“So much god-awful shit is converging in El Paso, it’s like the epicenter,” says Allegra Love, an attorney who serves as director of Santa Fe Dreamers Project, an organization that provides free legal services to immigrants. “This area just doesn’t have the resources to provide legal aid to the thousands of people detained in the region.”

El Paso is the second largest border city and its surrounding sector is a gigantic and dispersed geographic area spanning multiple states. It’s also one of the poorest regions in the country, with no law schools and no major law firms offering pro bono support. What the area does have is five detention centers run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and an increasingly anti-immigrant apparatus buttressed by the Trump administration’s piloting of secretive, harsh policies. From the nascent Prompt Asylum Claim Review to highly publicized cases of family separation to makeshift courthouses, the Remain in Mexico program, and the new “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala, the region surrounding El Paso has become ground zero for some of the world’s newest and cruelest immigration practices.

The Prompt Asylum Claim Review is a recently piloted policy that demonstrates the severity of the effects of new Trump-era policies. First reported by local journalist Bob Moore, it empowers the federal government to issue migrants a decision about their asylum claim within 10 days. Under previous administrations, asylum seekers who have credibly established the danger associated with staying in their home country have typically been released into the United States with a notice to appear in court. That process could span months, if not years. The Trump administration’s piloting of a quickened review system is intended to fast-track deportations of asylum seekers and deter vulnerable immigrant communities—including Black migrants, LGBTQ migrants, Indigenous people and pregnant people—from seeking refuge in the United States. But deterrents have never worked, and it seems the cruelty of these policies has become the point.

When migrants, including asylum seekers, enter the United States without authorization, they’re subject to Section 1325, a federal statute that’s the bedrock of the current administration’s immigration policies. This rule, versions of which have been on the books since 1929, treats entry into the United States as criminal activity rather than a civil violation. Under 1325, “improper entry” is a federal misdemeanor.

When former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Session implemented ‘zero-tolerance’ policy in 2018, he wielded 1325 against families, demanding the removal of children from parents charged with improper entry. Family separation was actually piloted in El Paso almost a year before Sessions confirmed its existence in May 2018. Prior to this fall, it was reported that 2,700 families were split up under this interpretation of the law. In October, the White House informed the American Civil Liberties Union that an additional 1,556 migrant families had been separated between July 2017 and June 2018. This brought the new total to at least 4,300. A bulk of the children removed from their parents were 12 years or younger; more than 200 were under the age of five.

While Trump signed an executive order ending the practice in June, it represents just one facet of a larger zero-tolerance policy that continues today. This is how it works: if a migrant is caught attempting to enter the United States without authorization, they’re intercepted by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the federal law enforcement agency Border Patrol. Individuals from these immigration agencies have discretion in choosing whom they’ll refer to the Department of Justice, for prosecution under 1325, and who they send through the civil system. The Trump administration has directed DOJ attorneys to prosecute all cases they receive. Sessions also said the administration’s goal was to prosecute 100 percent of the people caught crossing the border without authorization, despite an already overburdened court system.

Migrant Protection Protocol, also called MPP or the Remain in Mexico policy, was also piloted in the El Paso region. So far, more than 48,000 asylum seekers have been forced to wait in Mexico. In Matamoros—considered the largest refugee camp on the U.S. border—parents subjected to MPP are being forced to send their children to the United States alone, fearing they won’t survive winter in the camp. Migrants forced to wait in Juárez while their cases are processed risk being kidnapped, trafficked, or worse.

“The vast majority of the people I’m working with are utterly terrified of not getting asylum,” says Taylor Levy, an El Paso attorney. She notes that clients will sometimes give up on valid asylum claims out of fear of being forced to stay in Mexico. “The other day, a Guatemalan [asylum seeker] just sobbed to me. She said she’d rather be murdered in Guatemala because at least her children will have someone to take care of them. To her, it was better than being murdered in the streets of Juárez. Immigration took her family’s birth certificates; she said no one would even know they were dead.”

Levy has worked with migrants for more than 10 years. She tells me that prior to MPP, she never received calls about kidnapped clients. Since the policy launched, she’s receives calls at least twice a week. “We’ve made things exceptionally less safe and it’s become virtually impossible to request asylum,” she says. “Trump is the best thing that could have happened to organized crime.”

Levy also fields calls from immigration attorneys who represent families subjected to MPP and whose members were kidnapped by cartels in Mexico. In return for their release, cartels demand thousands of dollars in ransom. The attorneys are unsure of how to advise on these kind of ransoms. Should families pay up?

“Legally, attorneys can’t tell someone to pay a ransom to a criminal organization. At the same time, they know very realistically and very viscerally that if the families do not pay, there is a high probability their loved ones will be murdered,” Levy says. “We hear about people being beaten on video on [the app] WhatsApp, or sending family members pictures of children cowering in the corner sobbing. [MPP] is an entirely new revenue stream for organized crime.”

Imelda Maynard and Danielle Escontrias, immigration attorneys with Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico, also represent migrants subjected to MPP in the El Paso region. Escontrias says some attorneys choose not to take MPP clients because the likelihood of them disappearing is so high.

“As an attorney representing them, it’s particularly difficult to go to court and not know where this person is and to try to advocate for them without having any sense of what’s going on in their life. It’s a huge hurdle for us because nobody knows how to keep track of them. They are literally in a foreign country and they’re being targeted specifically for being migrants,” Escontrias says. “It can seem like almost everyone gets mugged, but we’ve heard of women getting raped. There have been deaths.”

The Trump administration is now also sending asylum seekers from the U.S. border to Guatemala, a country many asylum seekers flee. But MPP has created an environment where asylum seekers are deathly afraid of remaining in Mexico because they hear or see what happens to other migrants. And MPP is just another hurdle among many.

When asylum seekers do get their day in court, El Paso’s immoveable judges make winning near impossible, with the overall denial rate hovering around 97 percent. In other words, when they do land in El Paso, their fate is close to absolutely sealed.

Immigration attorneys who spoke to PLAYBOY would not discuss specific judges, but many said they’ve encountered those who misinterpret the law or misremember facts of cases. Immigration judges aren’t always making decisions the same day they hear a case, after all. If they’re hearing numerous cases the same week, they may not remember the details—and details are crucial in asylum, which is a discretionary form of relief.

“It can sometimes feel like you’re not talking about the same case, which causes a host of other due process issues,” Maynard says. “These are cases of life-or-death and yet it’s clear the judge isn’t paying attention. I don’t think it’s nefarious; I think it’s how the system is set up. If you have a quota to clear 700 cases a year, that means you have to hear to full merit, at least two cases a day, every day. That’s impossible. Judges are burned out and it’s adversely affecting clients, who aren’t getting a fair shot,”

In April, a group of attorneys with the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association filed a joint administrative complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility. It alleged that in El Paso, there is a “systemic pattern of dysfunction and lack of meaningful oversight in the U.S. immigration court system at large.” The complaint also asserted there was “a culture of hostility and contempt” toward the migrants in court and one instance in which a judge told an attorney, “You know your client is going bye-bye, right?”

Kathryn “Katie” Shepherd, the National Advocacy Counsel for the Immigration Justice Campaign at the American Immigration Council, was one of the attorneys behind the complaint. Shepherd said there are some valid reasons that explain inconsistencies in asylum rates among jurisdictions. For example, some judges work in jurisdictions where most asylum seekers have pro bono lawyers, while others see migrants without representation. But when all of the judges in the El Paso sector have astonishingly high asylum denial rates, Shepherd says it should be cause for concern.

“This is a symptom of a dysfunctional immigration court system and reveals the critical need to reform the immigration court system so that you have consistency between the jurisdictions,” Shepherd says. “For the most part, immigration judges should be applying federal law and generally speaking, there should be consistency and there’s just not. In Louisiana, you will see a judge essentially granting zero percent and in New York City, you have a judge granting 40 percent. That is just so patently dysfunctional.”

Though judicial discretion is a barrier for her clients, Maynard says the real fight in El Paso—and perhaps in the Trump administration, more broadly—is in the interpretation and application of law. While many have contended that MPP, for example, is “illegal,” Maynard reminds them that it’s not.

“What allows for MPP is in the statute; it’s in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was put in during the Clinton administration. That’s kind of the problem. The framework is there for a program like MPP to exist,” Maynard says. “And with these laws, there are different ways things can be interpreted. A lot of our laws are super subjective and it’s a matter of interpretation. Our judges in El Paso take a very restrictive view.”

The Trump administration recently went a step further in creating insurmountable legal barriers for anyone who falls into this category, blocking them from even entering the U.S. to attend court proceedings. In the El Paso sector, there are now five temporary MPP makeshift courthouses, which comprise tents and shipping containers. These “court” hearings are another vehicle for fast-tracking deportation.

With an onslaught of new policies piloted at the border intended to hinder asylum seekers from being able to step foot on U.S. soil, it’s easy to forget the countless economic migrants sitting in detention centers in the El Paso sector who are also denied due process. This is where a new program called the El Paso Immigration Collaborative (EPIC) hopes to make a difference. The collective launched August 1, 2019 and is using existing legal services to gather information and do intake on as many people detained in the sector as possible. The data is entered into a computer system developed by Innovation Law Lab, a custom-built platform that allows members of the collaborative to sort through detained people’s cases. The system allows EPIC to identify everyone in the area who is eligible for representation and bond, and everybody who is eligible for representation and parole. Love and her team work with EPIC to send that information out nationally, allowing remote attorneys to step in and take the case.

In many cases, organizations like the Santa Fe Dreamers’ Project can provide migrants their only sense of hope in an increasingly convoluted system. The organization is building out its capacity in the El Paso sector with on-the-ground volunteers who are confirming information in EPIC’s system and visiting detention centers to collect documentation from detained people.

Irena (a pseudonym) is not seeking asylum, but migrated from Guatemala in search of a better life. She was apprehended in the borderlands and prosecuted under zero tolerance after migrating more than 1,000 miles while pregnant. She didn’t have access to any legal resources while detained by U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) in the El Paso sector. As I previously reported, one of the populations most severely impacted by zero tolerance is pregnant people. Advocates in El Paso allege that Border Patrol agents target pregnant people for federal prosecution.

In the custody of USMS, the oldest federal law enforcement agency in the country, Irena witnessed some pregnant people bleeding for days without access to medical care, while others miscarried or were shackled during childbirth. She says she experienced gross mistreatment as well.

People in custody experience life-threatening lapses in medical care. Despite a formal ending of policy that splits up children from their parents, there is still a form of family separation being carried out in hospitals. If migrants who give birth in USMS custody do not have family members in the United States who can care for their newborn, the baby gets funneled into state custody. It is unclear if mothers and their newborns are reunited.

“They violated my rights. I was in labor and nobody helped me. No one took me to the medical center, they didn’t talk to me, explain the process, nothing,” she says. “They waited and waited until the last minute to take me to the emergency room, right when the baby was about to be born. I thought I was going to give birth to my son in the [jail].”

Her son is now nearly two years old and has serious medical issues. Irena assumes, though cannot confirm, his health problems stem from the negligent prenatal care she received while detained in Texas—or rather, stem from the complete lack of care USMS provided.

In spite of this experience, Irena says she is probably one of the “lucky ones.” She was not shackled during childbirth and a distant relative was able to take custody of her son when she was returned to USMS custody afterwards. A short while later, she was released from custody on humanitarian parole because of her son’s serious health issues. Getting out of detention is simply the first step in a years-long legal process, and Irena’s fate in the United States remains uncertain.

As part of her parole, Irena has to check in with ICE regularly. She assumes the agency will deport her after her November 2019 check-in. If forced to leave, Irena says she has not yet decided if she will take her U.S. citizen son to Guatemala or leave him in the United States so that he can continue accessing the medical care he desperately needs.

“I don’t know what will happen,” Irena says. “Every time I go [to ICE], I’m always afraid because my baby is still sick and I don’t know what they will say. I don’t have an attorney and to be honest, I don’t know what our future is.”

Love knows helping every individual is impossible but she says that the first goal of EPIC is to get as many detained people out on bond and parole as possible. For now, asylum representation is not a focus, but by virtue of existing, EPIC is helping people who may want to request asylum further down the road.

“The real idea is to get people moving out of this system and into safer places where they can pursue asylum while having a healthy family and while working in a safe place in a non-hostile jurisdiction like the [El Paso sector],” Love says. “But the other goal is that by using this information and data, we’ll actually be able to see the landscape of what’s happening in this massive and dispersed ICE jurisdiction, in the detention centers and courts, so that we can identify where litigation and public policy could work and where advocacy can help impact and change this system.”