Before dawn on March 10, 2014, a group of roughly thirty migrants awoke in Tijuana, Mexico, packed their belongings, and ate one final meal before attempting to cross into the United States. Some were Mexican nationals who had previously been deported. Others were Central American women and children hoping to reunite with family members who had migrated north years earlier.
There was nothing unusual about their intentions. For decades, foreign nationals with similar hopes had arrived at Mexican border cities to prepare for the journey into the United States. What distinguished this group was not why they wanted to cross, but how they intended to do it. Rather than hiring a smuggler to attempt the dangerous trek through the desert, they planned to walk the pedestrian bridge at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry and present themselves directly to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. There, they would ask for permission to enter.
To many of the migrants, the idea sounded implausible, even absurd. For decades, impoverished migrants had understood that there was no meaningful legal pathway for them to enter the United States. Immigration reforms had expanded visas for highly skilled workers and some agricultural laborers, but poor migrants seeking low-wage jobs had no comparable avenue. Up to that point, those who wanted to enter the country generally did so clandestinely, hoping to avoid detection by CBP agents. Yet in the weeks leading up to that Monday morning, a small group of American immigration activists had been meeting with deportees and newly arrived families in shelters in Tijuana, urging them to try something different. Like many observers within immigration advocacy circles at the time, I was watching the experiments of this small group of activists closely because their earlier political organizing had already led to the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The activists sought to connect two little-known elements of US immigration policy. The first involved the “credible fear” screening process, which requires immigration officials to interview migrants who claim they fear returning to their home countries. If an asylum officer determines that a migrant has a credible fear of persecution, the individual can present his or her asylum claim before an immigration judge. The second component relied on the discretionary enforcement guidelines issued by the Obama administration, which allowed migrants who were not considered a flight risk or public safety threat to be released from detention while their cases continued. The activists intended to use it as leverage to pressure the administration to release the migrants from detention while their cases proceeded.