In the News

In April, after Nicaragua’s increasingly authoritarian government began killing protesters, Isaac Molina tried to help. Molina saw the carnage at a university in Managua and rushed home to fill a backpack with medicine and other supplies. The government quickly closed hospitals and told doctors not to treat injured protesters. Molina, a 26-year-old doctor, kept treating them.

He was threatened for the first time in May after being identified as a member of a volunteer medical brigade. One month later, he said the police pulled him over and shot him twice, in the abdomen and the back. He fled with his wife and two young children in August and arrived at the US border in Tijuana in November. Shortly after arriving, he turned around and traveled to the other side of Mexico to wait.

In December, California Democratic Reps. Nanette Barragán and Jimmy Gomez accompanied 15 asylum-seekers to the San Diego side of the Otay Mesa port of entry. They were forced to wait and were eventually penned in by metal barricades held together with zip ties. Gomez slept on the concrete as the group waited for all the asylum-seekers to be allowed in, a process that wound up taking nearly 20 hours and attracted significant media attention. As they waited, Barragán and Gomez asked to see the spaces that were allegedly at capacity, but they were not allowed to do so. Ramos compares CBP’s claims about lacking space to arguing with a toddler. “You’re like, ‘You’re lying. I see the chocolate bar in your hand,’” she says. “This is disappointing that this is acceptable behavior for law enforcement. Their job is to enforce the law.”

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