Thank you Senator Wyden for stepping forward.
These people would've turned Mary & Joseph away...
Senator intervenes at border to help Mexican family apply for asylum
By Robert Moore July 27 at 9:48 PM
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — A pregnant Mexican woman suffering complications was told by immigration officers that they couldn’t process her family’s asylum claim at the U.S. border on Saturday before a U.S. senator intervened to persuade the officers to take the woman to a Texas hospital.
While visiting a migrant shelter Saturday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) grew concerned about a woman who was 38 weeks pregnant and suffering from preeclampsia and other complications. The senator and his staff decided to take the woman, her husband and 3-year-old son to a port of entry to make their asylum claim.
At the Paso del Norte Bridge linking Juárez and El Paso, the family approached two Customs and Border Protection officers, presented their identification and said they wanted to request asylum. They then heard the words that tens of thousands of asylum seekers have been told for more than a year at the U.S.-Mexico border: “We’re full,” a CBP officer told them.
Wyden, who had followed behind the family along with an entourage of staff members and friends from Oregon, then stepped forward and identified himself.
He told the officers that Mexicans are exempt from the “metering” program CBP has used to strictly control the number of people allowed to request asylum at ports of entry. He also told the officers the woman was late term in her pregnancy and suffering complications.
The officers called a supervisor, who arrived minutes later, and allowed the family to go to the port of entry to make their asylum claim.
Wyden was clearly shaken by his two-day visit to the border, which included a tour of CBP holding cells and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility. At the Juárez shelter, he met a 3-year-old boy who had stopped speaking after being held with his father by the U.S. Border Patrol and then sent back to Mexico. Wyden spoke with families who were required to stay in Mexico for six months before their first U.S. immigration court hearing.
“These policies that I’ve seen are not what America is about. And in fact what we saw with respect to the woman who is here today is just a blatant violation of U.S. law,” Wyden said, referring to the pregnant woman. He said he believed the CBP agents would have turned away the family if he had not intervened, a sentiment echoed by Taylor Levy, an El Paso immigration attorney who took Wyden and his staff to Juárez.
“I feel very confident that if the family had tried to present alone, they would not have been allowed in,” Levy said.
A CBP spokesman said the officer would not have told the family that asylum processing was at capacity if they had explained that they were Mexican and that the mother was pregnant. However, the family gave the officer, whose uniform identified his last name as Loya, a folder that contained their Mexican birth certificates and identification.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senator-intervenes-at-border-to-help-mexican-family-apply-for-asylum/2019/07/27/837a1832-b0c1-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html?utm_term=.cbc3b6429e42&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
DO SOMETHING!
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