| | | Trump said there was a crisis, then made a crisis. Promises made, promises kept. If you stall the paperwork process, and then throw everybody into over-crowded concentration camps, you manufacture a crisis, comrade.
The US has made migrants at the border wait months to apply for asylum. Now the dam is breaking
.By limiting the number of asylum seekers allowed to come legally, Trump made his own immigration crisis.
By Dara Lind dara@vox.com Nov 28, 2018, 7:00am EST
The center of the American asylum crisis is the El Chaparral plaza in Tijuana, which sits at the foot of the western pedestrian bridge to enter the US at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in California.
On Sunday, members of the migrant “caravan,” after a week of waiting in makeshift Tijuana shelters under poor conditions, marched up to the US side of the border to demand that the US admit them to seek asylum.
At the plaza at El Chaparral, Mexican federal police in riot formation blocked the marchers from going any farther toward the bridge. Then the march descended into chaos. Hundreds of marchers evaded and scuffled with Mexican police in an attempt to cross the border en masse. Some of the marchers threw rocks at Border Patrol agents. Agents fired off volleys of tear gas at the crowd, which included families and children.
It was nearly inevitable that tensions at the border would boil over, and that they would do so at El Chaparral. For months, it has been the unofficial “waiting room” of the United States.
At San Ysidro and many of the other official crossings that line the US-Mexico border, families who have traveled thousands of miles, fleeing poverty and violence to seek asylum in the United States, have been stopped outside ports of entry before they can set foot on US soil and trigger their legal asylum rights.
Before 2016, and in some cases as recently as six months ago, they would have had no problem and no delay. But for the last several months, the Trump administration has made a practice of limiting the number of asylum seekers allowed to enter the US each day — a policy it calls “metering.” It’s the counterpart of the Trump administration’s months-long crackdown on asylum seekers entering the US illegally — telling those who do try to come legally that there’s no room for them, and ordering them to wait....
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