University Of Missouri-St. Louis: Migrantes Unidos Gives Voice To Asylum-Seekers Advocating For Policy Changes

Hazelwood MO

02 June, 2022

5:41 AM

Description

Press release from the University of Missouri-St. Louis: May 24, 2022 Adelaida Elisabeth Miranda Orozco still remembers the stares whenever she'd accompany her two children to the playground near her home in Granite City, Illinois. She couldn't escape the eyes of strangers. First, they were fixed on the electronic monitor strapped to her left ankle, and then they'd look at her, their faces betraying suspicion and fear. The weight of the monitor around her ankle also prevented her from running around with her kids. "I could not play with my children," Miranda Orozco says of the yearlong experience of wearing the ankle monitor while speaking through an interpreter. "We would go to the park, and I could not play with them." It also cost her jobs. She once landed a position on the housekeeping staff at a local hotel. She'd been there a week when her boss noticed the monitor and promptly fired her. The same thing happened when she was working briefly at an area Chinese restaurant. Miranda Orozco felt helpless and alone. It was the promise of safety and stability for her family that brought Miranda Orozco to St. Louis with her children two years ago. She was one of the thousands of migrants fleeing gang violence, which is only exacerbated by the abject poverty pervasive in the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in Central America. Miranda Orozco left Guatemala and journeyed through Mexico to the U.S. border, where she and her children presented themselves to federal agents seeking asylum. They were detained for one night, then traveled to St. Louis while awaiting a court hearing on their case for asylum – a process that usually takes years, not months, because of a backlog in the courts. After arriving in St. Louis, Miranda Orozco had to visit the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office and was referred to the office of the Intensive Supervision of Appearance Program – or ISAP – which placed the monitor on her. Electronic ankle monitors, which track geographical information, have been used by immigration authorities for more than 20 years as an alternative to detention. Their use varies by jurisdiction, but a story published in The Guardian last summer stated that of the 96,574 individuals enrolled in ISAP in May 2021, 31,069 were wearing the monitors. Those individuals were required to be within 70 miles of their homes and typically were not permitted to cross state lines. Leonel Moreno Rivera followed a similar path as Miranda Orozco when he came to the United States and settled in St. Louis with his wife and three children while seeking asylum from Honduras. "I never imagined it, especially as a parent," says Rivera, who was made to wear his ankle monitor for approximately a year and half. "I knew that there was going to be a process, but I thought it was going to be a dignified process. I never imagined that I would be treated as a convict." Migrants such as Miranda Orozco and Rivera often feel powerless in a system that seems designed to isolate them, and they have few people advocating on their behalf for more fair and humane treatment. But Adriano Udani, an associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the director of the Public Policy Administration Program, has worked closely with colleagues at two local nonprofits – the Inter-Faith Committee on Latin America and the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project – to bring migrants together and engage them as advocates on their own behalf through a support group called Migrantes Unidos. After first learning of the prevalence of ankle monitors being used to track asylum seekers in St. Louis, Udani began having conversations with Maria Torres Wedding, then the director of client support services at the MICA project, and IFCLA Executive Director Sara John to study the impact the monitors were having on people's lives. They all wanted to do something new and different than what was provided to asylum seekers in St. Louis. "This problem could not be simply addressed as an academic researcher," Udani says. "Previous studies have shown that people who have ankle monitors are not flight risks to leave the country and are not criminals, which undercuts the reasons to have electronic monitoring." This press release was produced by the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The views expressed here are the author's own.