Biden Admin to Create Regional Migrant Processing Centers in Latin America, Raising Potential Barriers to Public Transparency

Asylum seekers may soon find that instead of waiting until they arrive at the US-Mexico border to meet with a US immigration official, they can schedule an appointment to meet with officials at processing centers in Latin America, far from the border, who will determine their eligibility for relocation, asylum, and other pathways to immigration.

This announcement came from the Department of State yesterday as part of a much larger and more expansive assortment of immigration policy changes. For now, I want to focus on these regional processing centers because even though they don’t see equipped to handle a very high percentage of the total number of asylum seekers, they could represent a new barrier to transparency.

The announcement described the Regional Processing Centers (RPCs) as follows:

Open Regional Processing Centers Across the Western Hemisphere to Facilitate Access to Lawful Pathways. In a historic move, the United States alongside other countries of the Los Angeles Declaration today announced they will establish Regional Processing Centers (RPCs) in key locations throughout the Western Hemisphere to reduce irregular migration and facilitate safe, orderly, humane, and lawful pathways from the Americas. The first centers will be established in several countries, including Colombia and Guatemala, in the region. Individuals from the region will be able to make an appointment on their phone to visit the nearest RPC before traveling, receive an interview with immigration specialists, and if eligible, be processed rapidly for lawful pathways to the United States, Canada, and Spain.

This description paints a picture of these processing centers as multifaceted and flexible locations that could take on a range of expedient responsibilities. Like bureaucratic Rube Golberg machines, they seem vaguely conceived to accomplish a yet unarticulated range of likely shifting objectives, although (if they move forward) their purpose will likely take shape over time.

According to reporting by Camilo Montoya-Galvez and Margaret Brennan at CBS, these “brick-and-mortar” processing centers will “be located in key choke-points” along migration routes through Latin America. I’m eager to return to this point at a later time and examine the geopolitical nature of these RPCs, because I think it’s important to recognize the historical continuity of US interventionism in Latin America rather than treat this as an entirely novel strategy.

One of the main functions of these processing centers appears to be to screen for asylum claims. I would refer to this as “asylum externalization” or asylum outsourcing, which has been floated in Europe, but not without controversy. Even if full asylum hearings are not being conducted there (and it’s not clear that they would have the jurisdiction to hold full asylum hearings there), the fact that the processing centers are designed to intervene in the asylum-seeking process suggests that this policy adds a new node – albeit an external one – to the asylum process.

This presents us with one key challenge, though: how will we know what goes on at these centers?

The public’s current understanding of asylum processes comes from data released by USCIS, which adjudicates affirmative asylum claims, and the immigration courts, which adjudicate defensive asylum claims. These two sources of data, and particularly TRAC’s work to make data on the courts legible to the public, means that we’ve all learned a lot over the past decade or so about the factors that shape asylum outcomes.

But if asylum screenings are being conducted outside of the US by US officials or at the request of the US government (presumably with funding and possibly other conditions attached), then we face a new problem: how will we get that data and, consequently, how will we understand what is going on?

One barrier is the Department of State, which is notoriously terrible when it comes to processing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. And for those parts of the immigration system that require external processing by Department of State employees — say, at consulates around the world — the FOIA system has not been nearly as useful for providing transparency and accountability compared to processing that happens in the United States.

Therefore, one likely consequence of establishing these regional processing centers is that they will intervene in the migration journey further “upstream” (before migrants arrive at the border), but they will do so with far fewer opportunities for transparency and accountability than what we have now.

Will we be able to learn how many people are processed at these centers, what the decision-making process is like, and what the outcomes are? How will these interventions affect the composition of migrants who are allowed to apply for asylum or come through the refugee process? Will we be able to assess whether these centers are accomplishing their stated objectives?

I realize that this complaint might feel misplaced since we don’t really know much about refugee processing at the case level, and perhaps this new system should be viewed as analogous to the refugee screening system rather than the court system. Even so, I stand on the side of more transparency rather than less, and I think that’s something most people can get behind.

Regardless of whether one feels that this policy is good or bad, the potential lack of public understanding of the consequences of these processing centers represents a concerning development. Migrants processed under this externalized asylum screening process are likely to become invisibilized to the American public that is funding these centers through the lack of data about their cases.

Whether this “invisiblization” is an intentional strategy or not is somewhat beside the point. Years of research tell us that when migration controls get externalized, those state practices of control, along with the people they target, are rendered less visible to the public in whose name the government claims to act.

Photo by Leon Overweel on Unsplash

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