We Built the Wall. Eileen Truax
difficult to make the case for asylum based on political views,” Carlos explains, “but when you’re a candidate for office, when you’re a writer or someone who’s constantly criticizing the government publicly, it’s much easier.” When President Felipe Calderón’s war on drug trafficking prompted an exodus, for example, Carlos’s strongest asylum cases were journalists. It was relatively easy to demonstrate persecution based on political beliefs or on their membership in a social group—in this case, the journalism profession.
Carlos began to take on more cases from journalists and human rights defenders, the vast majority from the state of Chihuahua, and became an expert in this new condition of exile-asylum from Mexico to the United States. Carlos, Sandra, their daughter Alejandra, and a few other people in their office began taking on these cases pro bono or for a nominal fee. When the Reyes case came to the Spectors, the evidence of massive repression was clear. Such cases were easy because they embodied the very definition of political asylum. Considered symbolic cases, they could be used to educate people on their options within the immigration system.
Carlos started to win some cases through the political asylum office, which is very different from having to go before a judge. There are two political asylum categories: affirmative asylum and defensive asylum. Those who enter the United States legally, with a visa or work permit, can go to one of the asylum offices throughout the country to apply for affirmative asylum. The process is more friendly, and the staff interviewing candidates for asylum there specialize in the subject; they are more sensitive to applicants’ circumstances and can process cases more accurately. Those who apply for asylum at border crossings or those detained while attempting to cross the border illegally are applying for defensive asylum; they try to defend themselves against deportation, presenting an argument for their asylum petition. Their first contact is with immigration agents, who generally do not have the training or knowledge to deal with victims of violence. The standard procedure is to arrest the asylum applicant, then schedule a court date for them to go before a judge. And that is where the battle begins.
“I never thought we would have to appeal these cases in court,” Carlos remarks, still incredulous that asylum is routinely denied to victims of well-documented, clear cases of violence like the Reyes family. “That’s when I realized the Mexican government is not satisfied with the U.S. rejecting 98 percent of applications. They want them to deny 100 percent of the cases.” He recalls cases in which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the state and federal commissions on human rights intervened on behalf of migrants accused of transgressions such as criticizing the government or the army. Those cases have been rejected.
It was time to depart from the strategy that had worked with Central American exiles in the eighties, Carlos decided. If that wave of exiles had been characterized by invisibility, people coming from Mexico would have to be highly visible, making public declarations and denunciations and criticizing the Mexican state. “Because the problem is binational,” Carlos argues, “the solution has to be binational: attacking and criticizing the source of the problem from here.” The United States is as culpable as Mexico, not only denying petitions but openly discouraging petitioners by insulting and detaining immigrants at border crossings. Such rejections in turn discourage lawyers from taking on strong cases due to low rates of success, Carlos says.
Winning political asylum cases for Mexicans has not been profitable for the Spectors, but it has increased the firm’s profile. They currently handle a caseload of 250 clients, including a hundred families, and one by one, the cases are being approved. Carlos has won cases for six members of the Reyes family, for instance, including Saúl and Sara. This is an extraordinary feat, considering the national statistics: of every hundred cases of Mexicans applying for asylum, ninety-eight are denied.
Although the figures are discouraging, asylum seekers keep coming. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, of 3,650 asylum applications presented by Mexicans in 2008, only 73 were granted. By 2011, the number of applicants had doubled, but of 7,616 applications, only 107 were granted. In fiscal year 2013, the applications reached 10,177, and of those, 155 were approved; by 2015 the number of applications dropped to 8,923, and 203 were approved. This represents a sea change from 2006, before Felipe Calderón’s war on narcotrafficking began, when 133 applications were filed.2
On top of enduring a complicated, challenging process, applicants and their lawyers must contend with the far right in both countries; those in the United States argue that asylum seekers are doing so to obtain green cards, while their Mexican counterparts refer to asylum seekers as “buscapapeles” (“looking for papers”), traitors, or criminals. And the Mexican government, Carlos says, consistently echoes this rhetoric.
Carlos tells me Marisol Valles’s story as an example. For months, Marisol was known as “the bravest woman in Mexico,” a nickname initially coined by the Spanish daily El País and picked up by the other media outlets following her story. A twenty-year-old college student studying criminology, Marisol became the chief of police in Práxedis G. Guerrero, a town in the Juárez Valley in Chihuahua, where her predecessors had met one of two fates: they were assassinated or fled after receiving death threats from narcotraffickers. Marisol took a job that no one else wanted, with the promise that she would head a police corps of mostly female officers, avoid direct confrontations with criminal gangs, and focus on devising policies to prevent violence and crime on the local level.
Four months later, Marisol began receiving the usual threats. She chose to leave the country, turning herself in to an immigration agent and applying for asylum.3 Her husband, her parents, her two sisters, and her infant son were with her, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and their birth certificates. After spending a few days in a U.S. immigration detention center, they were released to live with relatives, ten people in one house. Eight months later, they still had not been granted permission to work, which was usually granted to applicants while their asylum cases are wending their way through the courts.
When questioned by the media about Marisol’s departure, the mayor’s office in Práxedis Guerrero denied that she had received any threats, asserting that she had asked to take a week off for personal reasons and that she would be fired if she did not return to work. The governor of Chihuahua, César Duarte, went further, accusing Marisol of exploiting her “fame” to move to the United States, thereby damaging Chihuahua’s image, and insinuating that she had left her job due to romantic problems. Then Carlos Spector took her case.
That the morals of people leaving their country to stay alive are questioned infuriates Carlos. He maintains that government authorities seeking to protect their reputation are as guilty of this practice as the news media. After Marisol’s departure, for example, “an article was published saying she had been planning to come to the United States ever since she was a little girl, because she wore Polo T-shirts when she was seven or eight.” He smiles wryly, shaking his head. “I’m proud to have such far-sighted clients.” Even some human rights groups, he says, “view people who apply for political asylum as abandoning the fight for Mexico. Maybe they would rather see them die in Mexico. To them, that is a good Mexican: someone who gives their life, not someone who tries to save it through political asylum.” Marisol’s case was eventually closed: she obtained a work permit but was not granted political asylum.
After deciding to focus on asylum cases, the Spector family established the organization Mexicans in Exile for Mexicans arriving in the El Paso area, fleeing violence in Chihuahua and bringing their cases to Carlos’s law practice. The group’s goal is not just to win asylum but also to denounce the violence in Mexico, to provide guidance and support to those fleeing the country, and to demand justice from the Mexican authorities for all of the unsolved murders and disappearances. Just as the organization was getting off the ground in 2012, Carlos was dealt a tremendous blow: he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and tongue and nearly died.
“I couldn’t talk or eat,” Carlos recalls. “Either someone wanted to shut me up, or to send me a message … I got the chance to taste death, through chemotherapy and radiation … I realized life is very short, and you have to do something that fills your soul … I didn’t go to law school so I could