Border Crisis: How pregnant migrants fall prey of violence

Amid the bustle of Tijuana, the average onlooker might miss the bulge in Claudia’s belly.

That’s partially by design: Claudia, a petite 32-year-old who has been in limbo in Tijuana for over a year while waiting her turn to seek asylum, has become adept at keeping a low profile in a city that ranks among the most dangerous in the world.

She believes that the fetus is already an infant, even though he is still months away from his first breath. Johan Santiago was his name.

After Claudia’s prenatal appointment in the city’s single clinic for pregnant migrants, Claudia trudges back to a tent encampment — nicknamed “El Chaparral” — that acts as the waystation for Hundreds of familiesPeople flee poverty, violence, persecution. As she reaches the high point of the overpass connecting the camp to downtown Tijuana, she can just make out the rusting steel slits of the multibillion-dollar barrier, known as Trump’s border wall, to the north.

There, Claudia relies on Catholic charities to provide their food and clothing. She is joined by Michal and her six year-old son Joseph. She sits beneath the small blue tarp, which they now call home. She’s wearing a colorful knee-length swaddle. Sarape-style cardigan. They wait together.

“Being hungry, thirsty, cold — these things are what you have to go through,” Claudia says, referring to her mission of moving to — and giving birth in — the United States.

“But we can’t afford to fail,”She continues. “I can’t risk my baby.”

Claudia is one Thousands of women are pregnantAmong the Hundreds of thousandsEach year, thousands of migrants cross the border to Mexico each year in hopes of crossing. She’s also one of the Millionen of migrantsThose who were turned away from asylum seeking on American soil during the pandemic.

The U.S. courts have maintained the majority of Trump’s intensified border policies since March 2020. Contrary to Biden’s campaign promises, little has changed since his inauguration in January 2021, and some anti-immigration programs have been expanded under his watch. And despite a June 30 ruling by the Supreme Court in favor of reversing one of these policies forcing migrants awaiting asylum hearings to stay in Mexico, the White House’s ongoing implementation of others means the court’s decision is, for the time being, little more than symbolic.

Moreover, these decisions in D.C. have left the many asylum-seekers like Claudia fenced off in Mexico’s northernmost cities beneath advertisements for popcorn chicken buckets and cheap liposuction. As tens of thousands of migrants from exempted countries, like Ukraine, pass largely unimpeded through the San Ysidro border station, migrants just miles south of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas remain mired in a disconcerting — and dangerous — limbo.

Border towns like Matamoros, Reynosa, and Ciudad Juárez — which are overrun by ubiquitous and particularly ruthless gangs — can be perilous places for anyone, let alone those who have fled their homelands carrying little more than a backpack. This is particularly true for pregnant women. According to Human Rights First, there have been more that 10,000 violent attacks against migrants who live at the border in the time since Trump’s anti-immigration policies. These are not the only victims or witnesses who report them, lawyers and non-governmental organizations working in the area say.

Advocates claim that pregnant women make the best targets for the cartels trying to exploit and threaten migrants at the border. This is because they are often among the most vulnerable and in most need. Women have been kidnapped, beaten, and shot by gangs hungry for profits, advocates say — violence that, on more than one occasion, has triggered women to go into labor.

Mitra Ebadolahi, a civil rights attorney, believes that the restrictive immigration policies have only increased the risks pregnant women are exposed to.

“In the past three years, there’s been a real dismantling in the right to apply for asylum,” says Ebadolahi, who is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project. “That’s led to a tremendous amount of human suffering, where vulnerable people are trapped in dangerous border towns where they’re routinely preyed upon.”

Pregnant women face additional health risks in these circumstances.

Globally, maternal mortality rates are 10 times higher in low resource settings than in the U.S. due to lack of health care. Border towns such as Tijuana are home to pregnant migrants who struggle to get routine care because of high costs, insufficient awareness and discrimination.

U.S. policies have created procedural strangleholds that have led to an increase in migrant population in Tijuana and added strain on already stretched healthcare systems. Tijuana’s hospitals were among the many in cash-strapped settings around the world that stopped treating anything other than Covid-19 during the pandemic. Meanwhile, stopgap nonprofit clinics — overwhelmed and under-resourced in normal times — were stretched thinner still.

“It’s a completely untenable situation that has just exploded since so many people have no pathway in,”Andrea Leiner is the chief communications officer at Global Response Management, which operates clinics in Central America.

Interviews with more than 30 migrants, advocates, lawyers, doctors, and other government officials, spread across five border cities, over two years, show how living indefinitely at a border has increased the risks for many like Claudia or Johan.

“In a lot of ways, it’s worse than it’s ever been,” Leiner says.

The ‘feminization of migration’

Claudia was forced to leave her country of birth in 2019 after she realized that she could not stay at a Honduran station. She relates that she had suffered years of verbal abuse from her husband and violent fits from him. “just couldn’t take it anymore.”

But quickly, Claudia intuited that the police wouldn’t help her. “They said, ‘Show us the proof,’”She recalls. “I told them, ‘What, do I need to die for you to investigate?’”

Amid escalating threats from her partner, Claudia and her son Joseph fled north several weeks later as part of an 80-person migrant caravan — similar to the one that President Trump claimed was made up of groups of “stone-cold criminals”Mounting an “invasion”The U.S.

Claudia’s experience represents a fairly new trend in global migration patterns: something the Population Council, an international nongovernmental research organization, calls the “feminization of migration.”

A 2021 investigative reportThe Mexican government collaborated with several NGOs to create the report. It noted that historically, migration through Mexico has been dominated in part by men travelling alone, often to pursue economic opportunities.

In recent years, however, the percentage of Mexican women who have migrated to Mexico from Central America from El Salvador has increased by 70 percent, and 140 percent, respectively, from Guatemala. There are many reasons women flee their home countries, including “intractable, unresolved and recurring conflicts and violence,”According to UNMA, long-standing poverty is also a factor.

“The situation in home countries has become so untenable,” Leiner says, “women and families have no choice but to move.”

In these circumstances, UNMA called women and their children a “particularly vulnerable population,”They are more vulnerable to violence than they are to the health effects of poverty. The 2021 Central American displacement rate was “unprecedented,” the U.N.’s migration agency .

After the Trump administration cut hundreds and millions of dollars of humanitarian aid to Central American countries, the destabilizing pressures placed on women in the region increased. “concrete actions to reduce”The number of migrants who cross the border to the United States.

A September 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office found that Washington’s decision nixed funding to an array of efforts to improve Guatemalan police forces, Salvadorian forensic labs, and criminal recidivism programs in Honduras, causing the U.S. Agency for International Development to miss up to 35 percent of its performance targets.

The report’s authors highlighted the concerns of international observers that “the suspension and reprogramming of this assistance funding could be counterproductive.”

“Cutting [the humanitarian aid] programs off just increases people’s vulnerability and can make a real difference in people’s calculations to leave,”Geoff Thale (then-vice president of programs at the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank), NPR It was at that time.

Claudia had to flee her home in order to make these calculations.

‘We took a number and we waited’

Claudia and her son met Michal in Tapachula, where many U.S.-bound migrants pass through, just days after they fled with their caravan. Michal recalls that a gang from Nicaragua had just killed one his cousins. This led Michal to flee his country.

After a month, Claudia, Joseph, and Michal’s caravan made it to Tijuana. They realized that they were just at the beginning of a new chapter in their journey and lost any notions of being on the home stretch.

Washington’s modern history of using immigration policy to leave migrants languishing at the border began, in large part, under President Obama. In the midst of a flood of Haitian asylum seekers 2016Obama’s administration began a series of “queue management”Protocols that used the deli line to process immigration: The migrant was given a number and instructed to wait at the border until he or she was called.

In 2019 — due to what the Trump administration called “a security and humanitarian crisis on the southern border” — the White House unfurled a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols(MPP). “decrease the number of those taking advantage of the immigration system, and … [ensure] that vulnerable populations receive the protections they need.”

Functionally, however, the MPP — nicknamed the “Remain in Mexico” policy — imposed further restrictions on people seeking asylum from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. At the border towns, tent camps started to form. They waited patiently for their turn, exhausted, sick, and poor-stricken migrants.

“[The MPP] was devastating to the rule of law and human rights,”Ebadolahi, ACLU “It’s caused enormous backlogs, confusion and suffering.”

Covid-19 was then introduced.

In March 2020, due to the risk that migrants might be carrying Covid, the Department of Health and Human Services, (HHS), revived an outdated piece of legislation. The law — often referred to as “Title 42” — was written in 1893 during a cholera pandemic with a straightforward goal: Keep migrants out.

There is evidence that border officials in the United States targeted vulnerable women. “[The U.S. Border Patrol] reserves MPP as a reliable alternative for expelling pregnant females,”The agency submitted a Memo for May 2020Human Rights First.

In so doing, the policies may have satisfied the Trump administration’s longstanding obsession with pregnant migrants by banning what he pejoratively called “anchor babies” — infants born on U.S. soil who have an automatic legal right to citizenship. His 2018 promise of birthright citizenship as sanctified in the 14th Amendment may have been fulfilled by these policies. “has to end.”

Charlene D’Cruz, border rights program director for Lawyers for Good Government, says that, collectively, MPP and Title 42 have achieved those goals.

“The government has put a chokehold on the border,”She said.

Title 42 and MPP have required that more than two million migrants wait to be allowed south by the border.

Claudia, Michal, and Joseph were part of Tijuana’s portion of that vast group.

“We took a number,” Claudia says, “and we waited.”

‘Sitting ducks’

The first months of their stay in Tijuana were uneventful. The budding family found a shelter to stay in, and Claudia and Michal obtained part-time work doing odd jobs — cooking one day, construction the next.

After returning from work in March 2021 they found that their identification and possessions had been taken. Claudia believes this was in retaliation to Claudia’s late rent payment of one week. As the shelter proprietor evicted them, Michal noticed the owner’s son wearing Joseph’s sunglasses.

They went home with “nothing but the clothes on our back,”Claudia said, “And an oversized black garbage bag to rest in.” They went straight to El Chaparral, the tent camping under the bridge.

El Chaparral was a nickname that means inhospitable desert patches. Claudia’s family was exposed to the elements on all sides. They were also exposed by gangsters and profiteers as well as organized crime. (About eight months after Claudia’s family stayed there, the encampment was cleared by Tijuana police.)

Tami Goodlette states that El Chaparral is often the last resort at the border for migrants who have exhausted all resources. Goodlette is the director for litigation at the Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Service (RAICES). She calls these migrants. “sitting ducks”Organizational criminals that terrorize border communities.

“[Migrants are] vulnerable because they need so many things — housing, food, water — and in order to get those things, they need to place their trust in strangers,” Goodlette says. “Next thing you know, you’re sleeping in someone’s room; next thing you know, you’re being trafficked; next thing you know, your husband is kidnapped.”

Humanitarian organizations have conducted studies that show that the border is rife with sex trafficking and torture. The Population Council statistics showed that one fifth of women crossing the border had been physically and/or sexually abused, while two fifths were robbed and twenty percent were kidnapped. These crimes were more common for pregnant women.

Lawyers and advocates claim that such stories are deeply ingrained in their brains.

The mother who escaped kidnapping in the Mexican city of Nogales at the Arizona border — only to be denied entry to the U.S. while in active labor, and expelled back into Mexico.

The mother who was expelled from the U.S. twice, separated from her family the second time around — and subsequently beaten so severelycartel members that she was forced to enter labor.

The woman was ambushed and killed by gang members Shot seven times — before watching her husband die in front of her. She gave birth shortly thereafter to a baby with severe birth defects.

One bullet is still in her cervix.

‘Birth is a dangerous thing’

The lives of pregnant migrants can be put at risk if they don’t have access to medical care.

Luzette and Almick fled Haiti during spring 2020. They fled Haiti because of economic hardship and political persecution. Haiti is long been the poorest country in the Americas.

Luzette was expecting their third child when a cousin kidnapped her and then killed. To avoid another fate, the couple fled the troubled Caribbean nation soon after.

The couple decided to avoid the risky journey across 700 miles of open ocean between Haiti, America, and Chile. They then traveled by plane to Chile and then by land through Peru and Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Honduras to Tapachula, southern Mexico, before finally reaching Tijuana.

Upon arrival at the U.S. border, they discovered that — like Claudia’s family and so many others — they would have to wait.

Luzette was still in her third trimester when the couple arrived in May 2020. And when she went to the city’s general hospital in search of medical care, she was repeatedly turned away. Services for anything other than Covid-19 had been shut down by the hospital. Private clinics, she discovered that, even for minimal prenatal screening, such as blood draws, they were asking for huge sums of cash.

A couple trying to rent a small, rundown apartment in their shared home was struggling to make ends meet. “there was no one to help [us],” Almick says.

Health providers and advocates at the border say Luzette’s experience is common.

Leiner, with Global Response Management, says that’s partially because “the Mexican health care system is already incredibly stretched.” It’s especially true in the border towns, she adds. She added that, in recent years, almost all remaining beds have been filled by medical care for Covid-19 victims.

Then, there’s the racism, xenophobia, and discrimination.

Local hospitals near the border have repeatedly turned away D’Cruz’s clients, asking them to pay astronomical sums for minimal services or requiring them to provide their own equipment — scalpels, sutures, gauze — for C-sections.

“I would sum it up as the haves and the have-nots,” D’Cruz says. “There’s no place [migrants] can go.”

According to the Population Council even NGOs that provide assistance at the border often do not offer the specialized services pregnant women require.

Hannah Janeway, a doctor with Refugee Health Alliance and co-founder of Refugee Health Alliance (an NGO that provides medical services in Tijuana), says the health risks resulting from a lack of prenatal care pose a high risk to both mothers and their babies.

Expectant mothers who don’t get prenatal care — especially those with chronic and untreated diseases who are also exposed to stressful environments and even malnutrition — run the risk of developing gestational diabetes or preeclampsia. These conditions could lead to premature births and/or complications for mothers. complicated deliveryThis is the which Can be life-threateningThis is especially true if the mother cannot reach a hospital quickly, or even at all.

Janeway states that infants born to mothers without health access are at greater risk than those who have it. You may have congenital anomalies, cerebral palsy, or they could be born prematurely or small. Asphyxiation, widespread infections, and bleeding out can also put the infant’s life in danger.

Mother and child can both “become very ill and have lifelong consequences”Janeway states that lack of access to health care is the reason. “Birth is a dangerous thing.”

Nearly every advocate, lawyer, and clinician interviewed shared their stories of how terrible things are.

Janeway says that ambulances have repeatedly arrived long after some of her highest-risk mothers went into labor and then, after the hospital refused to take them, dumped them back at Refugee Health Alliance’s makeshift clinic. In other cases, the ambulances simply didn’t respond to calls to pick up women in labor.

Nicole Ramos, an attorney at Al Otro Lado (AOL) — which provides legal services to migrants — recalls one client who needed an emergency C-section at a hospital but was turned away until she found eight blood donors to bolster the hospital’s stockpile.

D’Cruz recalls a pregnant woman who was denied an emergency C-section because she didn’t have a negative Covid-19 PCR test, only a negative antigen test. That woman gave birth clutching a bathroom stall in the hospital’s lobby.

“You don’t force people into this situation unless you are completely OK with them dying,” Ramos says, “[and] it is not uncommon that our attorneys will receive a call telling them [that] a client died.”

Leiner sees the matter as personal. She underwent an emergency C-section after suffering severe labor arrest. “I know just how scary it is for things to go wrong in your pregnancy,” Leiner says, “and I know I wouldn’t have survived if I was in Mexico in their situation.”

Under Title 42 and MPP: humanitarian parole, pregnant migrants can find refuge in the United States amid such life-threatening situations.

But that’s assuming pregnant migrants know they are eligible for parole and are able to find a lawyer, D’Cruz says, which is rarely the case.

“There are only a handful of us doing this work at the border,”She continues. “We can’t meet even a smidgeon of the need.”

Attorneys also state that applications for humanitarian parole are acceptable Many timesYou may face delays or you are ignored or denied. All of these obstacles make it hard for parole to be granted. AOL staff stated that more than two-thirds (or three quarters) of the 147 parole applications they had submitted had been denied as of early 2022.

“It was almost as if, unless a pregnant woman was dying, I couldn’t get them across,” D’Cruz says.

‘It’s literally like families are walking a plank’

Advocates claim that as of right now there is no indication that the predicament of pregnant women at border has any improvement.

The following December 2021 events will be MPP was expandedInclusion of migrants from every country into the Western hemisphereThere are no guarantees for their safety. Describing the ostensibly more humane policy, D’Cruz says that “putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it prettier.”

More recently, the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision This was the first step in putting MPP to death. But it’s unclear whether the Biden administration will go that route, or whether it will leave the previous iteration intact — and if so, for how long.

Title 42 continues to live at the same time. After a D.C. court rejected appeals from the Biden administration, it was set to expire May 23, but a Louisiana judge extended it on May 20, Block the administration It is not ending. On July 21, the Supreme Court announced that it would be hearing an appeal in the case later in the year. Title 42, which continues to place large numbers of migrants in grave danger, is still being used amid the confusion.

To protect the health and safety of pregnant migrants, lawyers continue to file lawsuits.

One July 2021 complaintAmerican Civil Liberties Union and Jewish Family Service of San Diego observed that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), continues to divide families, despite having a 2018 Court-ordered InjunctionIt is against the law.

The International Rescue Committee will be operating in December 2021. We have 16 documented casesThere were many cases of pregnant women being separated from their families at the border, while they were on the way to the hospital, and when relatives were flown hundreds miles to be expelled via another border town.

CBP has ordered more than 600 flights like this since March 2021, the date when it began.

Goodlette from RAICES states that this leaves women already powerless after giving birth and makes them vulnerable to danger. She says they are. “dumped in a place where they know nobody.”

CBP has handcuffed some pregnant migrants when they are arrested, taken to the airport, or expelled. This is known as “shackling,”This practice is now in place despite “strong opposition”American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The April 2020 letter of 13 U.S. senators sent to the DHS inspector General. Requested an immediate investigationIn the practice “potentially fatal complications.”

CBP may also take action in cases where the mother of U.S. citizen infants is not receiving a birth certificate, as per legal complaints filed by Al Otro Lado, and others. Ramos at AOL says that it would almost certainly be illegal. Her organization has documented more than a dozen cases in which mothers were expelled after giving birth but before receiving their infants’ American documentation. Ramos states that these expulsions fall outside the scope of CBP’s jurisdiction since it does not have any jurisdiction over U.S citizens.

The practice “essentially leaves the children stateless in some of the most dangerous cities in the world,”She said.

CBP acknowledged that it puts pregnant women at risk by its handling. CBP denied hospital care to a pregnant woman who gave birth at its facility in February 2020. The mother then delivered her child in her jeans and held a trashcan for support.

The following year, CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller wrote in an internal memo that the agency’s treatment of pregnant women “raises significant humanitarian and public health interests.”

Due to these admissions, advocates for the ACLU, Jewish Family Service, and others have asked that border authorities be informed stop detaining pregnant migrants altogether. This request is in line with the July 2021 deadline Take the decision by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stop arresting and detaining pregnant migrants — meaning that any pregnant migrants held by CBP who are not expelled will eventually be released anyway, the ACLU’s Ebadolahi says.

CBP has yet to comply with the request.

Every day these policies persist is another day migrants are at risk, according to Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. This is particularly true for migrants who are forced to flee by foot across bridges that lead back to Mexico.

“It’s literally like families are walking a plank,”Gelernt spoke in court.

‘These babies represent hope’

Luzette gave birth after three months living in Tijuana to a child who follows her father’s footsteps. She is lively and mischievous, and has a deep brown eye that absorbs light and a loud laugh that fills the space. Olojannie was her Latin name. “little”The root Janus is the Roman god of transitions, conflict and new beginnings.

Ximena Rojas is a quick-talking, faster-moving midwife who runs Justice in Health, Tijuana’s only free maternal-care clinic devoted specifically to the care of migrants. Rojas was originally an entrepreneur. partera fronterista (“border midwife”She opened a clinic in her station wagon’s trunk on the sidewalk by San Ysidro crossing. Now, half a century later, hundreds of migrant mothers are being cared for each year. And staring down all the odds stacked against mothers like Luzette, Rojas maintains that there’s little more urgent than bringing children like Olojannie safely into the world.

“These babies represent hope,” Rojas says, “hope for a better future.”

Within weeks of Olojannie’s birth, Luzette and Almick decided to try to cross the border again. Luzette claimed that they were going to cross the border again. “there is no life for my daughter here.”

It was the summer in 2021. They made it through after a week-long journey of more than 600 miles east.

Within hours, the whole family was on their way north in a bus. They were surrounded by English and not Spanish. They joined family members in New Jersey. Almick found work in a candy factory while Luzette got a position in a daycare. Olojannie began eating spaghetti.

“We are still learning what it means to live here,” Almick says, “but Olojannie — she has opportunities here. She can have a good life.”

The path for other pregnant women has been more difficult.

Claudia, Joseph, & Michal lived for months in El Chaparral. Claudia described the difficult days as uncertain and challenging. “but we’re fighting the fight.”

They decided to move forward in spring 2021. They had a plan. Michal would travel first and the rest would follow him later.

His phone line was cut off after Michal left camp. Claudia, who was worried about Joseph’s fate, stayed with him in the camp, where Joseph is now in purgatory. Eventually, though, she made up her mind: She’d follow Michal and try to cross.

Claudia had last seen Rojas two months prior to Johan’s expected first breath. Claudia felt fine that day, and requested a hand lotion. She said that her allergies were acting up.

The next day, she was gone.

This story was created in partnership with the non-profit publication CYou can find more information atpital & Main.

Eli Cahan is aninvestigative journalist, an Impact Fund fellow at USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism, andaPediatrician at UCSF. His work was published in The Washington Post?, L.A. Times, The Guardian, VICE, or elsewhere