Law students head to southern US border to help asylum-seekers
Kiki Tapiero, a second-year law student at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, is somber thinking about the moment she returned to the US after spending a week of her winter break in Tijuana, Mexico. She and some classmates walked through a pedestrian footbridge, waited in line, talked with US Customs and Border Patrol agents and made their way to the US side. The process took a little more than 10 minutes.
Just a few hours before, in Mexico, they had been talking with Central American migrants who had traveled thousands of miles on foot to Tijuana and had been waiting for months near the border hoping to cross to the US.
“There’s a really big sense of privilege that I feel in being able to cross the border so easily,” she says.
Tapiero was one of 10 students from Berkeley Law who went to the border town as a volunteer with the organization Al Otro Lado, a group providing legal services to migrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border. (Tapiero and other students in this story say they are not speaking for the group, but are reflecting on their own experiences.)
Tapiero, who was in Tijuana Dec. 28 through Jan. 4, says her days were packed. In the mornings, she and other volunteers went to a port of entry where people wait to be processed for asylum. They talked with the migrants about what to expect and also observed the process, documenting how many people were on a waiting list and making sure that no one was being turned away. Under US immigration laws, people have the right to turn themselves in to border patrol agents and ask for asylum.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/law-students-head-to-southern-us-border-to-help-asylum-seekers/ar-BBSBy6M?li=BBnb7Kz
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