With more than 4.9 million Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of their country, the Biden administration announced in late March that it will host 100,000 people fleeing the conflict in the United States
While immigration activists usually welcome such an announcement, some criticize what they see as a double standard on the southern border, which favors Ukrainian refugees over black and brown migrants who are already waiting. In March, more than 3,000 Ukrainian refugees were processed at the US-Mexico border, while refugees from other countries are waiting months – and in some cases years – for their asylum applications to be heard.
“This is very different from the treatment mostly black and brown refugees have received over the past two years while the border has been closed to any asylum seekers under a law known as Title 42, which is called a public health measure that required it.” is to protect the US public from rising COVID numbers in the world, but really serves to keep black and brown asylum seekers out,” said Nicole Ramos, director of the Border Rights Project at legal services organization Al Otro Lado Yahoo News.
Immigrant families from Haiti and Brazil are taken into custody by a US Border Patrol agent in Yuma, Arizona (John Moore/Getty Images)
Title 42 is a Trump-era immigration policy that allows US Customs and Border Protection officials to bar entry of asylum seekers who pose a potential health risk. It was enacted in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to a large backlog of asylum cases at the border. It should be lifted by the end of May.
Ramos said thousands of migrants fleeing Central America, Mexico, Africa and Haiti are also fleeing drug wars, law enforcement and corruption. “There are many kinds of wars that other refugees flee from. But these wars are not considered worthy of responding. We have thousands of families fleeing Mexico’s southern state of Michoacán, where the government is literally at war with the drug cartels,” Ramos said.
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In an interview with CBS Evening News, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that there is no double standard when it comes to Ukrainian refugees, even though thousands of migrants from other countries are also waiting at the border.
“What we are doing on an individual basis is assessing whether a Ukrainian family, and frankly other families from other countries, are eligible for our discretionary authority to grant humanitarian parole. Do they present us with an urgent humanitarian condition that requires special treatment? And this is not specific to Ukrainians. We apply that broadly,” Mayorkas told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell last week.
Haitian immigrant Francel Celestin. (Courtesy of Francel Celestin)
About 170,000 migrants are waiting to apply for asylum in the United States, according to border officials. Thousands of migrants have had to wait for more than two years in poor conditions in border towns across the southern border because of Title 42.
Ramos said refugees from Haiti and elsewhere fall directly under the protections of US asylum law, but are denied the opportunity to have access to the judicial process. People who have been waiting months for their cases to be processed often need humanitarian aid just as urgently as refugees from Ukraine.
Francel Celestin is a Haitian immigrant who is awaiting processing of his asylum application in Tijuana, Mexico with his wife and three children. They are fleeing Haiti’s political crisis, economic instability, climate catastrophes and the assassination of the country’s President Jovenel Moïse on July 7, 2021. Celestin said his family still hasn’t recovered from the cataclysmic 7.0 magnitude earthquake of 2010 that reportedly killed 220,000 people.
Celestin told Yahoo News that he was targeted by the Haitian government for his involvement in an opposition party, leaving his family with no choice but to pack their bags and head to the United States’ southern border. He said he feared reprisals if he was forced to return home.
“Right now, people have no faith. Humans don’t have stability. They can’t even go outside because there are too many kidnappings. criminals do as they please; Cops can’t control them. There is no president because they killed him. So right now we don’t even have a governor. It’s a country where people do what they want. It’s pure corruption,” Celestin said in Spanish.
Like many Haitian migrants, he is unsure what to make of the possible priority given to Ukrainian refugees.
“I feel small to myself. I feel small because we are from the Caribbean and she is from Europe. They left because of a war in their country, but it’s their war. But we also left because of a war — because children in our country can’t walk alone and we can’t provide a decent life for our children,” Celestin said.