Today, Explained - From bad to worse at the border

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

U.S. Border Patrol tear-gassed asylum seekers who rushed the border yesterday. Maya Averbuch was there reporting for the New York Times. Vox’s Dara Lind explains how the Trump administration might deal with its asylum problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today explained this week comes from Quip electric toothbrushes. The Quip starts at just $25 at getquip.com slash explained. Your first purchase comes with a free set of refills and after that the refills are just $5 every three months. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. Maya Averbach, you're in Tijuana right now. You were there yesterday at the U.S.-Mexico border reporting for The New York Times. What exactly went down there yesterday? So there were several hundred people yesterday who formed part of the caravan who started making their way to the U.S. border. It started as a peaceful march towards the footbridge that is called El Chaparral. That's part of the San Ysidro port of entry. And right before they reached an overpass that goes towards that footbridge,

they were stopped by a line of Mexican federal police. And it is a tense situation here right now. These Mexican police in riot here pushing this group of migrants back. They are yelling at the officers. At that point, they waited and eventually decided to go around those police officers, which is when the group started to split apart and different contingents started to make a run for different parts of the border. Yeah, so tell me exactly how this escalated. Was U.S. Border Patrol getting involved the second they bypassed Mexican police? No, it's when people got to the border wall. I saw it first at the train crossing where there's video footage of migrants crossing over into the U.S. territory and then being repelled by tear gas. You can actually see those border patrol agents throwing tear gas canisters over the fence. Some people even have the courage to pick them up and hurl them right back.

You can see the smoke is rising and hear those booms and sirens going off. Women and kids and young men, I ended up being tear gassed as well. Many members of the press were. U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweeted this. Today, several migrants threw projectiles at the agents in San Diego. Border Patrol agents deployed tear gas to dispel the group because of the risk to agents' safety. Several agents were hit by the projectiles. Did you see anything out there to corroborate that?

I saw some video footage of people throwing rocks and people were tear gassed even though they weren't throwing anything. But I don't think that that's a justification for the amount of tear gas that was thrown. It's a complicated response and I think in part fueled by the hostility on the part of the president and the amount of media attention that has been around this particular group, which takes a lot of attention away from the thousands of people who are already at the northern border, who have already put themselves on the asylum lists, who are already waiting to get in and who have had to be in pretty dangerous parts of Mexico during that time in an effort to even begin their asylum proceedings, but don't get half the media attention because they're not part of this group that is the caravan.

I do want to stress that the number of people who were participating in this march and then tried to make it to the border yesterday is a small contingent of the more than 5,000 people who were in the shelter. It's really a sports center that is usually used by different teams and for the past 10 days has been used to house more than 5,000 people who are living in tents and sleeping on cots and who are still waiting to try to figure

out what their solutions are and who I imagine will have a much more difficult time now that there's already been a degree of unrest. You've been there with all these people in the caravan, the ones who were tear gassed at the border yesterday and the ones who are still in this stadium. Do they feel dispirited now that there's been this conflict? What are they saying? Yeah, I think, you know, for many of the people who stayed behind, it was disheartening to then see others come back. And I think many of those who went and tried to march peacefully ended up coming back disheartened. And I saw them gathering in a prayer circle and singing prayer songs after they had returned to the shelter. Do they have any hope that they'll actually make it into the United States?

Yeah, people have an incredible amount of faith that something can work out for them, and especially as a religious conviction that God can make anything possible. And I've heard that throughout the trip, but even more now in the last few days, as the situation has grown increasingly tense. Many others just don't know what to think. As someone said to me yesterday, we have to keep trying to get into the U.S. because we don't have a plan B at this point. But I can't go back to my country. And he was someone who had been deported previously

and then faced death threats from a gang while he was back in Honduras. And so doesn't see returning home as a viable option. Got tear gassed yesterday and is just hoping that some solution will turn up. Things are obviously chaotic on the United States-Mexico border right now, but the United States and Mexico's brand new leader might actually have a plan to fix it. That's next on Today Explained. Hello? Hi, is this Tim from New York? It sure is.

Oh, hey, Tim. This is Sean calling from Today Explained. I hear that you are hoping to find a quip in your possession this holiday season. You know what? I am. And if you don't mind me asking, what are you sporting right now? It's blue. It's kind of a blue toothbrush.

Oh, nice. It's my current favorite brand, which is Free From Dentist. Okay, good, good. And it's getting a little ratty. I never replace as often as I should. Well, I'm not sure what you've heard so far, but just so you know, the Quip starts at $25. Your first set of refills is free. And after that, they're $5 every three months at getquip.com slash explained.

But who knows, Tim from New York, maybe you won't have to go there. Maybe one will just appear out of thin air. Maybe I won't brush my teeth until I get equipped to get the full experience. Ooh, yeah. Let's definitely check back in about that throughout the week. Yeah. We don't even talk to my co-workers about that. It's true.

Daryl and you cover immigration here at Vox. Things seem to be escalating really quickly at the border. Is all this stuff sort of a new situation we're seeing? The escalation into confrontation is, yes. But this is also kind of the culmination of what we've been seeing for the last several weeks and even months at the border. As we see a bottleneck in the number of asylum seekers that actually can come in at ports of entry. And increasingly, lots and lots of people waiting right outside in Tijuana, in particular, but also in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, and in some other kind of cities along the Texas-Mexico border as well.

The Trump administration's combination of cracking down on people who enter between ports of entry to seek asylum and not letting a ton of people in at ports of entry has created this population of people who are just waiting to get into the U.S. And that's both a desperate situation for them and something that the U.S. and Mexican governments are increasingly antsy about. I want to hear more about the governments. Things are clearly chaotic on the ground. But what's the political situation? Mexico is about to get a new president on Saturday. The Washington Post broke the story this weekend that the Trump administration is trying to cut a deal to solve this whole asylum seeking situation. What is the deal? So as reported by the Post, and this is still very preliminary, not least because,

as you mentioned, the Mexican side of the negotiating table in this deal are people who aren't officially in office yet. So this is between the Trump administration and the AMLO administration incoming in Mexico. Absolutely. So the broad contours of that deal are that Mexico would allow the U.S. to kind of push people back to Mexico while their asylum claims were pending. They would kind of get preliminary screening interviews, you know, that wouldn't just kind of be the standard screening interview for asylum seekers, but would also ask, are you afraid of going back to Mexico? Is there something, you know, that is dangerous for you there? And if that weren't the case, they would kind of just be sent back to wait in Mexico while their full application for asylum was pending. That's, you know, that can take months or years and is the problem that the Trump administration has identified, you know, as quote unquote catch and release.

But if the release is happening into Mexico, that solves the administration's problem insofar as what they really, really don't want is to let anybody into the United States who might not possibly ultimately get their asylum application approved. So you're an asylum seeker from, say, Honduras. You travel up, you get through Mexico, you get to the U.S. southern border, and then you make your asylum claim once you get in, and then you're sent back to Mexico, even though you're not Mexican. Right. As a matter of fact, because you're not Mexican, it would be illegal under human rights law for the U.S. to kind of send somebody back to the country where they were claiming asylum from. But because they're technically not claiming asylum from Mexico, they're claiming asylum from their home countries. If there isn't another

reason for the U.S. to worry about their well-being in Mexico, that is something the U.S. to worry about their well-being in Mexico. That is something the U.S. can hypothetically do. Okay. So it's clear what the Trump administration would get out of this, you know, keep asylum seekers outside of the country until their asylum claims can be legitimized or whatever it might be. What does Mexico get out of this? A bunch of people who aren't Mexican nationals will now be sort of pending entry into the United States and hanging out until then in Mexico. Yeah, it's a really good question what the incentive for Mexico is to take this deal. Some things that have been thrown out there are, first of all, that this is kind of what's already happening, right? Like, yes, they're not being pushed back. But the situation from Mexico's

perspective is right now, they have to deal with a lot of people at the US-Mexico border who are trying to seek asylum into the US. That's the same situation that they'd be dealing with if they signed this deal. So, you know, it's possible that they think that kind of giving an official stamp to it is going to help them in some way. It's possible that they think that they're going to kind of get some sort of cooperation from the U.S. on other fronts. It's also possible that this is just, you know, the U.S.-Mexico relationship is extremely important for Mexico. And while AMLO has kind of talked a big game about standing up to Trump, he's never really been a, you know, migrant rights person. So it's possible that this is seen by the AMLO administration as a way to start off the Trump-AMLO relationship on a good foot.

Okay. You mentioned how sending people who are seeking asylum back to their country of origin would be this huge violation of international law. What about sending people back to some third-party country, i.e. Mexico. Is that illegal? Is there precedent for that? Yeah, this is actually officially codified in the U.S.'s relationship with Canada, where you literally can't seek asylum in the U.S. if you've crossed through Canada first. This wouldn't be the same thing as that.

But it is kind of standard that, you know, countries are allowed to work out between themselves whether somebody who crosses country A and seeks asylum in country B, which country is responsible for dealing with that. The wrinkle here, and this is something that, you know, is going to have to get worked out and hasn't been yet, is that right now a lot of people who are seeking asylum from, you know, Central American countries don't have legal status in Mexico or only have temporary like 15-day transit visas. So if they'd be waiting in Mexico, they'd be waiting without status. And

the U.S. is obligated legally to consider what's going to happen to them in Mexico if it pushes them back. So the worst case scenario here, if they kind of don't work this out, is that the U.S. can kind of push people back to Mexico and close its eyes to what happens next. And Mexico can push them back to the countries of origin where they would, in fact, be persecuted. And that would then be sort of a violation? That would be a massive violation of international law, though it's not clear whether the violation would be on Mexico's part or on the U.S.'s part or both. It's also, though, something that, according to The Post, Mexican officials are very concerned

about and still needs to be worked out. So that's kind of one of the reasons that it's maybe not so likely that this is going to happen the minute AMLO gets into office on Saturday, especially because with everything that just happened yesterday, the optics of we're going to cooperate with the U.S. and give them what they want on asylum might not look super hot. So how have Mexico and the United States responded to the story in the interim? The U.S. side has been pretty quiet. On the Mexican side, there was a statement that kind of denied the post story that was read as a denial of the post story, but it was a non-denial denial. What does that mean?

Well, what they said was, of course, there's no deal. The new government doesn't even get in until next week, which means we can't sign a deal yet. We're not the official government. And they also said we have no intention of becoming a safe third country, which is a reference to the agreement that the U.S. has with Canada. That's saying we don't want to officially prevent anyone who wants to seek asylum in the U.S. from seeking it. But that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be willing to house people while they were waiting to hear back. And if this deal does go through, how could it change what the U.S.-Mexico border looks like? Well, right now, we have a bunch of people who are waiting to get into the U.S. and who don't know what's going to happen to them next. That is not a sustainable situation. But like if that gets codified in the existence of all of these groups of people who are

theoretically asylum seekers in the U.S. but who are living in Mexico, the best analogy that I can come up with for that is refugee camps. It's, you know, there aren't a ton of situations in which people are being excluded from the country that they're in legally while trying to get somewhere else. And it creates not just legal questions, but logistical questions of who's providing for people's basic needs, questions of how long people can really be expected to last in those environments. The U.S. has done a pretty good job over the last few months of making people on the Mexican side of the border seem like they're not relevant to the U.S. It's much easier to stop people from coming in and avoid political criticism than it was to allow them to come in and then

separate them from their children, even though in both cases, what's happening is, you know, punishment being taken out on asylum seekers. But if you have literal just groups of people who neither the U.S. nor Mexico really want to take responsibility for, that's a situation that hasn't been as immediate for Americans and might kind of draw attention to the extent to which the U.S. has been pushing this issue literally southward, you know, out of sight, out of mind. Daryl Lind is one of the hosts of the Weeds podcast here at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. toothbrushes for supporting the show today. The Quip electric toothbrush, I'm told, makes a great gift. They start at just $25 at getquip.com slash explained. Your first set of refills is free. After that, they're $5 every three months. Another cool thing about the Quip, it's very quiet. You could do anything while brushing your teeth with your Quip. You could listen to a podcast. One that you might want to check out is called Function with Anil Dash. It explores how technology is shaping our culture.

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