It’s been over two months since as many as 15,000 Haitian asylum-seekers were forced to take shelter in an encampment underneath the international bridge in the borderlands of Del Rio, Texas. In September, harrowing images of Border Patrol agents on horseback, corralling and whipping a group of asylum-seekers as they waded across the Rio Grande, triggered widespread condemnation. Since then, advocates estimate the Biden administration has deported some 9,200 people who stayed at the Del Rio camp to Haiti. Others were forced back across the border into Mexico, where they are vulnerable to abuse by Mexican authorities and organized crime. A much smaller number were allowed into the United States to pursue their asylum claims.
As media attention has moved on from the spectacle at Del Rio, dozens of those Haitian asylum-seekers remain jailed in grueling conditions at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, New Mexico, about an hour southeast of Albuquerque.
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