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      The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexican border. Seriously? | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexico border. Seriously?Moustafa BayoumiAs if the border isn’t surveilled and militarized enough, the Department of Homeland Security wants to go full Black Mirror Are we all doomed to live in Charlie Brooker’s techno-dystopia? In Metalhead, an episode from season four of his famed Netflix show Black Mirror, a woman navigates an austere post-apocalyptic landscape while running for her life from a murderous robot dog. What makes the mechanized beast in the show particularly frightening is the lethal combination of the single-mindedness of a computer program with the extreme ferocity of an angry, feral dog.But it’s just TV, right? Not exactly. The military, technological, security and political classes in this country appear united in their desire to make robot dogs part of our future, and we should all be worried.The latest example came on 1 February, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release titled “Robot Dogs Take Another Step Towards Deployment at the Border”. DHS dressed up their statement with the kind of adorable language made to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere. “The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is offering US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a helping hand (or ‘paw’),” read the release. Isn’t that cute? A picture of the “four-legged ground drone” accompanied the release, and the “Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicle”, as it’s called, looked remarkably (and scarily) similar to the monstrous quadrupeds seen in the Black Mirror episode. But let’s not judge based on appearance. The real issue is that we keep rushing to militarized and technological solutions to what ultimately are human and political questions, creating more problems along the way.These particular robot dogs are made by Ghost Robotics, which claims that its 100lb machine was “bred” to scale “all types of natural terrain including sand, rocks and hills, as well as human-built environments, like stairs”. Each robot dog is outfitted with a bevy of sensors and able to transmit real-time video and information feeds. The devices are not yet in operation on the US-Mexico border, but a testing and evaluation program is under way in El Paso, Texas.To listen to DHS, it all sounds so utterly charming and so very next-gen – until you realize that what we’re talking about is the further encroachment of government surveillance on our daily lives. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “people who live along the border are some of the most heavily surveilled people in the United States. A massive amalgamation of federal, state and local law enforcement and national security agencies are flying drones, putting up cameras and just generally attempting to negate civil liberties – capturing the general goings-on of people who live and work in proximity to the border.”Then there’s the question of lethal force. These specific ground drones may not be armed, but Ghost Robotics is already infamous for the combination of robot dog and robot rifle. In 2021, small arms manufacturer Sword International (must these companies choose such dystopian names?) outfitted a robot dog from Ghost Robotics with a custom-made weapon, called a “special purpose unmanned rifle” or Spur. This darling invention was unveiled at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army.Incidentally, US policy not only does not “prohibit the development or employment” of killer robots (officially known as “lethal autonomous weapon systems,” or Laws) but also opposes any international preemptive ban. Meanwhile, as the Congressional Research Service notes, Israel has already exported what many consider a lethal autonomous weapon system to Chile, China, India, South Korea and Turkey. We’re fast running out of time for robust international dialogue on this issue.Domestically, the short history of the use of the robot dogs in our cities is also troubling. The Honolulu police department used about $150,000 of pandemic funding to buy their robot dog, which they then used to scan the eyes and take the temperatures of unhoused people to check for symptoms of Covid. The practice raised the alarms of advocates who said the practice was fundamentally dehumanizing. Needless to say, no housed person was treated that way.And after public outcry in 2021, the New York police department returned its $94,200 robot dog, Digidog. That robot was deployed to a home invasion in the Bronx and to a tense situation in a public housing building in Manhattan, attracting the angry notice of New Yorkers. Once again, many Black and brown New Yorkers felt over-policed, over-surveilled and under-resourced.“You can’t give me a living wage, you can’t raise a minimum wage, you can’t give me affordable housing; I’m working hard and I can’t get paid leave, I can’t get affordable childcare,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman in a video he posted to Twitter. “Instead we got money, taxpayer money, going to robot dogs?”Bowman is hardly alone. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized both the NYPD’s robot dog in 2021 and the recent news of robot dogs at the border. “It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization,” she recently tweeted. “From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS.”She’s right, of course, as is Bowman. Where exactly are our priorities?The Biden administration has a chance to stop this program in its tracks before the border becomes even more of a militarized, technological dystopia. We’re so easily mesmerized by the massive capabilities of technology, but the fact is that techno-military solutions to human problems too often create more problems than they solve. Just ask the unhoused populations in Honolulu, the urban poor in New York, and – if the program’s not cancelled – asylum seekers on the border. These are the people whose daily realities are increasingly being militarized by this technology. And because they are vulnerable and without political clout, they’re the ones closest to living in a Black Mirror episode. Meanwhile, the rest of us are sold a hi-tech bill of goods that unites everything that Americans love – technology, dogs and guns – and told to believe it’s all for the best.Look, I love my tech and all it can do as much as the next person, but when our embrace of technology reduces rather than enhances our dignity, then we have a problem. Humans deserve better. And frankly, so do dogs – even robot ones.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
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      How a reboot of Trump’s Remain in Mexico plan isn’t the solution migrants are hoping for

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      How a reboot of Trump’s Remain in Mexico plan isn’t the solution migrants are hoping for Advocates are critical of the immigration policy’s reinstatement, while asylum seekers see the plan as better than nothing from the USEvery day feels like a bad dream to Timoty Correas. He spent five months in a jam-packed tent camp before moving weeks ago to a roach-infested hotel full of migrant families in a neighborhood, blocks from the US border where, he said, during the night local crime cartels would load crowds of smuggled people in and out of houses used as hiding places.Like thousands of other people here, Correas and his eight-year-old son are stranded at the US border, always hoping that hardline pandemic-related restrictions will cease and the processing of asylum seekers by the US will resume.Correas, a vegetable seller, fled Honduras to try to find his parents in Houston, Texas, after gang members took over his house with death threats in May. He planned to seek asylum in the US.‘People with no names’: the drowned migrants buried in pauper’s gravesRead moreCorreas traveled a month with smugglers through Mexico alongside a tide of other northbound migrants and reached Reynosa, across from Hidalgo, Texas, towards the eastern end of the US-Mexico border, in June.But he and his son found the border essentially closed to asylum seekers.Then, when he recently heard on TV news that the US would begin processing asylum cases through a reboot of former president Donald Trump’s controversial Remain in Mexico program, known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), he was hopeful.Although the program would promise a further six-month wait, it was the best news he’d gotten since the summer.“As I understand it, MPP will apply to families,” he said. “They’ll give us an opportunity to speak with a judge. It feels like a big help, a big step toward entering the US legally.”Immigration advocates, however, are fiercely critical of the court-ordered reinstatement this month of the immigration policy that Joe Biden campaigned to repeal, after Trump forced migrants to wait in Mexico, typically in squalor and danger, while their cases wound interminably through a dysfunctional US system.It was one of the final chapters of Trump’s harsh approach throughout, leaving migrants in limbo and greater numbers risking – and losing – their lives to cross anyway via border desert or river.But for thousands of asylum seekers stranded for months on the border with no end in sight, MPP feels like a sign of movement and better than nothing from the US government, which has been expelling migrants under a rule known as Title 42 and blocking most asylum claims under public health grounds since March of 2020.The latest iteration of MPP has kicked off slowly, enrolling 80 people in its first six days in El Paso, Texas, according to the publication Border Report.The US plans to eventually offer MPP at seven ports of entry across the south-west border, although authorities haven’t given a firm timeline.At a muddy tent camp in Reynosa, aid workers said it remained unclear exactly who would qualify for MPP, how many people it would eventually process or how strictly the government would adhere to humanitarian guidelines it set for itself.“Everyone is real excited about it,” said Felicia Rangel, co-director of the Sidewalk School, an aid organization founded when migrant populations first began to accumulate in this area in 2019. “But it’s not a good thing.”Until Trump brought in MPP in 2019, having already tried to block many asylum claims, those fleeing violence who hoped for political asylum were granted refuge in the US and allowed to join relatives in the country, who act as their sponsors, while their cases were heard.Biden repealed MPP upon taking office but continued Title 42, summarily expelling migrants without a chance to make their case.Up to 2,000 such people are living in a camp six blocks from Reynosa’s city center. An additional 1,150 are in tents in a shelter space supervised by the Pathway of Life church and hundreds more are in other shelters, crowded nearby houses or rooms rented by local charities.“Ninety percent or more don’t plan to return to their country,” said Isaac Castellanos, pastor of the Shaddai Ministry church, which offered to host 125 people in tents on its property in late October as the local migrant population began to overwhelm the city.“The option they are waiting for is through MPP.”He said the city has been discussing a large, federally funded shelter for months, but without progress, forcing small private charities to assume support for the humanitarian debacle.At the camp in Reynosa’s plaza, 35-year-old Belen Dubon keeps an “information desk” at a bench on the road to the bridge to Texas, where new arrivals come daily, expelled from the US after crossing the Rio Grande.Dubon, a nurse from Guatemala City who has lived in this camp for almost six months, said newcomers are easy to recognize because US authorities remove their shoelaces before expelling them and because they are covered in dust.Every day more than 100 people arrive, she said, escorted across the nearby bridge by US border patrol, then released on Mexican soil.Dubon helps them find food at community kitchens in the camp and space on the crowded ground to sleep for their first night. But this camp and surrounding shelters are full, so many people seek a place elsewhere.“Their guides who brought them come back and pick them up,” she said, referring to human smugglers. “I don’t know where they go.”Most people here see no option to give up on waiting, she said, because they spent thousands of dollars of mostly borrowed money to pay smugglers to get them here.Others, like Correas and his son, can’t return home because their houses were taken over by gang members. Others have sent their children across the border unaccompanied, in hope they would be able to apply there to stay, despite the prospect of being detained.Some of those children’s parents in Reynosa told the Guardian they’ll wait as long as they must to reunite.Parents such as Iris Betancourt, 36, who fled Honduras with her husband and three children in August after a local gang boss tried to make her 13-year-old daughter his wife and wound up at the camp in Reynosa.Dangerous and unsanitary conditions kept the three kids mostly penned up in the tent, she said, while Betancourt’s sister in Houston encouraged her to send them to live safely with her.On 31 October, Betancourt and her husband took the kids out for ice-cream, hugged them close all night then paid smugglers $500 per child the next morning to sneak them into the US, where they expected to be apprehended, and would give authorities the contact information for their aunt in Houston.The kids spent a month and seven days in a secure New York City shelter under the US Office of Refugee Resettlement, then arrived in Houston this month, Betancourt said.“I don’t know when I’ll see them again. I don’t know if I’ll wait here for years,” she said, crying. “I wonder every day, will I get in or not? Will the wait be worth the sacrifice?”Aid workers say thousands of children have been similarly sent over by parents in recent months. Figures from US Health and Human Services show more than 13,000 unaccompanied children in government custody as of 10 December, with roughly 500 discharged each day to sponsors across the country. Yet the parents who stay behind at the border face a slim chance of achieving legal entry into the US.Under Trump, MPP had a less-than-1% acceptance rate for asylum cases.Although Biden’s reboot lists new protections for enrolled migrants, it still isn’t clear exactly how the program will operate, said Alex Norman, a former paralegal who helps process emergency immigration parole cases at the camp in Reynosa.“They aren’t going to have the capacity to process thousands of people who are here now,” said Norman, who sits in on calls between DHS officials and local aid organizations.“Or the thousands who are on their way now that they hear there are asylum possibilities.”Eleanor Acer of advocacy group Human Rights First told NPR that MPP was a “humanitarian fiasco” under Trump and would be so under Biden, too.Yet migrants such as Correas, think any sort of shift in US policy is the best news he’s gotten after six months of limbo.His parents fled Honduras in the 1990s when he was a child and his dream of bringing his own son to be with them in a safe city motivates him now to wait indefinitely.“To be with my mom and dad, it will be the greatest gift of my life,” he said. “If I have to wait six or seven months like MPP says, then I’ll have to learn to adapt.”TopicsUS-Mexico borderUS immigrationBiden administrationTrump administrationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden administration reinstates Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

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      Biden administration reinstates Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ policyBiden called the policy inhumane after Trump administration used it to return over 60,000 asylum seekers across the border Asylum seekers looking to enter the US from its southern border will again be sent to Mexico while their claims are assessed, with the Biden administration announcing the reinstatement of the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy on Thursday.Remain in Mexico policy needlessly exposed migrants to harm, report saysRead moreThe US and Mexican governments haver agreed to a resumption of the program, put in place by Donald Trump in 2019, following its previous suspension by Joe Biden after he became president. It will initially begin in San Diego and in the Texas cities of Laredo, Brownsville and El Paso next week.Biden had called the arrangement inhumane after it was used by Trump’s administration to return more than 60,000 asylum seekers across the border to Mexico, where they were often preyed upon by criminal gangs. Many people were left waiting for months in limbo in Mexico as their fate was determined.In October, Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said that the program “had endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and did not address the root causes of irregular migration”.However, Republican officials in Missouri and Texas sued Biden’s administration in federal court to prevent the scrapping of the return to Mexico policy, claiming that it would place an undue burden on them from incoming migrants.The supreme court ultimately concurred with the states, placing an injunction on the federal government in August which forced it to resume the program. Since then, federal officials have been negotiating with their Mexican counterparts on how the scheme will resume.Under the reinstated deal, single adult asylum seekers will be the primary focus of the removals, with those transferred offered Covid-19 vaccinations. Mexico will accept asylum seekers from Spanish-speaking countries, the Washington Post reported.The US will aim to complete migrants’ claims within 180 days, amid fears they will be left to languish in Mexico. The US Department of Justice is assigning 22 immigration judges to work specifically on these cases.Supporters of the system have claimed it will help reduce the flow of migrants into the US but advocates have argued that there is little evidence that this will happen and point to the often dire humanitarian situation the program has exacerbated on the border.People expelled by the US often end up in sprawling tent camps or sub-standard housing in places such as Tijuana and Reynosa that often lack basic foods and amenities for asylum seekers.According to Human Rights First, a US human rights group, there have been more than 1,500 cases of reported kidnappings and attacks against migrants subjected to the system, known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), and thousands more under another Trump policy known as Title 42 that uses public health concerns to eject asylum seekers.“President Biden and his administration must stop implementing Trump policies that endanger the lives and safety of people seeking refuge in the United States,” said Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First.Trump’s ‘shameful’ migrant stance condemns thousands to violent limbo in MexicoRead more“Remain in Mexico and other policies that flout asylum laws and treaties are inhumane and unjust. Every day they are in place, they deliver people seeking protection to places where they are targets of brutal attacks and kidnappings perpetrated by deadly cartels and corrupt Mexican officers.”The Biden administration has also been sharply criticized by refugee advocates for the growing number of immigrants being held at private facilities. Biden had promised to end the private, for-profit jails but has exempted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency from this effort and the number of immigrants in detention has nearly doubled to 29,000 since he took office.“Frankly, it’s infuriating,” Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director for Detention Watch Network, told the Washington Post. “It’s incredibly disappointing. We really expected more.”TopicsUS immigrationUS-Mexico borderBiden administrationTrump administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden to reinstate Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ migrant policy

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      US immigrationBiden to reinstate Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ migrant policyDoJ says reinstatement depends on approval from MexicoCourt overturned Biden’s initial decision to suspend policy Amanda Holpuch@holpuchFri 15 Oct 2021 14.57 EDTLast modified on Fri 15 Oct 2021 15.55 EDTThe Biden administration said on Friday it plans to reinstate the Trump-era border policy known as Remain in Mexico, which forced at least 70,000 asylum seekers to stay in Mexico, many for extended periods and in deprived and dangerous conditions, while they waited for their cases to be considered US courts.Senior state department official calls Biden’s deportation of Haitians illegalRead moreJoe Biden suspended the policy formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) in his first days in office, but a federal judge ordered his administration to put it back into place.In a court filing late on Friday, the US justice department said the program’s reinstatement depended on approval from the Mexican government, which is asking for the asylum cases to be settled in six months and for the US to ensure the people affected have timely and accurate information as well as better access to legal counsel. The program is expected to be back in effect in mid-November.Donald Trump introduced Remain in Mexico in January 2019. From the beginning, advocates criticized the program because it put highly vulnerable migrants, mostly from Central and South America, at serious risk of physical harm and illness as they waited in some of the most dangerous cities in the world. It also fails to address the forces pushing people north to the US-Mexico border and the huge backlogs in US immigration courts.Campaign group Human Rights Watch said in a January report about the policy that affected asylum seekers it interviewed, including children, “described rape or attempted rape and other sexual assault, abduction for ransom, extortion, armed robbery, and other crimes committed against them”.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immigrants’ rights policy director, Omar Jadwat, said via Twitter that the news was “appalling” and acknowledged the Biden administration was required by a court order to make a “good faith” effort to restart it.“They had a lot of options here, including re-terminating MPP promptly and seeking to vacate the order,” Jadwat said.To restart the program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to spend $14.1m to reopen temporary courtrooms located in tents in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas, which will cost $10.5m a month to operate, according to a court filing.In June, the DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, formally put an end to the policy and in a memo said: “MPP had mixed effectiveness in achieving several of its central goals and that the program experienced significant challenges.”TopicsUS immigrationMexicoAmericasTrump administrationUS politicsBiden administrationUS-Mexico bordernewsReuse this content More

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      Men on horses chasing Black asylum-seekers? Sadly, America has a precedent | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      OpinionUS politicsMen on horses chasing Black asylum seekers? Sadly, America has seen it beforeMoustafa BayoumiThe Biden administration has condemned abuses at the border – while maintaining the policies underlying these abuses. That’s beyond cynical Thu 23 Sep 2021 06.22 EDTLast modified on Thu 23 Sep 2021 06.23 EDTYou’ve probably seen a photograph haunting the internet this week: a white-presenting man on horseback – uniformed, armed and sneering – is grabbing a shoeless Black man by the neck of his T-shirt. The Black man’s face bears an unmistakable look of horror. He struggles to remain upright while clinging dearly to some bags of food in his hands. Between the men, a long rein from the horse’s bridle arches menacingly in the air like a whip. The photograph was taken just a few days ago in Texas, but the tableau looks like something out of antebellum America.The image is profoundly upsetting, not just for what it portrays but for the history it evokes. What’s happening at the border right now puts two of our founding national myths – that we’re a land of liberty and a nation of immigrants – under scrutiny. To put it plainly, we don’t fare well under inspection.First, the current situation. This now iconic photo by photojournalist Paul Ratje was taken at a makeshift camp that has sprung up at the US-Mexico border at Del Rio, Texas. Over the past week or two, thousands of people, mostly Haitian, have crossed from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande to the US seeking asylum. It’s important to note that they didn’t come illegally; it is perfectly legal to arrive at a border point of entry and request asylum. But conditions in the camp, according to reports, have become fetid and nearly unlivable, forcing asylum seekers to trek back and forth across the river to buy food and supplies from the Mexican side.Then the men on horses showed up.In video broadcast by Al Jazeera, mounted border patrol agents can clearly be seen threatening, insulting and even lashing at the asylum seekers with their horses’ reins, growling at them to stay in Mexico. The images, which sparked justifiable outrage, quickly spread – as did rightwing defenses of the agents. Fox News, for example, was quick to point out that border patrol agents are not issued whips with their gear. But you don’t have to believe in alchemy to see that when a horse’s rein is used as whip, it becomes a whip.The Biden administration has ended use of the phrase ‘illegal alien’. It’s about time | Moustafa BayoumiRead moreChains, whips, horses, bloodhounds, branding irons: these were some of the tools used during New World slavery to preserve white hegemony. Most Americans know this, and I hold on to the hope that no one wants to return to such brutality. Every part of that miserable system was degrading. It was degrading to the enslaved, most obviously, and even, I would argue, to slaveholders, who surely lost more of their humanity each day that that monstrous system survived.In fact, New World slavery wasn’t just degrading. It was collective lunacy, often involving animals. Slaveholders and slave catchers – yes, that was a real profession – trained dogs to attack Black people, and then deliberately interpreted the attacks as proof that even dogs recognized Black inferiority.And those slave catchers? After Mexico formally abolished slavery in 1829, American slave catchers would routinely cross into Mexico – without authorization, it must be said – in search of runaway slaves from the US. In 1858, the Texas legislature even passed a law offering anyone returning an enslaved person “who may have escaped beyond the limits of the slave territory of the United States” a third of “the value of such slave”, with the government treasury paying the money. A noticeable uptick of kidnappings of people of African descent in Mexico followed. Needless to say, Mexico was not pleased.So history easily illustrates the US’s border hypocrisy. Yet the larger point is that every national border has always been a place that offers those who pass through one of two options: sanctuary or terror. The images emerging from Del Rio, explicitly recalling the collective shame of our past, are clearly pointing in the wrong direction. This might explain why the White House, which has executive authority over the border patrol, rushed to condemn the pictures.Asked about the footage, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, responded, “I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate.” Vice-President Kamala Harris said, “Human beings should never be treated that way.” The Department of Homeland Security has promised an investigation with “appropriate disciplinary actions”.But is this just image control? At the same time that it condemns the actions of its own law enforcement agency, the Biden administration has refused media access to the camp at Del Rio, invoked a Trump-era order (the rarely used public health law known as Title 42) to expel asylum seekers without review, and forcibly deported hundreds of Haitians in Texas – many of whom left the country more than a decade ago, after its 2010 earthquake – back to a country that is not only reeling from a massive earthquake last August but also from a political earthquake, the assassination of its president, last July.Without review, it’s impossible to know who is facing real threats of persecution when returned to Haiti. The United Nations human rights spokesperson, Marta Hurtado, said that the UN “is seriously concerned by the fact that it appears there have not been any individual assessments of the cases”. Why does the Biden administration not share her concern?One has to wonder if the same policies expelling Haitians from the US today would be in effect if those arriving at the border were Europeans or even Cubans. If history is any guide – for decades, the US privileged Cubans over Haitians and other Caribbean peoples in immigration matters – the answer is no.It’s one thing for the Biden administration to condemn abuses conducted by its own government that recall the worst parts of our national history. But it’s quite another to do so while maintaining the policies that enable those abuses. That’s not just cynical. It’s despicable.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
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      Kamala Harris takes heat from both sides in daunting border visit

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      The sun beat down on the 30ft border fence that separates El Paso, Texas from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as temperatures headed towards 100F on the southern border that stands as a symbol for so much in American politics.The heat was also on for Vice-President Kamala Harris, who was making her first trip to the border since being tasked with immigration policy by Joe Biden more than three months ago.It is not an easy job. She was handed one of the toughest issues in American politics and one that has plagued successive American presidents for several decades, no matter what political party was occupying the White House.Criticism for Harris came from both sides of the political aisle for the length of time it took her to make the trip on Friday. More attacks came from Donald Trump, who had accepted an offer from Texas’ rightwing governor Greg Abbott to tour the border ahead of an attempt by Republican-run Texas to fund the completion of a border wall. “If Governor Abbott and I weren’t going there next week, she would have never gone!” Trump said.But Trump’s criticism of Harris was hardly the only voice raised against her as she seeks to come to grips with immigration and border security. She was also criticized by immigration activists and many on the left of the Democratic party for the message she delivered during an early June visit to Guatemala.“Do not come. Do not come,” she said. “I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.”The blunt message was ill-received by those who pointed out that Harris’ parents were also immigrants.“[Her comments] reinforced the years of attacks on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers by the previous administration,” said Dylan Corbett, the director of a local non-profit organization that focuses on immigration policies and aiding migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. “The message should be: ‘How can we, together, build a future where your children don’t have to migrate?’”After touring a border patrol facility to kick off her visit, Harris made an unannounced stop at the Paso Del Norte port of entry, a busy international bridge that connects the downtown centers of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.While there, she met with five girls detained at the bridge’s processing center, aged between nine and 16 and all from Central America. The meeting was closed to the press, but her office described the meeting as positive, with the girls calling Harris an inspiration and drawing photos for her.Approximately 1,600 children just like those girls are being housed in shelters at the US army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, according to US media, where there are lengthy stays, poor conditions and infrequent meetings with lawyers.But a visit to the controversial shelter on Fort Bliss was not part of the vice-president’s visit, despite the announcement of an investigation of the housing for migrant children.Across the street from her meeting with the girls, a small group of immigration advocates chanted from the corner, “Si, se puede!” after Harris left. She headed back to the airport, where she met with the leaders of immigrants rights organizations. The focus of their discussion was reported as the root causes and drivers of immigration to the United States.Behind the talk, though, is a brutal reality.The trip from Central America for many immigrants is long and potentially lethal, especially for children. There are deaths from heat stroke as migrants trek through triple-digit desert heat, or fall from the 30ft high border wall already in place in high-traffic areas along the international line.Migrants who survive that fall are just a few of the people who are taken to a local non-profit organization, Annunciation House, which operates as a network of shelters, helping to connect migrants with family in the States and legal representation for asylum cases.The injuries range from fractured ankles to head injuries that have left a woman quadriplegic, according to the director of Annunciation House, Ruben Garcia.“We have such little appreciation for what they’re risking to be safe, to put food on the table,” Garcia said. “These people aren’t coming here because they want to put jacuzzis in their houses.”Nor is getting to the border, or even across it, the end of the story. Should migrants survive the trip from their home countries, through Mexico and across the border into the US, in most cases, they are not currently allowed to stay in the US, even when seeking asylum.Nearly 100,000 migrants have been expelled from El Paso, Texas, into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since October, according to data provided by the border patrol. The expulsions are still taking place under a policy known as Title 42, implemented by the Trump administration. Thus far, Title 42 has been kept in place by the Biden administration despite outcry from immigration organizations.“The expulsions under Title 42 are still rampant,” Garcia said.The policy falls under the umbrella of public health and was implemented as a response to Covid-19. “We all know it had nothing to do with the pandemic, it had to do with immigration control,” Garcia said. “I tell people: Donald Trump did get his wall. It’s called Title 42.”There was little sign Harris planned to end that. Nor is there much doubt that the debate over immigration and the border in the US will remain toxic after a Trump era when many Republicans – including the former president – made openly racist statements about immigrants.“In the United States, there is an incredibly significant population that doesn’t want you, they speak extremely derogatorily about you,” said Garcia. “They wouldn’t care if you die on the way, they wouldn’t care if you fell off the wall and broke your back.”Harris sought to draw a little of that poison on her trip. “Let’s not lose sight that we’re talking about human beings,” she said.After meeting with Harris, Linda Rivas, the executive director of Las Americas, a non-profit organization that provides legal representation during immigration processes, said she was grateful to share the stories of her clients with the vice-president but also called for more action. “The Biden-Harris administration must improve the asylum process and end the cruel border policies that ripped families apart,” Rivas said.But as the policy debate continues and Harris mulls her next steps, the heat is unlikely to relent – either in US politics or at the sweltering border itself.In a statement last week, US Customs and Border Protection described crossing the border in the desert in the summer. “The terrain along the border is extreme, the summer heat is severe, and the miles of desert migrants must hike after crossing the border in many areas are unforgiving,” it said.At the moment, not much looks likely to change that. 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