A new set of guidelines released by Customs and Border Protection this month outlines how migrant belongings should be handled during processing.
Migrants and asylum seekers apprehended along the border and taken into federal custody are separated from their belongings at least temporarily during processing. But reports of items being thrown away rather than returned have persisted for years, along with calls for reform from lawmakers and advocates.
The agency’s new, 9-page directive outlines requirements for handling belongings and also designates a wide range of essential items – including medical materials, legal documents, religious garb and belongings with sentimental or monetary value.
“This new directive, while it’s not perfect, we do think it will go a long way toward ensuring that there is greater respect for those items and that there are many less situations in which people are being stripped of them,” said Noah Schramm, border policy strategist with the ACLU of Arizona.
The guidelines come months after a government watchdog report that called on CBP to create more stringent property standards.
Schramm with the ACLU says Border Patrol already has a rigorous system for tracking belongings in processing facilities. At a processing facility in Tucson, for example, migrants’ belongings are tied to them electronically through a wristband they get once they arrive. But Schramm says there’s also huge variations from sector to sector, and confiscations sometimes happen prior to when migrants arrive at processing facilities.
“It is an enormous problem from our perspective if say Border Patrol agents out in the field are telling people ‘oh no, those medications, you have to throw them away,’” he said.
He said the new guidelines could create greater consistency. The document directs Border Patrol sectors to craft systems to come into compliance within 30 days of the order’s publication.
-
They're kids who came to the United States without papers — or parents. In fact, that’s the name of the book Stephanie Canizales wrote about a group of them who came of age in Los Angeles in the last decade. -
Keeping Families Together would offer a path to legal residency to an estimated 500,000 undocumented people who’ve been in the U.S. for at least a decade and are married to U.S. citizens. -
Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agencies show the vast majority of fentanyl comes through legal ports of entry. And the people bringing it into the country are native born Americans. -
Migrants now vie for one of a fixed 1,450 appointments available borderwide everyday — including about 100 at the Nogales Port of Entry. Report authors say more than 765,000 people have scheduled CBP One appointments since January 2023. -
CBP One is currently the primary way migrants can ask for protection in the U.S. – an executive order enacted by the Biden administration in June introduced further restrictions on asylum access in between ports of entry.
