Restrictive border policies give cartels more money and more victims.

Biden administration officials can argue their policies are an improvement over what could be an even worse US approach at the border. The administration has established a new humanitarian parole program to allow more asylum seekers safe pathways into the US, though they are limited to certain nationalities, and among them, people who can afford to pay for plane tickets and other travel, are able to obtain passports, and have family members in the United States wealthy enough to apply to sponsor them with the US government. The Biden administration has also made extensive use of temporary protected status and raised refugee admissions caps. 

Still, the Biden asylum rule and digital metering policies are part of a larger effort by the United States to deter irregular migration at the US-Mexico border. The US has sought agreements with many Latin American governments, including Mexico and Guatemala, aimed at deterring migration. In one such arrangement, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has agreed to accept some non-Mexican asylum seekers who are rapidly removed or returned “voluntarily” by the United States.

Against this high-level backdrop, officials from both the United States and Mexico participate in blocking asylum seekers from seeking asylum in the United States. In this report, Human Rights Watch documents efforts by the US and Mexico to conduct “turnbacks”—blocking people from entering the United States and pushing them back to Mexico—of asylum seekers at ports of entry at the US-Mexico border. The US CBP One appointment system is cited by officials of both governments when blocking asylum seekers from accessing the border. Turnbacks today are therefore often the dangerous result of digital metering and the Biden asylum rule.

The US policies blocking asylum at the border in recent years, carried out in collaboration with Mexico, have changed in name and severity, but one material outcome for asylum seekers has remained the same: they are forced to wait in northern Mexican states, as well as in many cities in other parts of Mexico through which migrants transit, where they are systematically targeted by cartels, sometimes with the help of Mexican government officials, for kidnapping, extortion, sexual assault, robbery, and other abuse. Digital metering feeds cartel needs for a vulnerable population to prey upon.

The more difficult it is for migrants to cross the US-Mexico border, the more money cartels make, whether from smuggling operations or from kidnapping and extortion. Human Rights Watch documented cases of kidnapping for ransom in interviews in each of the five Mexican cities in which we visited for this report. Criminal actors and government officials also have near impunity when sexually assaulting asylum seekers, given the fear and power imbalance they can exploit due to digital metering.