Pregnant Asylum-Seekers Needed Help at the Border. Inside the Program That Provided Care —and Community

Xiomara was already having labor pains when she presented herself to U.S. Border Patrol officials to make a claim for asylum. She had fled gang violence in El Salvador six months earlier, working under the table in Mexico to afford bus tickets for her and her three young children to make it to the border. When she finally arrived, nine months pregnant and feeling contractions, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offered to take her to a hospital. But she had heard about family separations and was worried about losing her kids if she were hospitalized, so instead she was sent back to the streets of Ciudad Juárez at night, alone with the children and with another on the way. “It was sad, and I started to cry,” Xiomara, 33, tells TIME in Spanish. “I really thought they would let me through to the U.S.” Instead, she says, officials kept telling her “that I shouldn’t have showed up.” It was May 23; the U.S. government’s rule, which states that any migrants showing up at the border be immediately turned away to Mexico, even if they wish to make a claim for asylum, an international right, because of the risks posed by COVID-19, was put in place in March. Since then, CBP has conducted more than 444,000 “expulsions” of this type at the U.S.-Mexico border. After a kind stranger in Juárez told Xiomara the name of a shelter he knew, she took her children, ages 10, 6 and 4, only to find it was full. But it di...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 feature Immigration Magazine Women in Crisis Source Type: news