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Although there is no clear consensus on the numbers, a recent study found that more than eighty per cent of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. do, in fact, show up for their court hearings. Salazar, Rivera, and other law-enforcement officials in the valley, though, told me that they believed Trump’s policy of forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico was preferable. “They apply for their asylum, they go through this process, and then they’re brought across the bridge. They’re not brought on rafts,” Roger Rich, a burly man in his fifties, who also serves as a constable, said. “That, to me, is a lot safer—and it’s a legal way to do it.” But, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research institute at Syracuse University, only one and a half per cent of the people subject to the “Remain in Mexico” policy were ultimately granted asylum in the U.S. The rest were left to their own devices in northern Mexican states such as Tamaulipas, which the State Department has deemed as dangerous as Yemen, Syria, or Afghanistan.
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