The family approached border officers to assert their right to ask for asylum; they were also seeking help for a son who no longer had medicine for his chronic heart condition. In response, a border officer noted that he was not a doctor, physically pushed the family back across the international line into Mexico, and told them to return to Piedras Negras and the local migrant shelter there.

In the shelter, the family put their names on an informal waiting list for their chance to seek asylum again. However, their smugglers learned they had not yet entered the United States and began demanding more money, promising to infiltrate the shelter and kill the family if they did not send additional payments. Several days later, while the family walked to a convenience store, a white van screeched to a halt and armed men forced the family into the vehicle.

The family was taken to a house and spent two days in captivity, until Mexican state police arrived. However, these officers had not come to save the family but rather to sit down at the table for a leisurely breakfast and to accept money from the kidnappers. When the police did pay attention to the family, it was to call Mexican immigration agents to deport them. These agents proposed a deal, to release the family for $1,000. But with no more money, the family was transported to a Mexican migration detention center. After languishing for two months, the parents and children were released into Mexico City, where the threats continued both from their former kidnappers and Barrio 18 gang members searching for the family.

This family’s harrowing story is far from an isolated case. In February 2017, a Honduran woman and her three children were kidnapped in the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas — the migrant kidnapping capital of Mexico — after trying to seek asylum with border officers on three occasions. And in November 2018, a transgender Mexican asylum seeker was robbed and assaulted in Tijuana. The next month, a Cameroonian asylum seeker was stabbed and two Honduran asylum-seeking teenagers were murdered.

Routine turnbacks and the expansion of “metering” systems at ports of entry began in 2016. Yet last summer, border officers doubled down on the practice, stationing its agents mid-bridge from El Paso to Brownsville and at border gates from New Mexico to San Diego with instructions to reject people seeking asylum. Today, these turnbacks are occurring daily at major ports of entry along the southwest border.