So much of the national debate about the U.S.-Mexico border is influenced by optics and politics. Often, what the rest of the nation sees is not what’s really happening on the ground.
And so it goes with asylum seekers’ most prized possessions, including religious artifacts, passports, vital medications, even the cremated ashes of loved ones who died on the journey north.
In 2022, The Border Chronicle wrote about how these possessions became fodder for the polarizing immigration debate. On Earth Day, the U.S. Border Patrol’s official Instagram page featured piles of asylum seekers’ possessions and referred to them as “trash and litter left behind by illegal immigration.” In Texas, Brian Hastings, then Border Patrol chief for the Rio Grande Valley sector, posted photos of people’s belongings, calling them “burdensome trash.”
Only it turned out that Border Patrol agents were the ones forcing asylum seekers to discard their belongings. This wasn’t littering; it was a violation of Border Patrol’s own policies regarding custody of people’s possessions under their care. When agents in Yuma, Arizona, began trashing Sikh asylum seekers’ turbans, which are considered sacred, the ACLU of Arizona and other civil and human rights organizations got involved. CBP agreed to stop the practice in August 2022, but agents are still trashing asylum seekers’ belongings.
This month, the ACLU and affiliates in Arizona, New Mexico, San Diego, Imperial County and Texas and others, including the Kino Border Initiative, ProtectAZ Health and the Sikh Coalition, released a new report titled From Hope to Heartbreak: The Disturbing Reality of Border Patrol’s Confiscation of Migrants’ Belongings. The report tracks just how extensive the problem is. In 2022 and 2023, the group found more than 1,000 instances in which Border Patrol confiscated important items, including medications, which led to children and adults being hospitalized. The report follows a 2013 report by the Arizona-based humanitarian group No More Deaths, and an October 2022 report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Immigration and Detention Ombudsman.
Based on its findings, the ACLU is lobbying Congress to implement its recommendations. To discuss this, The Border Chronicle spoke with Noah Schramm, a border policy strategist with the ACLU of Arizona and an author of the report.
What led the ACLU and other organizations to spearhead this report?
Our involvement around this issue is long standing, but really escalated in the summer of 2022, where we started seeing a significant increase in the number of people having to throw away their belongings before going into Border Patrol custody. But also specifically the conversation around religious garb, and the turbans from migrants of the Sikh faith being thrown away. This really catalyzed our involvement because it posed a serious religious freedom and religious rights issue. As a result of the widespread coverage of the turban confiscations, we got a foot in the door with CBP on that narrow issue of the handling of religious items. And this was an opportunity to get them to finally address the larger, long-standing issue of confiscation and mishandling of migrants’ belongings. And this report really came about as a way for us to pull together all the work that we had done to document this issue, as well as pull together evidence to make the case to CBP, and to the federal government more broadly, that this is an issue with real, significant consequences.
What were the significant findings in this report? What type of things are being seized?
One of the big ones is medications and medical devices. Some examples are medications for seizure disorders, for asthma, like taking people’s inhalers, medications to manage high blood pressure, diabetes, and a long list of various kinds of genetic disorders and other chronic conditions. A longtime practice of Border Patrol is confiscating these medications, not allowing migrants to access them while in custody and then not returning those medications upon release. The results, in many cases, have been severe. We documented a handful of cases where people ended up in the emergency room as a direct result of these confiscations.
One of the report’s coauthors, ProtectAZ Health, which operates a free clinic for migrants who are released into the Phoenix area, has been documenting this issue from 2022 to the end of 2023. They documented more than 680 cases of medications being confiscated and not returned. It’s difficult to say whether it’s representative of what’s happening border wide, because this is just from one city where migrants are being released by Border Patrol.
The other types of confiscations that we’re seeing include legal and identity documents: things like passports, birth certificates, and national identity cards. And also, things like evidence that people have to support their asylum claims, and even medical records. One of the cases we identified was of a person who had a brain disorder and needed surgery, imminently. And the documents to support that diagnosis were thrown away by Border Patrol.
There are also more mundane items like cell phones, money, and people’s clothing. One of the cases we make in the report is that these items may not seem like a big deal because they can be replaced. But, in fact, when people are in survival mode when they’re released into cities they’ve never been in before, and they have their cell phones taken, and clothes and money, it amounts to a much more severe harm.
Is it your sense from working on this report that the order to confiscate items is given at the Border Patrol sector level? Or is it more local staff or an individual agent who decides to do this?
We see enormous inconsistency in how property is handled across Border Patrol sectors. And this is one of the main arguments we’re making to CBP, is that their policies aren’t cutting it, because you see such significant discrepancies in how, say, the Yuma sector is handling people’s documents and medications versus the Laredo sector, where you don’t see many of these cases, or at least they haven’t been as widely reported.
A general pattern we’ve noticed is that when the numbers get very high, that’s when property-handling practices go out the window. And this is just one of the ways that Border Patrol can cut corners and streamline their processes so that they can process more migrants. And so that’s one of the issues we really point out to CBP leadership is to say, look, maybe you need to adjust the practices to allow for a larger volume of people to be processed. But you need to have some baseline of humane standards to make sure that people aren’t being stripped of things that could be relevant to their asylum cases or that they might need to manage a chronic condition.
You’re in Washington, DC, right now talking to congressional leaders about this issue. What kind of feedback are you getting? Do they know that this is a problem?
Many of them do. Part of the reason is that we haven’t been alone in advocating on this. We started to escalate our advocacy, coincidentally, when Congressman Raúl Grijalva from Arizona was raising the alarm on the same issue. He led a handful of members of Congress to a sign a letter, demanding that CBP and ICE take action on migrants’ documents being confiscated. And after we escalated our advocacy in the summer of 2022, we began coordinating more with Congressman Grijalva’s office on this issue and a number of other congressional offices. They’ve asked for an investigation from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is an independent oversight agency. Our understanding is that since November 2022, they’ve been conducting this investigation, and that it is moving toward a conclusion. But it’s unclear to us, at this point, what role the GAO investigation results will play in shaping CBP actions. It’s out of our hands, but we view it as a positive that Congress exercised oversight on CBP on this issue through the GAO investigation.
What we’re asking for at this moment of congressional offices is to continue to apply pressure on CBP. Our goal is to demonstrate to CBP that they need to take meaningful action on this issue, that members of Congress are watching closely.
Congress is so polarized at the moment, especially regarding anything to do with our outdated immigration system. How do you get their attention? Or CBP to reform itself?
One thing we like to emphasize is that this is going to be an issue, regardless of the broader immigration and asylum policy that the U.S. has. So long as you have a carceral model at the border, where people are being detained by Border Patrol, you will always have the question of what do you do with their belongings. How do you handle them? Which ones, if anything, do you need to confiscate?
What we are hoping is that CBP wants to professionalize its behavior on how it handles migrants’ property. Because there are real incentives for them to do that. They don’t want people to get sent to the ER and potentially die or suffer great harm as a result of something that is ultimately preventable. And they don’t want to be violating federal law by confiscating migrants’ religious garb, they don’t want to be making it harder for communities to receive asylum seekers by confiscating their legal documents and making it harder for them to, for example, find housing. We are hoping that this is an issue where there is enough alignment between our values and CBP’s values that we can actually achieve real policy change and slowly inch this system in the direction of more humanity.
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