Epilogue

On April 6, 2017, at 7:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, President Donald Trump ordered an attack on Syria. Fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles were launched on an air base, killing over eighty civilians. The attack was carried out sixty-three hours after the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians in a rebel-controlled province, killing hundreds of women and children who were suffocated by the effects of sarin gas, which damages the nervous system. A few hours after that attack, Trump justified his actions in advance. “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that was so lethal,” he announced, “that crosses many lines, beyond a red line, many many lines.”

Trump’s response to the killing of children, however, did not include revising his position on asylum law, nor did it entail any initiative to welcome refugees from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime into the United States. In fact, the guidelines established by the Trump administration in its first one hundred days in power resulted in an increase in asylum cases; applicants were denied release under their own recognizance or with a bond, which meant longer periods of imprisonment as their applications were processed. Immigration lawyers have interpreted this action as a response to the president’s failure to enact a “Muslim ban” through executive order.

One of the cases encompassed by these guidelines landed in Carlos Spector’s office. On February 5, 2017, Mexican journalist Martín Méndez Pineda presented himself at the Juárez–El Paso border requesting asylum. He had been receiving death threats in the state of Guerrero after publishing an article describing various methods used by federal police officers to intimidate citizens. After presenting convincing evidence to establish “credible fear,” ICE responded by denying his release from detention. According to Carlos, the U.S. government keeps asylum seekers locked up in detention for as long as possible in order to convince them to drop their asylum applications, which represents a grave danger for other journalists under threat in Mexico. In just the first four months of 2017, four journalists were murdered in Mexico, and two more were wounded but survived assassination attempts.

The first months of the Trump administration offered convincing evidence that its policies on asylum and detention of undocumented immigrants would not only seamlessly continue the policies established by the previous administration, which violated international humanitarian guidelines, but would also mean longer periods spent in detention. This would benefit the two large private companies that manage the country’s immigrant detention facilities.

In the six months after Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 8, 2016, the stock prices of CoreCivic and GEO, the two largest operators of private immigrant detention centers, rose by over 100 percent. This was of course very good news for those companies, not only for the financial bonanza it represented, but because if things had gone in another direction, their futures would have been hanging by a thread.

On August 18, 2016, while Obama was still in office, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reduce the number of government contracts with private prisons. After that announcement, stock prices for both private prison corporations plummeted by 40 percent. Two months later, in the final days of the presidential campaign, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) changed its name to CoreCivic and announced that it would have to make staff cuts in order to stay on budget. Trump and his adversary, Hillary Clinton, had made their opposing positions clear: Clinton vowed to cut private prison contracts, while Trump declared his conviction that the private prison system was good for the country.

Deputy Attorney General Yates’s decision to cut back on private prison contracts was based on a Department of Justice report, which included an analysis of the drastic growth of the immigrant detention system in the United States. Between 1980 and 2013 it had grown by 800 percent and then decreased from 220,000 detainees in 2013 to 195,000 in 2016. Paying large sums of money to those private corporations was no longer necessary, the report concluded.

The two corporations’ stunning rebound after the election—CoreCivic’s stock rose 140 percent; GEO’s rose 98 percent—took place against the backdrop of two situations. One was Trump’s campaign rhetoric to lock up immigrants and the implicit need to keep the companies providing this service on the government payroll. The second was the donations that GEO and CoreCivic had made: $673,000 to the Republican Party and at least $130,000 to the Trump campaign.

On February 23, 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Yates’s memorandum, effectively breathing new life into CoreCivic and GEO. Sessions explained that maintaining private prison contracts would “meet the future needs” of the federal corrections system. Although Sessions’s announcement did not directly allude to the detention of undocumented immigrants, then Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly would refer to it explicitly three days later when he sent a memorandum to all agencies involved with immigration services and border security. The memo expanded the list of offenses to be considered crimes, which would also increase the number of undocumented people vulnerable to being arrested, detained, and put into deportation proceedings.

According to the memos signed by Kelly, the new administration would hire 15,000 new immigration agents to carry out these arrests; however, the memos authorized hiring only 50 new immigration judges. This meant that by mid-2017, 201 immigration judges would be handling over 500,000 pending cases, plus all the new cases for those detained during the new administration. There would be more detainees, a greater demand for private detention centers, longer waiting periods, and higher profits than ever for companies making a lucrative business of locking people up.

Trump had been in the Oval Office for less than a month when a series of photos taken by the Reuters news agency quickly traveled around the world. The pictures showed a family approaching the U.S. border, carrying their scant possessions in a few suitcases, holding their small children in their arms. They were trying to cross over, but not from Mexico into the United States. This family was fleeing the United States, trying to make it into Canada.

It would soon become clear that over the previous twelve months, coinciding with the beginning of the presidential campaign period in the United States and Republican candidate Trump’s blatant anti-immigrant message, the number of people illegally crossing from this country into Canada in order to seek refuge or asylum had risen exponentially. The busiest area was the border with the Canadian province of Quebec; there, the number of people arrested for illegally crossing went from 254 in 2015 to 1,222 in 2016.

The average number of asylum applications per month at the land ports of entry in Quebec province rose from 111 in the first half of the year to 255 in September and 593 in December. These spikes followed Trump’s July victory in the GOP primaries and his successful bid for the presidency in November. The total for 2016 was 1,695 applications, 72 percent up on the 985 registered in 2015. The trend continued into 2017 with a total of 3,365 asylum applications, twice the previous year’s count.

According to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) records, most of those who illegally crossed from the United States to petition for asylum in the last months of 2017 and the beginning of 2017 were from Syria, Sudan, and Yemen, three of the seven nations included in Trump’s “Muslim ban.” In Manitoba, the majority were from Somalia, another of the seven nations. Other Canadian provinces, such as Manitoba and British Columbia, experienced the same phenomenon.

Although Canadian authorities have said they will not speculate on the possible motivations for this wave of migration, it is possible to infer that the measures adopted by the new U.S. presidential administration could be sending families to the northern border and into Canadian territory, where policies on refuge and asylum continue to be generous. Other asylum seekers do not even venture to present a petition for asylum in the United States, some activists explain, and go directly to Canada.

The democratic country that has long boasted of its tradition of opening its doors to “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” has become a place that must be fled, a stepping-stone to somewhere else. Without laying a single brick, we’ve already built a wall.

When I began research for this book in 2013, Enrique Peña Nieto had just taken office as president of Mexico. Many victims of violence who had fled the country during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term and his “war on narcotrafficking,” with over 100,000 murders, including 48 journalists and 38 mayors killed, now hoped that with a new administration, the tide would turn and it would be safe for them to come home. That has not been the case. At the close of 2016, in Peña Nieto’s fourth year in office, 67,000 people had been murdered during his term, including 30 journalists and 16 mayors. Indices of violence had risen in three out of four states. The brutal aggression in Mexico has not stopped. The corruption, massacres of civilians, and human rights violations continue to mount, while international organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders grow weary of putting out recommendations that no one heeds.

In countries like Mexico, people are killed by impunity and the complicity of a state that does not meet its obligation to protect its own citizens. But there is complicity on the international level as well, where nations that boast of their welcoming, open arms make political use of humanitarian criteria, and respond to migrants with a cool pragmatism that turns to indifference and a lack of solidarity. People who live in those countries can choose to stop turning a blind eye, and begin to revise the laws and policies regarding mobility and migration—for economic or religious reasons, to save one’s life, to seek a better life—from a global perspective. What has happened recently in the United States should serve as a call to action for all those living here who still believe in the dignity and strength of the human spirit. We must revise not only the process of arrival, but the criteria by which those who come here are considered worthy to stay. We must integrate into society those who have been victims, value their contributions to their new country, and support their efforts to rebuild their lives.

The political situation in the United States and the high visibility of migration on a global level—from Africa to Spain, from the Middle East to Germany, from Central America to the United States, from Haiti to South America—presents the ideal opportunity to redefine the concepts of citizenship and of borders, and the powers of those who govern nations without regard for the interests and will of the people. It is time to construct a new citizenship, to lay a foundation for the citizens to come, even the ones who knock down all of the walls.