Asylum seekers try Mexico after the U.S. shuts its doors

Yessica can see the United States from outside her room at the migrant shelter where she lives in Nogales, Sonora.

When she and her husband left El Salvador last fall, the land beyond the snaking red border wall in the distance was their goal. They narrowly missed their chance to get there.

“It’s so far and so close at the same time,” Yessica said.

The Salvadoran couple had one of the last appointments to request U.S. asylum before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. But a last-minute encounter with Mexican police caused them to miss their Jan. 18 slot by a little more than an hour. It was the latest setback in a dangerous journey where they both got kidnapped.

Now, blocked from seeking U.S. asylum, Yessica and her husband are joining thousands of other migrants who are seeking refuge in Mexico. They’re up against an overwhelmed asylum system, said Israel Ibarra, a migration researcher with the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Nogales, Sonora.

“What has happened is that they are trapped,” Ibarra said.

Lawyers say asylum claims in Mexico can take over a year to process — far longer than the 45 business days that Mexico generally promises. There is no guarantee the Mexican government will approve asylum claims.

Yessica and her husband have already been at their shelter in Nogales, Sonora, for nearly eight months. They fled El Salvador after receiving threats from gangs, which is why KJZZ is using only their first names.

Nina Kravinsky/KJZZ

Without documents, the couple can't work legally, access services or travel around Mexico.

“We don’t leave [the shelter], because we’re scared,” she said, worrying that they'll be deported back to El Salvador if they step outside.

Meanwhile, Yessica and her husband have watched the shelter clear out. They say some former residents aren’t waiting around for the system to process their claims, and instead are finding ways to work without documents.

The migrants who remain in Mexico face dwindling options. They could turn back to the country they left, entrust their claim to Mexico’s flooded refugee system or wait for a shift in U.S. policy. All those options come with risks, said Daniela Ugaz, a lawyer with the Arizona-based nonprofit Florence Project who represents asylum seekers.

“It’s very hard to say, ‘This is clearly the better option,’” Ugaz said. “Because we’re not in a world where there are good options at the moment.”

The arm of the Mexican government that processes refugee claims has been overwhelmed for years, experts say. Asylum claims ballooned from 1,295 people in all of 2013 to more than 140,000 a decade later.

Data for this year is unavailable online, but lawyers say they’ve seen an uptick in cases, even as migration to the U.S.-Mexico border has plummeted since the beginning of Trump’s term.

The system doesn’t have the resources to keep up, said Gretchen Kuhner, director of Institute for Women in Migration, a nonprofit that advocates for asylum seekers in Mexico.

“At the same time that we have more cases, we also have a backlog,” Kuhner said.

The backlog has affected offices across the country. A recently jailed activist who was leading a migrant caravan out of southern Mexico told Mexican media before he was detained that the migrants were frustrated by delays at the office near the Guatemala border.

Unlike the caravan Yessica and her husband joined last year, this caravan’s destination wasn’t the United States, but Mexico City.

In the border city of Tijuana, asylum seekers also face delays. Lawyer Diego Ramírez Zaldívar, with the nonprofit legal aid group U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, called the situation a “crisis.”

“Mexico is well recognized as a pro-migration country,” Ramírez Zaldívar said. “But unfortunately, Mexico doesn’t have the capacity to attend all of the requests.”

The lawyer says he feels like his hands are tied. He regularly delivers bad news about long wait times to asylum seekers who are desperate to work or study legally.

Mexico’s office for refugees, which processes asylum claims, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Back at the shelter in Nogales, Yessica is working on a piece of embroidery. It’s a heart — one crest is filled with the Salvadoran flag, the other, the U.S. flag.

Nina Kravinsky/KJZZ

But even as she gets ready to stitch the stars and stripes, she and her husband are putting what was once their dream of making it to the United States on hold — even though they don’t know how long their asylum claim in Mexico will take, or if it will even be accepted.

“Maybe they want us to go back to our countries,” Yessica said of the Mexican government. “But they don’t know the suffering we’ve gone through to be where we are.”

For now, Yessica is trying to game out what life might look like if they’re able to get refugee status here. The stress of it all keeps her up at night.

But if they’re successful, they’ll be able to reunite with their daughter and granddaughters, who they left behind in southern Mexico when they realized how dangerous it would be to travel through the country on foot.

Yessica, a cook, hopes getting refugee status could let them put down roots here in Nogales, Sonora. She wants to open a pupusería, and bring the cheesy rice flour pancakes of her home country to her new neighbors in Mexico.

“We’re going to stay here,” Yessica said. “We can’t go back.”