The port of entry in question — San Ysidro — is a big one. It's the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. An average of 90,000 people pass north through the crossing each day, 70,000 in cars and 20,000 by foot.
20k people standing around and they shut down the thing? What the fuck government, are you mad? 20,000 people is insane.
7000 processing of the average 90k / day? What...?
And as Quartz notes, that would only delay — not eliminate — the United States' legal responsibility to hear asylum claims.
So, they have legal right to seek asylum, cool. That's been a whole talking point from the right for sooo long.
However, authorities at legal border crossings have been limiting the number of people who can request asylum. Only 40 to 100 people are allowed each day, Fredrick says.
90,000 average crossers per day; most of them NOT seeking asylum; but you can only process 40-100 individuals per day for seeking asylum? What the actual fuck?
90k security checks average a day, but can only handle an additional 40-100 asylum checks?
Migrants were protesting that delay.
Yeah, no shit; artificial limits were set obviously.
It was a peaceful protest at first, says Fredrick, who witnessed the events in Tijuana.
Hmm, peaceful protest seems fine.
The federal government is aware that asylum-seekers face a backlog. A report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General published in September described the issue.
Cool story; now fix it; oh wait, Trump sucks; that's right.
The U.S. government has encouraged all asylum-seekers to go to ports of entry, rather than along the rest of the border. At the same time, authorities are limiting the volume of asylum-seekers allowed at ports of entry. The "competing directives" have created a backlog, OIG found, likely causing more migrants to enter the country illegally.
I'm almost willing to bet this wasn't Obama's doing or directives.
It was a peaceful protest at first
That's surprising when there's so many people just standing around (upwards of 25-30k)
"They went down into this kind of riverbank, where there is not that giant steel fence that divides the U.S. and Mexico," he says. "It's a chain-link fence and barbed wire. A group of them started pushing up against that fence."
U.S. Northern Command tells Walsh the military provided nonlethal assistance, did not have contact with migrants and were not involved in deploying tear gas.
I'd certainly hope the US military did NOT use tear gas, considering it's banned by the Geneva Convention.
"We are going to wait to see precisely what the president proposes," said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in an interview with NPR.
"But one thing we know right off the bat is that it cannot be legal unless they can assure all the asylum seekers who will be stranded in Mexico ... will be safe — not only from persecution by state actors in Mexico, but by criminal gangs. And from what we know about what's going on, we see no likelihood that that is going to be true. And so because that's part of the legal analysis, whether the asylum seekers will be safe in Mexico, we can't imagine any proposal will be legal."
So, the ball is in the federal government's side. Mind you, this seems like a pretty easy thing to fix; and wasn't an issue under Obama.
Now it's a massive issue under Trump; why? Because he's the
SOURCE of the issue.
