For decades, the American political asylum process has been used to punish enemies and reward friends of the US government. Refugees from Cuba can walk through an open door. People fleeing Eastern Europe have been judged very differently than those trying to escape persecution in “friendly” but deeply violent states like Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia and Honduras. From a storefront law office in the US border city of El Paso, Texas, one man set out to challenge that system. Carlos Specter has filed hundreds of political asylum cases on behalf of human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents, and though his legal activism has only inched the process forward—98% of refugees from Mexico are still denied asylum—his myriad legal cases and the media fallout from them has increasingly put US immigration policy, the corrupt state of Mexico, and the political basis of immigration, asylum, and deportation decisions—on the spot. We Built the Wall is an immersive, engrossing story of a new front in the immigration wars.
Оглавление
Eileen Truax. We Built the Wall
We Built the Wall. How the US Keeps Out Asylum Seekersfrom Mexico, Central America and Beyond. Eileen Truax. Translated by Diane Stockwell
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Line Between Life and Death
2. Carlos Spector, Attorney-at- Law for Impossible Cases
3. Constructing a Border
4. Annunciation House The Asylum Tradition
5. Political Asylum Sheltering Arms, but Not for Everyone
6. Giving Up Freedom to Save Your Life
7. The Business of Locking Up Migrants
8. Preserving Memory
9. Impunity
10. Seeking Justice from the Other Side
11. Back to Life
12. The Never-Ending Wave
13 “We don’t want you here!”
Epilogue
Notes
Отрывок из книги
For my fellow journalists in Mexico. For those who
died denouncing injustice, and for those who have
.....
After leaving Guadalupe, Saúl and his family made their way to El Paso and stayed at a shelter for migrants and the homeless. Neither Saúl nor Gloria spoke any English. Their children—thirteen, six, and three years old—would have to attend a school program for English language learners. Saúl took whatever work he could get, from gardening and yard work to unpacking fresh produce at a supermarket. They found a small apartment, which, with a little effort, could accommodate the five of them and Sara, who had arrived by then. A few months later Saúl heard that rents were much cheaper in Fabens, about a half hour east of El Paso, and that there were other people from Guadalupe there. The family moved, and Saúl found a new job.
The Reyes family has tried to make a fresh start and adapt to a new life in a mobile home in the middle of the Texas desert. According to the most recent census figures available, of 8,250 residents in Fabens, 97 percent are Latino and 90 percent are Mexican. That figure is from 2010 and a large part of the exodus caused by violence only began that year; it is hard to say, therefore, how much the population has grown or changed in composition since then.2 A walk through Fabens’s sandy streets indicates that many of the people living here arrived recently: about a third of the homes are not houses but mobile homes or trailers—“trailas,” as they are known in local parlance.
