Frontier Justice
by Richard Baron

“The Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center opened in 1987 in response to the refugees who were fleeing the civil wars in Central America. It was providing them with food and shelter, but it soon began to address the legal issues people were facing, and now we mainly represent people in removal proceedings who are seeking asylum because they had to flee their homes. Aside from Mexico, we’ve had clients from Burma, Iran, Liberia, the People’s Republic of China, Kazakstan, and currently we’re seeing an influx of people from Ethiopia.

Micaela Guthrie at the Santa Fe Street Bridge Between Juárez and El Paso

“People think that if they make themselves available to the system and seek its protection, it’s going to be non-adversarial, but immigrants encounter a lot of roadblocks along the way, and the system doesn’t give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s a high burden to prove that you belong in the United States, and the system’s so centralized, there’s no one to talk to on a local level. Nobody is accountable. We have clients who tried to claim asylum but were told by someone not trained to make the decision to go away, that they don’t qualify.

“There’s a notion that every country is like the United States, where every transaction is documented, and when people are fleeing their countries they are not necessarily aware that they need a birth certificate. In a lot of instances they can’t avail themselves to their government and seek those documents because they’d be getting themselves and their families in trouble.

“Because of the rhetoric of 9/11, people don’t want to be associated with immigration advocacy, and they don’t want to give funding to pro-immigrant agencies anymore. People repeat negative factors again and again, that immigrants take advantage of the system, that they have ulterior motives, a hidden agenda, that they are people we need to watch out for, and this rhetoric has been used so much that the public perception of immigrants isn’t that they contribute to the rich cultural fabric of our society, but that they only cause problems. The public has a very cynical attitude towards immigrants these days.” – Micaela Guthrie

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