President Donald Trump’s get-tough policies toward immigrants living in the U.S. illegally may win points with his supporters, but they are exacting a steep price from those who fled to the U.S. seeking better lives and now face a forced return to the dangers they tried to escape.
One of them is Mexican journalist Emilio Gutiérrez Soto who came over in 2008 and requested asylum but was given a temporary work permit while awaiting a decision. He didn’t get an answer until last July, nine years later, when an immigration judge in El Paso denied his request.
Gutiérrez, 54, and his son came to the U.S. to escape death threats from a Mexican general angry about stories he had written for El Diario del Noroeste describing abusive behavior by soldiers in the northern state of Chihuahua. He feared they would kill him and believes they still would if he returns.
A number of U.S. and international press organizations have taken up his fight while he appeals the decision. An immigration appeals board initially upheld the asylum denial in November and ordered Gutiérrez out of the country, but now is reconsidering the case.
Unfortunately, Gutiérrez and his son Oscar, 24, have been placed in detention while the matter is being decided.
In October, Gutiérrez flew to Washington to accept the National Press Club’s John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award on behalf of this year’s winner, which was the entire Mexican press. On Dec. 11, he spoke again to the club, but this time it was a news conference by telephone from the detention center.
We agree with the National Press Club, which said in a Dec. 13 letter to the appeals board that sending Gutiérrez back to Mexico “could be tantamount to a death sentence by an immigration judge.”
Perhaps the board didn’t take death threats to Mexican journalists seriously enough in its first decision, but we do because numbers don’t lie.
The National Human Rights Commission in Mexico says 73 journalists have been killed since 2010, including 11 this year, according to a new U.N. report that called those numbers “a picture for the situation of journalists in Mexico that cannot be described as other than catastrophic.”
We would urge the appeals board to act quickly because Gutiérrez and his son are in detention and in limbo, having been in the latter for a long time. Based on what we know about this case, there is no good reason not to grant amnesty and we would urge the board to do so.