Migrant mother and her lawyer refused to take “no” for an answer from U.S. border agents

Yulisa waits on the international bridge that stretches over the Rio Grande from Brownsville to Matamoros, Mexico. Yulisa is almost eight months pregnant. Richard Loria for Texas Public Radio

U.S. officials have sent back to Mexico more than 30,000 asylum-seeking migrants to wait for their immigration court dates. This is part of the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico program. Pregnant women are among some of the people sent back. But one attorney from the Rio Grande Valley pushed back at the policy. She tried to get her client paroled and back into Texas.

Last month, Jodi Goodwin, a local immigration attorney, was in Matamoros, a Mexican city across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, to represent an asylum seeker named Yulisa, who was about seven and a half months pregnant. Yulisa declined to provide her last name to Texas Public Radio.

Goodwin was there to try to convince officials and agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to allow Yulisa into the U.S. and remove her from the Remain in Mexico program, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP.

continue reading in the original article in The Texas Tribune

SHARE