Border Breakdown: Honest Asylum-Seekers Pay When Illegal Immigrants Jump the Border

EL PASO, Texas – The Trump administration has been stymied in its attempts to control the flood of migrants seeking asylum at the US southern border after a federal judge in San Francisco blocked the president's executive order which would deny asylum to anyone caught entering the country illegally.

That judge's move may actually hurt all the legal asylum-seekers as waves of illegal immigrants try to push their way past them to the front of the line.

From San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas, there are 48 border crossings where you can legally go from Mexico to the United States. The Trump Administration is encouraging people claiming asylum to use crossings like these.

US Customs and Border Protection agent Ramiro Cordero tells CBN News, "A decade ago we used to have 95 percent Mexican nationals coming across. That number has changed. Now we are having about 85 percent Central Americans about 10 percent Mexicans and still 5 percent from other parts of the world."

CBN News visited the bridge that spans the Rio Grande river between the Mexican city of Juarez and El Paso, Texas. On this bridge, on this particular day, there are more than 200 people waiting in line to claim asylum. And the line moves so slowly most migrants will be sleeping on the sidewalk here for more than a week.  

Many of them are Cubans fleeing communism. These Cuban women have been making their way through Central America for 10 months.

Cuban migrant Yubislenis Acosta says, "We had a lot of problems on the way. The police in some places took our money, assaulted us, and the immigration authorities were just as corrupt."

She's been sleeping on this bridge for five days, trying to enter the US the right way. The wait keeps getting longer though, because so many people enter in this sector illegally, basically jumping to the front of the line.

This is the reason the Trump administration sent more than 7,000 troops to the border, to shore up the fence and encourage people to enter the right way.

Earlier this year, the president's zero tolerance policy on enforcing family separations caused international outrage. But on this bridge, this reporter  found out that many more families are being separated by America's lax immigration law. We met one man who left his home in Guatemala 18 days ago with his 10-year-old daughter, but he left the rest of his family behind.

Jorge Ramirez tells us, "We came here so I can support my family because in Guatemala there is no work. So I brought my girl, and I have two six-month-old twins still at home. But we came here to get a start."

The backlog in US immigration courts has now passed one million cases, up by 30 percent just this year, which means that any of these Central Americans who crosses our border illegally and must be given an asylum hearing will end up living free in the US for about three years before they even see a judge.  Many of them, of course, never show up for that hearing. Of those who do, a majority will be denied asylum, but at that point they may just melt back into society and refuse to leave.

And that means their families back in Latin America will be without fathers, mothers and breadwinners, potentially for years to come.