The Rest of the Story

If you read this blog you may recall I posted a Report From The Border.  That story is about what my wife and I personally witnessed when we visited Brownsville and Matamoros where refugees are waiting in Mexico for their opportunity to plead for asylum.  There were two big holes in our tour.  We were not allowed to visit the detention center where children are held and we were not allowed to witness proceedings in the immigration courts.  I am still dismayed as to why the public is kept completely in the dark about the child prisons and the immigration hearings.  Nevertheless, we now know that less than 1% of all applicants are granted asylum.  The rest are deported.  We never get to hear the refugees’ stories as they tell them; we never get to witness how they are treated by our immigration judges in immigration court; and, until now, we had no idea what happened to them when they were deported.

Human Rights Watch has now issued a report on what happened to Salvadorans returned to El Salvador who were denied asylum based upon a credible fear of danger and some others who were deported for other reasons.  The majority were asylum seekers who had been denied.  Of the cases which were studied and which could be verified (documented), 138 were killed, the majority by gangs, but also by police, death squads or other private actors.  More than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted, tortured or went missing.  The report is based on a limited number of cases.  Therefore, Human Rights Watch states that they believe it is “just the tip of the iceberg.”  And, of course, the study is limited to El Salvador.

For more on this story, you can contact NPR.  Steve Inskeep’s interview of Elizabeth Kennedy of Human Rights Watch was on February 6, 2020.

Our immigration judges are actually employees of the Department of Justice.  This means they take their marching orders from Attorney General William Barr who wants people deported.  There is no pretense about judicial independence, impartiality or justice.  These so-called “judges” are there to do a job and have a boss to answer to.  I can’t imagine how hard it must be for an immigration judge to be caught in the vise between the Attorney General and Trump on one side and the very good chance they are sentencing someone to death on the other.