Mexico is struggling to cope with a new wave of migrants expelled from the United States, while others are coming north hoping to cross. Shelters that were empty four months ago are now having to refuse many.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Migrants’ hopes have been raised by human smugglers who promise that President Biden’s government will receive them.
Instead, the United States is driving them back to Mexico, where they wait along with tens of thousands of others in the hope of crossing over. Pressure and despair are increasing rapidly among families trapped in Mexico, while shelters and workers struggle to help them.
In the United States, federal authorities are struggling to manage a sharp increase in children who cross the border on their own and are then held in detention centers, often for longer than permitted by law. And the twin crises on both sides of the border show no signs of abating.
Near the intersection with El Paso, Texas, a group of mothers and fathers holding their children sobbed as they returned from the United States to Mexico on Saturday. They staggered, wearing sneakers that were too loose after their laces were confiscated and discarded along with all of their other personal items when they were detained by the United States Customs and Border Protection.
From his office in Ciudad Juárez, Enrique Valenzuela jumped out of his chair, leaving a meeting to run to the bridge to meet the families after his daughter, Elena, 13, saw them arriving.
Valenzuela, coordinator of the Mexican government’s migration efforts in the state of Chihuahua, knew that, if he couldn’t reach out to them to offer help, organized crime networks that take advantage of migrants’ desperation to extort or kidnap them in exchange for ransom they probably would.
The migrants – nine adults and 10 children – wiped their tears when Valenzuela approached. The moment was one of several scenes of despair and confusion witnessed by New York Times journalists at the border over three days.
“The border is closed,” said Valenzuela. “Come with me, I will help.” He led the group to his office near the rusty border wall that separates El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, covered with kilometers of new barbed wire installed in the last weeks of President Donald J. Trump’s administration, officials said.
Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old Guatemalan, mother of a 3-year-old girl, collapsed on a chair while Valenzuela handed out hand sanitizer.
“I didn’t survive,” she sobbed on the phone as she spoke to her husband, a butcher in Chicago.
“Biden promised us!” another woman lamented.
Many of the migrants said they spent their savings and went into debt to pay coyotes – smugglers of human beings – who falsely promised them that the border would be opened after President Biden was elected.
Still, migrants continue to arrive, and many officials believe the numbers may be higher than seen in recent years, after the pandemic and recent natural disasters in Central America wiped out livelihoods.
Biden is now directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage the thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who are filling the detention facilities after Biden said, shortly after taking office, that his government would no longer refuse unaccompanied minors.
Mexican authorities and shelter operators say the number of children, with their parents or unaccompanied, is reaching levels never seen since 2018. By the end of that year, tens of thousands of migrants headed to the border each month, prompting the government to Trump to separate families and lock them up. Hundreds of children remain separated from their parents to this day.
Biden asked the Mexican government for help in easing the pile-up at the border. So far, Mexico’s response has been mainly to increase the smuggling ringings and start sending migrants – most of them from Central America – back home, according to shelter operators in Mexico. The government is also trying to prevent more migrants from entering Central America in Mexico, as it did during the Trump administration, officials said.
A Mexican Foreign Ministry official said the government has the right to deport illegal migrants, but did not comment on whether the attacks have escalated in recent weeks or whether the Mexican government is responding to a request from the United States.
On the international bridge on Saturday, Dagoberto Pineda, a Honduran migrant, looked shocked as he quietly wiped away tears and held his 6-year-old son’s hand. He thought he was entering the United States, but here he was in Ciudad Juárez, shouting under a Mexican flag. He asked Valenzuela and the New York Times reporters for help: was he allowed to enter or not?
A huge hurricane hit the city of Pineda late last year, destroying the banana plantation on which he worked, owned by Chiquita Brands International. After years of paying Pineda about $ 12 a day to help fill American supermarkets with fresh fruit, the company dismissed him. When the coyotes offered him the chance to enter the United States for $ 6,000 – more than his annual salary – he accepted it.
Pineda had crossed from the state of Tamaulipas to southern Texas, where he was detained by American officials for several days. When he flew 600 miles to a second detention center in El Paso, Texas, he thought that his entry into the United States had finally been granted.
Instead, on Saturday, border patrol agents released him on the Paso del Norte bridge, which connected El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, and told him to walk in the direction of the Mexican flags.
Last week, Mexican officials and shelter operators like the International Migration Organization said they were surprised by the Department of Homeland Security’s new practice of detaining migrants at a point on the long border just to take them hundreds of miles away to being expelled in a different border city.
The United States is doing this under a federal order known as Title 42. The order, presented by Mr Trump but adopted by Mr Biden, justifies swift expulsions as a health measure in the midst of the pandemic. But stuffing migrants into overcrowded airplanes and detention centers without any coronavirus testing negates the purpose of Title 42, observers say.
Stephanie Malin, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, said that American officials saw “an increase in meetings”, but to adhere to federal guidelines for Covid-19, border officers were transferring migrants “quickly” out of your custody.
“Trump won his wall, it’s called Title 42,” said Rubén Garcia, founder of the Casa da Anunciação, one of the largest shelter chains in the United States, based in El Paso.
Still, the new wave of migrants is depleting the resources of the entire system. Last Sunday, Garcia said, he only had 30 minutes to prepare after being informed by the authorities that 200 migrants were about to be deposited in his shelter, none of which were tested for Covid-19.
“I’m on calls with White House and DHS employees, and when I’m on those calls, I say, ‘You’re not ready. You are not prepared for what is about to happen, ”” said Garcia in an interview, using the acronym for Department of Homeland Security.
Across the border, Mexican authorities are also ill-prepared to deal with the growing number of migrants, with shelters at a breaking point.
If Valenzuela’s daughter had not taken her eyes off the book to see families crossing the border, all 19 migrants would have been evicted in the center of Ciudad Juárez, one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, at the mercy of cartels or human traffickers. .
The night before, Mr. Valenzuela welcomed 45 families with little time to prepare.
According to Trump’s Stay in Mexico Policy, which deported migrants to Mexico to await their legal proceedings to obtain asylum in the United States, communication and coordination were better among the various organizations operating along the border, operators said. of Mexican shelters and staff. Mr. Biden ended this policy in January and promised to start processing some of the 25,000 migrants enrolled in this program. In the past few weeks, hundreds have been admitted.
Jettner, 29, a migrant from Honduras, is one of those allowed to enter the United States. After waiting for almost two years at the border with his wife and two daughters, it took them only an hour on Friday to be sued and allowed in. He quickly went to his sister’s home in Dallas.
As he climbed the bridge, leaving Ciudad Juárez behind as he walked towards El Paso, he was confident. “My life is going to change 180 degrees,” said Jettner, who asked that only his first name be mentioned, fearing reprisals for his family at home. “I’m going to a place where I’ll be fine and have a decent roof over my daughters’ heads.”
While American officials insist that the border is closed to new migrants, it has not stopped thousands from making the dangerous journey north, mostly from Central America.
Just four months ago, the Filter Hotel’s shelter in Ciudad Juárez was so empty that several rooms were used as storage. The shelter, administered by the International Migration Organization, now has signs on the door stating “no space”.
Of the 1,165 people that Filter Hotel has sued since early May, almost 39% were minors, most of them under 12, officials said. His team often has to scare off smugglers when they wander through the entrances to the shelters.
Gladys Oneida Pérez Cruz, 48, and her 23-year-old son, Henry Arturo Menjívar Pérez, who has cerebral palsy, arrived at the shelter after being expelled from the United States at the end of last month. Shortly after Biden’s inauguration, smugglers began to cross his neighborhood in Honduras on business, falsely publicizing that the United States’ border was open.
Mrs. Pérez hoped to join her sister in Maryland and find a job that would help her pay for her son’s medicine.
A coyote charged $ 9,000 for the trip – a higher price than she expected, but came with the promise that she would travel by car and her colleagues would help her carry her son across the border, as he had to leave the wheelchair. wheels back. Her sister transferred the money. She and her son embarked on the dangerous journey on February 7, she said. Almost two weeks later, smugglers left them at the border and said they would have to cross on their own.
They managed to cross after hours of effort, but were quickly stopped by American border patrol agents and expelled back to Mexico. She decided to return to Honduras, preferring to face poverty instead of being killed or kidnapped in Mexico.
“I apologize for trying to enter the United States in this way, but it was because of my need and my son’s illness,” she said through tears.
“Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” she said. “He hasn’t done that yet, but he will be a good president for migrants.”
Albinson Linares contributed reporting from Juárez, Mexico.