In late July, for the fourth time in 10 months, Daniel Fernandez prepared her for what he hoped would be his first asylum seeker.
The Venetian landowner collects items old and new: his asylum application, his paperwork for migration protocols, hand processor and a mask.
“They have not yet officially said anything about the hearings,” Fernandez, 30, said a few days before his July 27 appearance in U.S. immigration court – an appointment he received after three postponements.
Then, later that week, he tapped a sado emoji on WhatsApp: ‘They canceled the hearings. No start date. ”
Amid a backlog of more than 1 million immigration cases and indefinite border restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, Fernandez and thousands of other migrants like him have to wait in Mexico, appearing periodically at border courtrooms like their cases through U.S. immigration courts.
But Fernandez – a gay man who is HIV-positive and was diagnosed with clinical AIDS shortly after applying for asylum – said the widespread crime and lack of health care on the Mexican side of the border had left him in an almost year-long limbo that is unsafe. The situation is in stark contrast to the very reason he is seeking asylum in the United States, which is to be safe.
“I do not imagine I would be caught here in Mexico,” said Fernandez, who was being prosecuted by the government of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. “I’m too hopeless here right now.”
An asylum claim based on ‘political opinion’
Fernandez shared his asylum case with NBC News, after failing to do so before an immigration judge.
Fernandez first approached the United States-Mexico border on October 31 and sought asylum because of persecution he faced because of a card-bearing member of Voluntad Popular, or Popular Will, a US-backed opposition party. . In 2015, the group elected the first gay and transgender members to the National Assembly of Venezuela. He also told border officials that he was HIV-positive and had not received medication or blood tests for months, so he did not know about the progression of his infection.
In several ways, Fernandez has a textbook asylum case: He claims he was persecuted because of his “political opinion,” a category explicitly protected in America’s asylum statute, unlike LGBTQ. (The Trump administration recently proposed potential restrictions on asylum claims based on prosecution for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.)
In his asylum application, Fernandez detailed how government police and pro-government alliances called “colectivos” and beat him in the years after he began protesting against government in the northwestern cities of Valera and Maracaibo.
He also claimed that in 2017 he could not get medication to treat his HIV infection, whether due to shortages, political retaliation or both – he could never be sure.
Fernandez’s asylum application is reminiscent of a day of ‘extreme persecution’ on June 27, 2017, when protests against Maduro’s attempts to rewrite the constitution reached a violent crescendo.
“We will never surrender,” Maduro said at the time. “And what we can not achieve by voting, we will do with weapons.”
Fernandez said that this week in Venezuela he was approached by two unknown men on motorcycles who called his name. They grabbed his phone, threw his belongings across the street and started “a brutal mess.”
“F —–, if you continue after the protests, we will f —— keep you going,” he said, the two men shouted as they punched rain and landed on him. Eventually, neighbors came to his aid.
“I felt very close to death,” Fernandez wrote in his asylum application. “If the neighbors had not seen the action, I do not know how far the aggression would go.”
He took her advice and came back to his birthplace, but soon received threatening calls and texts: “f —–, you love dick, next time we’ll give it to you harder.” They knew he was in Valera too, he said.
This torturous cat-and-mouse game lasted another two years. His mental health declined, and his family told him he would have to return to Maracaibo to resume his studies and try to lead a normal life.
Meanwhile, he said his physical health went out of control because he could not treat his HIV infection. He lost a lot of weight and began to get sick from gastrointestinal problems and thrush.
One year ago, amid ongoing economic imposition and a humanitarian crisis that has driven nearly 5 million Venezuelans out of the country, Fernandez also decided he had enough. It was time to go.
He left Venezuela on August 31 and crossed the country into neighboring Colombia. He stayed there for more than a month before saving enough money to fly to Mexico City. From there, he traveled to the border crossing in Laredo, Texas, and arrived just before the end of October.
He is still waiting 10 months later in Mexico.
When he arrived in the US, the then-recently-established “stay in Mexico” policy required him to wait south of the border until his dates in U.S. immigration domains.
Stay in a dangerous limbo
Proponents of immigration have decided to wait in Mexico as illegal under international law, as it effectively closes the doors to large numbers of asylum seekers, and require them to wait in Mexico, which has high crime rates.
The U.S. State Department is currently issuing a “do not travel” warning to the state of Tamaulipas in Mexico and a “re-examination” warning to the states of Coahuila and Nuevo Leon, all border states near Texas, because of the risk of crime and kidnapping. Fernandez is currently in the state of Coahuila, where the state department says “violent crime and unpredictable gang activity are common.”
A report in October 2019 from the bipartisan U.S. Civil Liberties Commission found that “staying in Mexico” – technically the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP – “taxing migrants is a refuge in Mexico and puts asylum seekers at greater risk of violence.”
“Several asylum seekers who were denied entry to U.S. ports have been killed, women raped and children abducted, casting doubt on the relative safety of Central Americans in Mexico,” the report said.
Immediately after arriving in Mexico, Fernandez still had no official way to access HIV drugs, and his infection became less severe.
“He was taken to Laredo Hospital, where a doctor checked his medical records and confirmed he was living with AIDS and needed further treatment,” his lawyer, Scott Weaver, said in February. “Nevertheless, the CBP officers making a decision on his case told him that his request was denied and that he had to return to Mexico.”
“People should not be placed in MPP if they have serious medical problems,” Weaver continued. “This is written in DHS ” Guiding Principles for MPP. ”
Matthew Dyman, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told NBC News that “MPP exemptions are determined on a case-by-case basis.”
“If guaranteed medical exemption criteria were made public, they would be exploited by human traffickers and activists,” Dyman said.
After Fernandez was denied humanitarian parole in February for his medical condition, he was returned to Mexico, where he was mugged and briefly abducted by a gang.
Even now, he stays there.
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