Clothes, shoes, passports: migrants forced to dump possessions at US-Mexico wall

Every day, hundreds of people arrive at gaps in this stretch of border wall to request political asylum from uniformed federal border agents who stand waiting under a rudimentary metal shade structure in the Sonoran desert heat.

Most of those arriving to seek asylum are from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Romania, or other eastern European countries.

So instead migrants arrive at ad-hoc places like these gaps in the wall, alongside the dried-up bed of the Colorado River, to exercise their right to request asylum.

In some circumstances, including dangerous conditions in their country of origin, and the distance and difficulty in returning the people there, asylum seekers are exempted from the summary expulsion under title 42 that has upended so many desperate journeys.

But to get to the next step in the asylum process, agents in Yuma, according to Customs and Border Protection, require they leave everything behind, except for what they can fit into a small plastic Department of Homeland Security-issued bag.

Border residents in Arizona and Texas have observed an increasing number of personal belongings left along the US side of the border wall in the last two years.

Usually people leave clothing and sundries, but items such as passports, birth certificates, police reports, and other confidential documents that could be crucial in proving asylum cases have been found abandoned, too.

Some coalition volunteers began cleaning up the Yuma stretch of border. The county placed two large dumpsters nearby. They also persuaded border patrol to provide shade structures and water for arriving asylum seekers.

He has also found personal and confidential documents on his walks along the border.

The Guardian sent images of passports, birth certificates and other documents found at the border wall to Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency overseeing border agents, and requested comment on whether agents were telling asylum seekers to leave their documents behind, and in some cases ripping them up.

CBP declined to respond to the questions.

But increasingly people arrive at migrant shelters in the US with only the clothes on their backs, and without any identification.

However, after the Trump administration began its Remain in Mexico policy for many crossing the border unauthorized, some migrants told them agents ripped up their Mexican immigration visas and other documents.

Blake Gentry, director of the indigenous language office at Casa Alitas, a migrant shelter in Tucson, estimated that about a third of people arrive at the shelter without documents or belongings.

He suspects some agents are forcing migrants to dump their possessions in some sort of rogue practice.