People Live Here

In the Rio Grande Valley, local volunteers who have made welfare visits with detained asylum seekers in the Port Isabel Detention Center for over a year have spoken with multiple detainees who have allegedly coordinated a hunger strike with an estimated 70 to 90 participants in protest of a lack of precautionary measures taken against COVID-19. ICE said no detainees had threatened to hunger strike.

A 60-year-old woman seeking asylum had an asthma attack at the international line on the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville, Texas on Thursday. Photographs posted by the woman’s attorney on Facebook showed her collapsed on the ground as officers on the U.S. side filmed the incident on a cell phone.

Each child qualifies as disabled under the Rehab Act and should be excepted from the policy, according to D’Cruz, who noted that disabled asylum seekers should not be returned to Mexico by the agency according to MPP’s own “Guiding Principles”.

As the sun rose over the Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport on Valentine’s Day, a group of men and women bundled up against the cold surrounded what looked like several out of service city buses parked in front of the Hunt Pan Am terminal.

It was just past 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 3 as Matamoros-based attorney Charlene D’Cruz made her way across the Gateway International Bridge towards the United States. She was accompanied by a volunteer, who held the hand of an asylum seeker, guiding the woman across the river past a line of people winding well into Mexico.

The coalition, consisting of various members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, saw a version of the camp filled with Mexican military and federal police standing by, armed with rifles. The staircase leading up to a levee along the Rio Grande had been cleared of caked, dried mud.

On Sunday, activists from over 30 states joined the Texas branches of the ACLU and the Children’s Defense Fund to demand an end to the U.S. Department of Justice’s tent court system, as well as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP, ‘Remain in Mexico’ program).

Charlene D’Cruz is an attorney and Border Fellow with Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG). In October, she set up a full-time office in the Resource Center for Asylum Seekers in Matamoros, Tamaulipas as part of Project Corazon: Matamoros Legal Assistance Program. D’Cruz and attorneys working remotely help prepare thousands of refugees to self-represent their asylum…

When asylum seekers waiting in Matamoros, Mexico need emergency medical care, crossing the border into the United States is never a given—despite medical exemptions in the White House’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. “When we first got started, Border Patrol told one of our doctors that ‘this will not be a thing’,” said Helen Perry, executive…

“The people in this camp are resilient. They want to cook for themselves. They want to provide for their own children. We owe it to them to provide the resources to be able to do that.”