Angelica Salas, Executive Director, CHIRLA
Buses transporting asylum seekers have been arriving to Los Angeles for months. Non-profit organizations such as CHIRLA, ImmDef, CARECEN, Haitian Bridge Alliance among many others have quickly reacted and are attending to this emergency. On episode 34 of Immigration Today! Angeline Chen interviews Angelica Salas, the ED of The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) who gives us more details on this subject.
Angelica Salas joined us on Immigration Today! in early 2021 where she spoke about her work with CHIRLA, which continues to react to the needs of migrants across our nation including the asylum seekers being dropped off to cities across America. Angelica explains that in order for us to understand this issue, we must look at the context of asylum law in general. Asylum has always been a legal right to pursue but it has been facing attacks since the Trump administration in 2016. Policies such as Title 42 and Remain in Mexico have made it extremely difficult for asylum seekers to practice their right to seek asylum in the U.S. After Biden was elected, not much changed and asylum seekers remained unable to present their case in front of a judge.
Now that Title 42 has been lifted, there is an opportunity for people to seek asylum but a reasonable and humane process has not been created to help with the process. States like Texas and Florida have been busing migrants to Los Angeles and other areas. CHIRLA and other organizations have partnered with the city of Los Angeles and picked up the task of receiving these migrants with the level of humanity that they need. They provide basic care such as food, shelter, medical exams, clothes, transportation, legal representation and much more.
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“Immigrants are coming because they had been denied the opportunity to come forward and seek asylum. That context is really important as we talk about the buses…the busing of individuals to democratically led cities around the country is now happening as numbers of people are actually able to apply for asylum. So, states like Texas and other republican led states have been vilifying individuals who are coming to our ports of entry and vilifying anybody who’s seeking to assist them. And, worse than that, they are using individuals to score political points, to try to tell a political narrative of chaos at the border and try to create an optics that is politically motivated which basically disregards people’s lives. And most importantly, trying to show that the border was in crisis, as opposed to demonstrating that our policies were wrong.”
You can stay connected with the work CHIRLA does via their website. Please consider making a donation here.
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