According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) analysis of the screenings conducted by U.S. asylum officers, over 80 percent of women from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico who were screened on arrival at the U.S. border “were found to have a significant possibility of establishing eligibility for asylum or protection under the Convention against Torture.” Why aren’t they being granted asylum?

Seeking Asylum by the Author

These women and their children have traveled more than 2,300 miles (most from El Salvador, Guatemala, & Honduras).  If you could drive it would take at least 33 hours, but most of these people flee on foot, and may or may not have any transportation to their destination, the border of the United States.  If they do, its via train, which is still very dangerous.  What we fail to realize is that these people need to get into Mexico, and do so through one of a few border towns.

The map below shows where people enter Mexico, and then face thousands of miles of difficult travel to the border of the United States, to Texas, New Mexico or Arizona.

Most of what we have heard from the Trump administration about the people trying to seek asylum is untrue.  They are not members of the MS-13 gang.  In fact, according to the Fact Sheet published by WOLA, the MS-13 gang membership makes up less than one percent of all criminally active gang members in the United States and Puerto Rico, and there is no sign that the number of MS-13 members in the United States has increased in the past few years.

If you listen to Trump and Sessions, you’d think the country is being overrun by this gang.  If you want to learn about gangs and groups that play havoc in the US, then look no further than the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC ).  There are over 950 “hate groups” tracked by the SPLC, and most of them are populated with white American citizens, not immigrants.  Indeed, the SPLC is one of the organizations in the country that fights for immigrant justice.

The people fleeing the violence in Central America are not trying to sneak across the US border.  They are actively seeking out US Border Protection services and applying for asylum.

The current US “border crisis” was manufactured by the Trump administration once Sessions announced his zero tolerance policy.  To me it’s not surprising that Sessions made this announcement.  If you recall, Coretta Scott King wrote a letter to the United States Senate when that the Senate was considering Sessions for a federal judgeship.  Sessions, acting as an US Attorney, committed fraud in a voting rights case in which he charged three Black citizens for using absentee ballots and encouraging other Black voters to do the same(which had been used by Whites for a long time).  Sessions directed the FBI to use punish elderly Black citizens who had used absentee ballots (legally).  Ms. King said that after the ordeal, many of them said they would not vote again.  Also recall that Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to read Ms. King’s letter in the Senate when Sessions was being considered for the Attorney General job.  She never got to complete the speech as the she was stopped by some trivial Senate rule.  Sessions was confirmed, and he is back at it, but this time he is going after Central American children and women who are seeking asylum in our country.

The travesty at the border has intensified which children being separated from their parents, and sent off to Detention center across the country.  ProPublica has identified 97 facilities housing these children and has been able to map 76 of them as shown in this map they published.  As of today, very few of the more than 2,000 children sent to one of these facilities has been reunited with their parents.  The crisis created by Trump and Sessions is unconscionable and it alone ought to be grounds to impeach them both.