Southern border is a humanitarian catastrophe

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“Armado” fled Venezuela with his wife and child, along with a baby whom he carried through the Darién Gap — the land crossing from Colombia into Panama that is notorious for predatory gangs, perilous rivers, malaria and other mortal hazards. He is just one of the almost 8 million Venezuelans who have escaped fierce repression and the economic collapse of their country since 2014.

I met Armado and his young family at an asylum shelter in Arizona. They had walked across seven countries to get there, surviving what the United Nations now describes as the deadliest land crossing in the world — the U.S. southern border. In 2023, more than 500 people died trying to make it across, with most perishing in the Sonoran or Chihuahua deserts.

They come because we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis with more than 117 million people displaced by persecution, conflict and atrocities. Although the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) was founded almost 40 years ago in a humble house in Minneapolis, we are on the front lines of that crisis. We meet wounded survivors in refugee camps where we now work in Africa and the Middle East, and also at our clinics here in the Twin Cities and in St. Cloud.

According to the United Nations, 1.2 million people applied for asylum in the U.S. during 2023. That makes the U.S. the largest recipient of asylum applications in the world, and not a day seems to go by without some polemicist or politician trying to make headlines or punchlines out of the crisis on the southern border.

President Joe Biden says he wants to “secure the border,” not “weaponize” it. But his latest plan is to arbitrarily restrict the number of people who can apply for asylum on any given day. Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, believes that migrants are “coming from insane asylums” in Latin America and “poisoning the blood of our country.” He wants a bigger wall, detention camps and mass deportations.

In Tucson, Ariz., CVT runs a program with our partner Casa Alitas — a temporary shelter for asylum seekers who have been released from detention by U.S. immigration authorities. They are released only after they have proven that there would be a credible threat to their lives if they were returned to their home country. That’s where I met Armado and his family.

The first time I visited Casa Alitas I watched as more than 220 asylum seekers — including single women and families with young children — were dropped off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The male asylum seekers arrived on a prison bus with their feet and hands in shackles. There were no laces in their shoes and they had no belts. ICE told them it was to stop them from hanging themselves.

Most of the asylum seekers had had no contact with their families since their exodus began. Many had spent weeks in detention while their asylum claim had been scrutinized. Now they had been released, pending a final decision by a U.S. judge.

One of the first things they did once they were inside Casa Alitas was phone their loved ones and let them know they were alive. I watched as some young men also took the opportunity to write their name, draw their national flag and scrawl a few words on the courtyard’s brick wall. Drawn with colorful chalk, these declarations of hope were postcards to the future they want to embrace. One Nicaraguan college student, arrested and tortured for protesting against his authoritarian government, had simply written, “Quiero ser libre” (I want to be free).

Seeking asylum is not a lifestyle choice. It is an act of desperation. A 2015 study, for example, found that up to 44% of all refugees and asylum seekers in the U.S. were survivors of torture. They live and work in every major city in the U.S., contributing to the society that provided them with sanctuary.

Toxic rhetoric that paints refugees and asylum seekers in a negative light ignores the intestinal fortitude required just to survive the journey to get here. Just to persevere long enough to have those shackles unlocked and to be able to chalk their name on the bricks at Casa Alitas. But with a current backlog of 2 million asylum cases in the U.S., something clearly needs to change.

The situation at the southern border is a humanitarian catastrophe. Fixing it will require a total overhaul of an immigration and asylum system that all sides of U.S. politics recognize is hopelessly outdated, underfunded and unfit for use. But we should start by putting humanity back into the center of the policy debate.