From “The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border” by Cristina Rathbone
It is important to be clear here: everyone on the street was seeking asylum in the States, which is to say that everyone was seeking the legal and physical protection of a neighboring country in the face of ongoing and lethal threat at home. This right was established in 1951, when the United States joined 148 other countries in signing the United Nations’ Refugee Convention, which was later ratified again – and also expanded – in 1967.
Asylum seekers are not trying to sneak into the country, in other words, but to enter it legally. Except there was not much left of the US asylum process anymore. For years, it had been more complex than it should have been, and by 2019, it had become as baroque and Kafkaesque as an absurdist play. Honestly, the truest thing to say is that after decades of neglect and three years of concerted administrative and political undermining, there was really no effective asylum system left, nothing that resembled a predictable or ordered process at all.