As the Biden administration ended a pandemic-era border policy and launched new restrictions on asylum in May 2023, images of hundreds of migrants held between San Diego border walls broadcasted nationwide.
Some of the migrants waited in the open air holding areas for more than a week with limited access to food and water except for donations brought by humanitarian volunteers.
I witnessed how families waited in the open air, unable to leave, when I wrote about the issue last year. I also was among the few who hiked up a steep hill from the Tijuana side to speak with a group of men who were held between a less-accessible stretch of border wall. I wanted to know what, if anything, has changed.
Ex-Border Patrol Chief Drops Bombshell Revelation
At a recent House Homeland Security Committee hearing, former San Diego Border Patrol Sector Chief Aaron Heitke revealed that the Biden administration had pushed him at the time to move the migrants out of sight of the cameras.
“It looked bad, and they wanted them moved,” Heitke said at the hearing in mid-September.
Humanitarian volunteers, human rights organizations and members of Congress have criticized the practice of holding migrants for extended periods of time in the open air, including in the location between San Diego border walls behind the International Wastewater Treatment Plant in a section of border that agents call “Whiskey Eight.” Despite the pushback, according to humanitarian volunteers, agents continue to use the space as a holding area — though the groups are smaller and wait for less time than they did a year and a half ago.
A Customs and Border Protection official speaking on background said Heitke’s claim was incorrect. Heitke retired from his position with the agency last summer.
According to CBP, agents prioritize migrants based on vulnerability and transport them as quickly as possible for processing. The agency said that it directed extra resources to the San Diego Sector last year to move people more quickly during the timeframe that Heitke described.
Investigation Findings TBD
CBP has argued in the past that the people between the border walls are not in custody, but as I witnessed when I first covered the issue in April 2023, they are not free to go, which suggests that they are detained.
Detention standards for the agency require it to provide certain necessities to people in its custody, including food, water and basic hygiene items. But this doesn’t happen for the people held between the walls.
“The issue is that the agents are not following their own policies,” said Lilian Serrano, a volunteer at Whiskey Eight and director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
Several members of Congress launched an investigation last summer into the practice of holding migrants between the walls. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties visited months ago, according to Serrano.
The DHS office has not yet released a public report on the issue. The office did not respond to a request for comment.
Waiting Children
Earlier this year, a judge ruled in a case about CBP custody conditions for children that the space between the border walls counts as a detention space and that agents could not continue to hold children there.
But, humanitarian volunteers said they are still seeing children who spend hours waiting in custody in the open air.
Serrano said that includes a 12-year-old girl from Jamaica who crossed with her mother and grandmother a couple of weeks ago. She said she met the family around 7:30 a.m. She said the family told her that the three had crossed around 11 p.m., and an agent told them to wait in an area west of Whiskey Eight.
The mother was injured from falling off the border wall, Serrano said. The family told Serrano that agents passed them on all-terrain vehicles throughout the night, but no one asked if they needed medical attention until the morning shift agent picked them up and brought them to Serrano for an ice-pack for the woman’s swollen ankle.
“Our worry has always been that we know based on limited access we have at Whiskey Eight that the court orders are being violated right there in front of our eyes,” Serrano said. “There are other areas where we have always suspected Border Patrol hides migrants from our view.”
She said Heitke’s statements at the hearing confirm to her that agents “have interacted in the past to hide migrants from our view not to ensure that policies aren’t being violated but so that we don’t see violations of the policies.”
Pedro Rios, another volunteer at the site and director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, said he met a family that included an infant about a week and a half ago when he was monitoring Whiskey Eight. The family appeared in the area around 7:30 p.m., he said, with a group of several dozen people.
Rios said agents took the family for processing around 3 a.m. — more than seven hours later.
CBP said that currently migrants generally wait no more than a few hours to be taken to stations for processing.
Fewer Crossings
According to Heitke, the practice of holding people between the walls began because of the rate of people crossing to request asylum.
“Groups were coming in to turn themselves over faster than we could keep up,” Heitke said at the hearing. “We only had so much space. We keep people within our stations. There’s no other place to put them while they’re being processed.”
But, apprehensions have dropped significantly, and still the practice continues.
In April 2023, San Diego agents made more than 25,000 apprehensions and nearly 23,000 in May, the month of the policy change, according to data from CBP. After that, the number decreased through the summer before growing again through the fall to a peak of more than 37,000 in April of this year.
In August 2024, the most recent month available, San Diego agents made just over 14,400 apprehensions.
Though Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants have dropped significantly since May, San Diego has been the busiest part of the border for the past several months. That’s a major change from recent years.
Roughly one year ago, in August 2023, San Diego Sector agents made just over 10 percent of Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border, according to CBP data. This August, the most recent data available, San Diego agents made about 25 percent of the border’s apprehensions.
Though the number of people waiting at Whiskey Eight fluctuates from none to dozens rather than the hundreds from months past, the humanitarian volunteers said they don’t plan on giving up their work anytime soon.
“When will Border Patrol completely follow their standards?” Rios said, listing access to food and water and children’s needs as his main concerns. “These questions for me need to be answered with satisfactory answers to conclude we are no longer needed there.”
In Other News
No renewal: The Biden administration won’t extend the two-year humanitarian parole it has granted to thousands from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela, according to CBS’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez. The program was one of the administration’s ways of offering alternatives to migrants coming to the border to request asylum.
Another way to separate families: KPBS’s Gustavo Solis spoke with a Colombian woman whose husband was deported without being given the chance to request asylum. Officials separated the couple at the border, and while they allowed the woman to make a request and wait in the U.S. for her asylum process, her husband was deported without any screening.
A new mayor in town: Tijuana’s new mayor was sworn in at the beginning of October and promised to make Tijuana safer, according to Alexandra Mendoza of The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Leave a comment