law has not evolved along with the social, political, and economic changes of today,” Carlos says. It fails to comprehend the reality of a “failed state” that persecutes Mexican citizens, he says, which “is partly why political asylum is denied to Mexicans.”
Historically, political asylum has been used as a tool to punish the enemies and reward the friends of the nation where asylum seekers apply. For immigration lawyers, the clearest example is Cuba. Because Cuba is ruled by a Communist regime politically opposed to the United States, the U.S. consequently welcomed Cuban immigrants with open arms (until January 2017, when President Barack Obama announced an end to the policy known as “wet foot, dry foot”). “People fleeing persecution in Communist countries or Eastern Europe,” says Carlos, receive a far warmer welcome in the United States “than those trying to escape persecution in countries that are viewed as ‘friends’ of the United States, like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Argentina.”
In 1980 the United States Refugee Act officially recognized the right to petition for asylum just as civil wars were breaking out in Central America. Carlos believes these factors created what he calls “the country’s political conscience”: the view in the United States that only a civil war or a national tragedy justified an individual seeking asylum. This meant that most cases from Mexicans were denied.
Despite this, the number of asylum seekers from Mexico began to creep up during Salinas de Gortari’s presidential administration (1988 to 1994). Salinas came into office after a bitter campaign battle against his leftist rival, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, colored by widespread suspicion of electoral fraud on the part of the PRI, the governing party. The most radical leftist leaders were persecuted, and in some cases assassinated, in several states across Mexico during Salinas’s presidency.
Soon, cases of people exiled because of Salinas de Gortari reached Carlos’s office. In response, he crafted a strategy based on cases of exile in other Central American countries, as well as the Chileans exiled from Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in the sixties. Attacks at the time were focused on leaders with very specific characteristics and in particular circumstances. Since power was centralized, repression was also centralized and channeled to a direct object.
Repression and persecution in Mexico have changed since the PRI’s fall from power in 2000: the PAN, the rightist party, now dominates the federal government, and many municipalities are in the hands of the leftist PRD. With power decentralized among three political parties, violence extends indiscriminately, with few limits and concrete objectives. Most cases of persecution originate in small cities and towns, rather than Mexico’s major cities—in areas key to narcotrafficking, near to oil wells or with access to water. Cartels, in league with the state, can provide, or deny, access to these areas.
“It’s often 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
