Thread by @mayaaverbuch

Here are the craziest things we learned about the Migrant Protection Protocols while reporting with @KannoYoungs for @nytimes. What happens when you're stuck in Mexico but your case is being heard in the US?
nytimes.com/2019/04/05/us/…

Daniel Nuñez was told that his asylum hearing would be held at the San Ysidro port, in California, a nearly three-hour drive from where he is in Mexicali. Other accounts tell us that everyone else in Mexicali has to figure out how to another city every time there's a court date.

A lawyer for one of the people identified in court papers only as Howard Doe for protection claims to have fled a drug cartel in Honduras, only to be kidnapped by another cartel in Mexico. He was turned back anyways, which is how you know the standard for fear is incredibly high.

There's a fundamental contradiction. A State Department report released last month acknowledged the possibility that the migrants were no safer in Mexico from the same gangs that threatened them in Central America than they had been at home.

Migrants told us that they called every lawyer on the list they were given by US officials. They got the same answers every time: we don't take cases outside the country. Call back next week. Nobody is available.

An official from Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said it was unclear how many asylum seekers might be turned away from the United States under the policy, which he said the Trump administration had expanded without its consultation. But Mexico agreed to these returns months ago.

This policy is being challenged by a federal lawsuit but obviously it has not ended yet. Consider how it's being scaled up in places like Ciudad Juarez. On April 3, there were 73 people who had been returned. Three days earlier, that number was seven.

Let me also say that "returned" is a strange word to talk about what's going on, because it implies sending people back to where they came from – but obviously Mexico is a country of transit that most migrants know little about.

One family told us that the day they were returned to Mexico, they went to their friends' home where they were staying only to find that a truck had driven through the front wall in a drive-by shooting.