The 300 asylum seekers who arrived at the US border on April 29 after a month-long, 2,000-mile journey have another grueling struggle ahead of them, according to the immigration attorneys who are donating their time to represent them.
More than three-quarters of asylum claims from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans between 2012 and 2017 were denied, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, and this year’s caravan of asylum seekers are facing a climate made even more hostile by the xenophobic Trump administration.
Once the asylum applicants — who traveled in a caravan to the Tijuana-San Ysidro border from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — establish that they face a credible fear of persecution in their home countries, their ordeals are just beginning.
Colleen Flynn, an immigration attorney with the National Lawyers Guild’s Los Angeles chapter, told Truthout that because of retaliation by the Trump administration, even those who establish “credible fear” could face years of detention.Read more