On Mexico’s border with US, desperation as migrant visitors piles up

Written by Maria Abi-Habib
The migrants’ hopes have been drummed up by human smugglers who promise that President Joe Biden’s administration will welcome them.
Instead, the United States is expelling them again to Mexico, the place they wait together with tens of 1000’s of others hoping to cross. The stress, and desperation, is rapidly constructing amongst households caught in Mexico, as shelters and officers battle to assist them.
In the United States, federal authorities are scrambling to handle a pointy enhance in kids who’re crossing the border on their very own after which being held in detention services, typically longer than permitted by legislation. And the twinned crises on each side of the border present no signal of abating.
Near the crossing with El Paso, Texas, a gaggle of moms and dads clutching their kids had been sobbing as they walked again into Mexico from the United States on Saturday. They walked unsteadily, in sneakers too free after their shoelaces had been confiscated and discarded together with all their different private objects once they had been detained by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
From his workplace in Ciudad Juárez, Enrique Valenzuela sprang from his chair, leaving a gathering to run to the bridge to fulfill the households after his daughter, Elena, 13, noticed them coming.
Jenny Contreras, left, is consoled by Lidia Hernandez, each of Guatemala, after being notified of their pending deportation in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, March 13, 2021. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
Valenzuela, a coordinator for the Mexican authorities’s migration efforts in Chihuahua state, knew that if he couldn’t get to them to supply assist, organized crime networks who prey on migrants’ desperation to extort or kidnap them for ransom in all probability would.
The migrants — 9 adults and 10 kids — wiped their tears as Valenzuela drew close to. The second was certainly one of a number of such scenes of despair and confusion witnessed by New York Times journalists on the border over three days.
“The border is closed,” Valenzuela stated. “Come with me, I will help.” He led the group to his workplace close to the rusty border wall that separates El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, topped with miles of recent concertina wire put in within the remaining weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration, officers stated.
Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old Guatemalan mom of a 3-year-old woman, collapsed in a seat as Valenzuela handed out hand sanitizer.
“I did not make it,” she sobbed into the cellphone as she spoke along with her husband, a butcher in Chicago.
“Biden promised us!” wailed one other girl.
Many of the migrants stated that they had spent their life financial savings and gone into debt to pay coyotes — human smugglers — who had falsely promised them that the border was open after Biden’s election.
Still, the migrants preserve coming, and plenty of officers imagine the numbers might be larger than these seen lately, after the pandemic and up to date pure disasters in Central America wiped away livelihoods.
Biden is now directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist handle the 1000’s of unaccompanied migrant kids who’re filling up detention services after Biden stated, shortly after taking workplace, that his administration would not flip again unaccompanied minors.
Enrique Valenzuela, a migrant coordinator in Chihuahua, directing Dagoberto Pineda, left, to his workplaces in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, March 13, 2021. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
Mexican officers and shelter operators say the variety of kids, with mother and father or unaccompanied, is reaching ranges not seen since 2018. Late that yr, tens of 1000’s of migrants headed for the border every month, prompting Trump’s administration to separate households and lock them up. Hundreds of youngsters stay separated from their mother and father to at the present time.
Biden has requested Mexico’s authorities for assist in easing the pileup on the border. So far, Mexico’s response has largely been to ramp up raids of smuggling rings and to start sending migrants — most of them from Central America — again dwelling, in line with shelter operators in Mexico. The authorities can also be making an attempt to maintain extra migrants from crossing into Mexico from Central America, because it did throughout the Trump administration, officers stated.
A Mexican Foreign Ministry official stated the federal government was inside its proper to deport unauthorized migrants however didn’t touch upon whether or not raids had elevated in latest weeks or whether or not the Mexican authorities was responding to a U.S. request.
At the worldwide bridge on Saturday, Dagoberto Pineda, a Honduran migrant, regarded shocked as he discreetly wiped away tears and held his 6-year-old son’s hand. He had thought he was getting into the United States, however right here he was in Ciudad Juárez, crying beneath a Mexican flag. He requested Valenzuela and New York Times journalists for assist: Was he allowed in or not?
Gladys Oneida Perez Cruz cares for her son, Henry Arturo Menjivar Perez on the Filter Hotel in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, March 13, 2021 (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
A large hurricane hurtled by Pineda’s city late final yr, destroying the banana plantation he labored on, owned by Chiquita Brands International. After years of paying Pineda about $12 a day to assist fill American grocery shops with contemporary fruit, the corporate laid him off. When coyotes supplied him an opportunity to cross into the United States for $6,000 — greater than his annual wage — he took it.
Pineda had crossed from Tamaulipas state into southern Texas, the place he was detained by U.S. officers for a number of days. When he was flown 600 miles to a second detention middle in El Paso, Texas, he thought his entry into the United States had lastly been granted.
Instead, on Saturday, Border Patrol brokers launched him on the Paso del Norte bridge, linking El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, and instructed him to stroll within the route of the Mexican flags.
Over the previous week, Mexican officers and shelter operators just like the International Organization of Migration stated that they had been shocked by the Department of Homeland Security’s new apply of detaining migrants at one level of the sprawling border solely to fly them lots of of miles away to be expelled at a special border city.
The United States is doing this beneath a federal order often known as Title 42. The order, launched by Trump however embraced by Biden, justifies fast expulsions as a well being measure amid the pandemic. But cramming migrants into airplanes and overcrowded detention services with none coronavirus testing defeats the aim of Title 42, observers say.
Migrants are escorted acoss the bridge into the U.S. in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, March 12, 2021. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
Stephanie Malin, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, stated that U.S. authorities had seen “an increase in encounters” however that to stick to federal pointers for COVID-19, border officers had been “expeditiously” transferring migrants out of their custody.
“Trump got his wall, it’s called Title 42,” stated Rubén Garcia, founding father of Annunciation House, one of many largest shelter networks within the United States, based mostly in El Paso.
Still, the brand new surge of migrants is straining sources all through the system. Last Sunday, Garcia stated, he was left with barely half-hour to arrange after being instructed by the authorities that 200 migrants had been about to be deposited at his shelter, none of them examined for COVID-19.
“I’m on calls with staffers at the White House and DHS and when I’m on those calls I say: ‘You’re not prepared. You’re not prepared for what is about to happen,’” Garcia stated in an interview, utilizing the acronym for the Department of Homeland Security.
Across the border, Mexican officers are additionally ill-prepared to deal with the rising variety of migrants, with shelters at a breaking level.
If Valenzuela’s daughter had not regarded up from her e-book to identify the households crossing the border, all 19 migrants would have been dumped in downtown Ciudad Juárez, certainly one of Mexico’s most harmful cities, on the mercy of the cartels or human traffickers.
The evening earlier than, Valenzuela welcomed 45 households with little time to arrange.
Under Trump’s Remain in Mexico Policy, which deported migrants to Mexico to attend out their courtroom instances for asylum within the United States, communication and coordination was higher between the assorted organizations working alongside the border, shelter operators and Mexican officers stated. Biden ended that coverage in January and promised to start out processing a number of the 25,000 migrants enrolled in that program. In latest weeks, lots of have been let in.
Jettner, 29, a migrant from Honduras, is a kind of who was allowed in to the United States. After ready for almost two years on the border along with his spouse and two daughters, it took them barely an hour on Friday to be processed and let in. He swiftly went to his sister’s home in Dallas.
As he walked up the bridge, leaving Ciudad Juárez behind as he strode towards El Paso, he was assured. “My life is going to change 180 degrees,” stated Jettner, who requested that solely his first identify be used, fearing reprisals for his household again dwelling. “I am going to a place where I will be well and have a decent roof over the heads of my daughters.”
Though U.S. officers insist that the border is closed to new migrants, that has not stopped 1000’s from making the damaging journey north, most from Central America.
Just 4 months in the past, the Filter Hotel shelter in Ciudad Juárez was so empty that they used a number of rooms as storage. The shelter, run by the International Organization of Migration, now has indicators on its door declaring “no space.”
Of the 1,165 folks the Filter Hotel has processed since early May, almost 39% had been minors, most of them youthful than 12, staff stated. Its employees typically has to shoo smugglers away once they hang around shelter entrances.

Gladys Oneida Pérez Cruz, 48, and her 23-year-old son, Henry Arturo Menjívar Pérez, who has cerebral palsy, got here to the shelter after being expelled from the United States late final month. Shortly after Biden’s inauguration, smugglers started cruising her neighborhood in Honduras for enterprise, falsely placing out the phrase that the U.S. border was open.
Pérez hoped to affix her sister in Maryland, and to search out work that may assist her afford medication for her son.
A coyote charged her $9,000 for the journey — a steeper worth than she anticipated, but it surely got here with the promise she would journey by automobile and his colleagues would assist her carry her son throughout the border, as he needed to depart his wheelchair behind. Her sister wired the cash. She and her son launched into the damaging trek on Feb. 7, she stated. Nearly two weeks later, the smugglers dumped them on the border and stated they must cross on their very own.
They managed to cross after hours of effort, however had been rapidly detained by U.S. Border Patrol brokers and expelled again to Mexico. She has determined to return to Honduras, preferring to face poverty slightly than threat being killed or kidnapped in Mexico.

“I apologize for having tried to enter the United States like this, but it was because of my need and my son’s illness,” she stated by her tears.
“Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” she stated. “He hasn’t done it yet, but he is going to be a good president for migrants.”