more refugees
from coming to our borders.

But we know that this isn't true.

In fact, in 2019,

the number of apprehensions
at our southern border

has actually gone up.

And we tell people
every day at the border,

"If you seek asylum in the United States,

you risk family separation,

and you risk being detained indefinitely."

But for many of them,
the alternative is even worse.

People seek refuge in the United States
for a lot of different reasons.

In Tijuana, we've met refugees
from over 50 countries,

speaking 14 different languages.

We meet LGBT migrants
from all over the world

who have never been in a country
in which they feel safe.

We meet women from all over the world

whose own governments
refuse to protect them

from brutal domestic violence
or repressive social norms.

Of course, we meet
Central American families

who are fleeing gang violence.

But we also meet Russian dissidents,

Venezuelan activists,

Christians from China, Muslims from China,

and thousands and thousands
of other refugees

fleeing all types
of persecution and torture.

Now, a lot of these people
would qualify as refugees

under the international legal definition.

The Refugee Convention
was created after World War II

to give protection to people
fleeing persecution

based on their race, religion,
nationality, political opinion

or membership
in a particular social group.

But even those who would be refugees
under the international definition

are not going to win asylum
in the United States.

And that's because since 2017,

the US Attorneys General have made
sweeping changes to asylum law,

to make sure that less people qualify
for protection in the United States.

Now these laws are mostly aimed
at Central Americans

and keeping them out of the country,

but they affect other types
of refugees as well.

The result is that the US
frequently deports refugees

to their persecution and death.

The US is also using detention
to try to deter refugees

and make it harder for them
to win their cases.

Today, there are over 55,000 immigrants
detained in the United States,

many in remote detention facilities,

far from any type of legal help.

And this is very important.

Because it's civil
and not criminal detention,

there is no public defender system,

so most detained immigrants
are not going to have an attorney

to help them with their cases.

An immigrant who has an attorney

is up to 10 times more likely
to win their case

than one who doesn't.

And as you've seen, I hate
to be the bearer of bad news,

but the situation is even worse
for refugee families today

than it was during family separation.

Since January of 2019,

the US has implemented a policy

that's forced over 40,000 refugees
to wait in Mexico

for asylum hearings in the United States.

These refugees, many of whom are families,

are trapped in some of the most
dangerous cities in the world,

where they're being raped, kidnapped

and extorted by criminal groups.

And if they survive for long enough
to make it to their asylum hearing,

less than one percent of them
are able to find an attorney

to help them with their cases.

The US government will point
to the lowest asylum approval rates

to argue that these people
are not really refugees,

when in fact, US asylum law
is an obstacle course

designed to make them fail.

Now not every migrant
at the border is a refugee.

I meet plenty of economic migrants.

For example, people who want to go
to the United States to work,

to pay medical bills for a parent

or school fees for a child back home.

Increasingly, I'm also meeting
climate refugees.

In particular, I'm meeting
a lot of indigenous Central Americans

who can no longer
sustain themselves by farming,

due to catastrophic drought in the region.

We know that today,

people are migrating
because of climate change,

and that more will do so in the future,

but we simply don't have a legal system
to deal with this type of migration.

So, it would make sense, as a start,

to expand the refugee definition

to include climate refugees, for example.

But those of us in a position
to advocate for those changes

are too busy suing our government

to keep the meager legal protections
that refugees enjoy under the current law.

And we are exhausted,

and it's almost too late to help.

And we know now

that this isn't America's problem alone.

From Australia's brutal
offshore detention camps

to Italy's criminalization of aid
to migrants drowning in the Mediterranean,

first-world countries
have gone to deadly lengths

to keep refugees from reaching our shores.

But they've done more
than restrict the refugee definition.

They've created parallel,
fascist-style legal systems

in which migrants have none of the rights
that form the basis of a democracy,

the alleged foundation of the countries
in which they're seeking refuge.

History shows us that the first group

to be vilified and stripped
of their rights is rarely the last,

and many Americans and Europeans

seem to accept an opaque
and unjust legal system for noncitizens,

because they think they are immune.

But eventually,

these authoritarian ideals bleed over
and affect citizens as well.

I learned this firsthand

when the US government placed me
on an illegal watch list

for my work helping
immigrants at the border.

One day, in January of 2019,

I was leaving my office in San Diego

and crossing the border
to go back to my home in Mexico.

Mexican officials, although they had
given me a valid visa,

stopped me and told me
that I couldn't enter the country

because a foreign government
had placed a travel alert on my passport,

designating me
as a national security risk.

I was detained and interrogated
in a filthy room for hours.

I begged the Mexican officials

to let me go back to Mexico
and pick up my son,

who was only 10 months old at the time.

But they refused,

and instead, they turned me over
to CBP officials,

where I was forced back
into the United States.

It took me weeks to get another visa
so that I could go back to Mexico,

and I went to the border, visa in hand.

But again, I was detained and interrogated

because there was still
a travel alert on my passport.

Shortly after,

leaked internal CBP documents

confirmed that my own government

had been complicit in issuing
this travel alert against me.

And since then, I haven't traveled
to any other countries,

because I'm afraid I'll be detained

and deported from those countries as well.

These travel restrictions, detentions

and separation from my infant son

are things I never thought
I would experience as a US citizen,

but I'm far from the only person
being criminalized for helping immigrants.

The US and other countries
have made it a crime to save lives,

and those of us who are simply
trying to do our jobs

are being forced to choose
between our humanity and our freedom.

And the thing that makes me so desperate

is that all of you
are facing the same choice,

but you don't understand it yet.

And I know there are
good people out there.

I saw thousands of you in the streets,

protesting family separation.

And that largely helped
bring about an end to the official policy.

But we know that the government
is still separating children.

And things are actually getting worse.

Today, the US government
is fighting for the right

to detain refugee children
indefinitely in prison camps.

This isn't over.

We cannot allow ourselves
to become numb or look away.

Those of us who are citizens of countries

whose policies cause detention,
separation and death,

need to very quickly decide
which side we're on.

We need to demand that our laws respect
the inherent dignity of all human beings,

especially refugees
seeking help at our borders,

but including economic migrants
and climate refugees.

We need to demand
that refugees get a fair shot

at seeking protection in our countries

by ensuring that they have
access to council

and by creating independent courts

that are not subject
to the political whims of the president.

I know it's overwhelming,

and I know this sounds cliché, but ...

we need to call
our elected representatives

and demand these changes.

I know you've heard this before,

but have you made the call?

We know these calls make a difference.

The dystopian immigration systems
being built up in first-world countries

are a test of citizens

to see how far you're willing
to let the government go

in taking away other people's rights
when you think it won't happen to you.

But when you let the government
take people's children

without due process

and detain people indefinitely
without access to council,

you are failing the test.

What's happening to immigrants now

is a preview of where we're all headed
if we fail to act.

Thank you.

(Applause)