12/3/20
By Karla Rader Barber with Jenny Sevilla
Day 9 of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence Against Women The Official 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign
#16days #orangetheworld #generationequality #ratifyILO190
Jenny Sevilla with Austin Border Relief grew up on the border and regularly travels back to volunteer. She shares some of her experiences working with asylum seeking women:
I started going down to the Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, which is my hometown, a few years ago. Hundreds of people who just went through ICE processing and detention would be escorted to the Respite Center for basic necessities and help with travel plans to join their families and wait for their asylum hearings. This was before MPP. I had many opportunities to speak with the women who had gone through ICE processing and heard their stories about the terrors they had experienced — the ones they fled in their home countries, those experienced along their journeys and then at the hands of CBP and ICE officers. Women told me countless times of physical, emotional and sexual abuse they experienced. One woman was too scared to speak up about the guard who would molest her because she was afraid she would not be allowed to see her two children. Another woman had an infant and a small toddler and was being fed so little that she could hardly produce breast milk to feed her baby. She told me that when she asked for more water and food, she was told she could go hungry or eat what was given to her — a small thawed burrito in the morning and a box of juice and cookie in the evening.
After MPP was enforced, the women forced to live in Matamoros by the International bridge and river, told us many stories about being sexually assaulted or harassed when they went to the river to wash in the evening.
On another visit to the border, I was speaking with an attorney who has faithfully helped asylum seekers in Matamoros. The attorney told me she was expecting to be introduced to a woman who had just been kidnapped while living in the MPP camp of asylum seekers. After a few minutes, I saw 10 feet away a woman accompanied by another, crying and very distraught. She had been kidnapped for ransom, sexually assaulted and terrorized, but finally returned. Children and especially LGBTQ immigrants are also at high risk for abuse and in grave danger in these exposed camps. There have been many reports of the cartel soliciting asylum seekers payments to receive protection from them. The asylum seekers are so vulnerable still.
It is horrifying to know that the U.S. policies have deliberately exposed women and LGBTQ immigrants to the same insecurity, violence and traumas that they fled in the first place.
The only way to stop these atrocities is to make a path for asylum seekers to first, enter the country and wait here safely with their family members until their hearings ending MPP and mass expulsions, give humane work visas so immigrants can sustain their families and make a more compassionate path to citizenship. Otherwise, we are outsourcing pain, assault and trauma of these women to be committed over the border. We must hold the new Biden/Harris administration responsible for ending Trump-era policies as well as those from previous administrations that enable these crimes against humanity.