Boston-Area Volunteers Offer Legal Advice To Migrants In Tijuana
Julie Dahlstrom, Karen Pita Loor, and Sarah Sherman-Stokes accompanied Jesus Zelaya (’20), Genesis Guzman (’19), and Chelsea Tejada (’20) to Tijuana to help migrants apply for asylum in the US.
Thousands of migrants, many of them from Central America, are waiting in Tijuana, Mexico, for a chance to apply for asylum in the United States.
It’s a fluid situation on the ground. Many of the migrants shuffle between tents and shelters as volunteers pass out meals and warm clothing.
A group of Boston University law instructors and students was in Tijuana over the weekend offering legal advice. The group began their work each morning around 7:30 as large crowds of people gathered at the plaza in front of “El Chaparral,” a border crossing near San Ysidro, California.
Families huddled together around their belongings, with young children wearing pajamas and carrying backpacks. Some of them entertained themselves playing a pickup soccer game, kicking around an empty plastic bottle of Sprite. They were all there hoping it would be the day their numbers are called from the asylum waitlist.
A man began calling out numbers, reading from a notebook. The crowd gathered around him.
There are an estimated 5,000 people on the list, waiting for their turn to enter the U.S. and apply for asylum, a humanitarian immigration status. Many of those on the list have been in Tijuana for months, coming from other cities in Mexico and places as far away as Sierra Leone and Haiti.
The BU law instructors and students circulated throughout the crowd, asking people if they have questions about how to seek asylum.
One of the BU students, Jesus Zelaya, is of Honduran and Salvadoran descent. He says that’s a big motivator for him being down there.
“Coming from an immigrant background, I understand the challenges and struggles of being an immigrant, and this allows me essentially to reflect on what my life would be like if I was still in El Savador,” he said. “I wouldn’t be in law school.”
Zelaya handed out pamphlets about migrant rights and explained the asylum process to many of the people waiting in the plaza.
Julie Dahlstrom, a clinical associate professor who heads up the immigrants’ rights clinic at BU School of Law, spoke with a woman who says she fled cartel violence in Michoácan, Mexico. Dahlstrom says most of the migrants she spoke with had little knowledge of their rights or the risks associated with applying for asylum.
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