Antonio, Wilmer and Rayder are barely 20 years old and are biding their time in a kind of trench. Leaning on a mound of earth, they have the border with the United States just a foot away. You see the river, the fence and the American police officers protecting the fence that they have longed to cross since they left a small town in Venezuela more than two months ago. But for now, they prefer to wait. “Until those idiots from the Mexican migra leave,” says Antonio, while he changes some worn-out sneakers for some flip-flops that he trusts to cross the water.
Just before the river there are four vans from the Mexican immigration agency. The three friends have had bad experiences with them while traveling across the country. “They robbed us several times. “Marico, they seem more corrupt than in Venezuela!” All three acknowledge that they are more afraid of the unarmed Mexican agents than of the military police with assault rifles on the American side.
A similar feeling is shared by the more than 10,000 migrants waiting in Ciudad Juárez, the most populated center on the Mexican border and one of the hottest spots during the peak of recent weeks. In addition to stories of abuse and violence during their extreme journey across the country, the migrants’ fear is also backed up by numbers. Mexico has accelerated deportations, which have grown more than 20% in August alone, according to the latest available data.
In Ciudad Juárez, the trauma of one of the greatest recent migrant tragedies has not yet been resolved. At the end of March, 40 men died in flames during a fire at an immigration agency detention center. No one opened the door for them and no one has yet paid for what happened. “We have friends who are already there (the United States) and they tell us that they are being treated much better than here,” says Wilmer without losing sight of the Mexican officials’ vans.
A few weeks after that tragedy, title 42 was terminated, an exception for health reasons, extended since the pandemic, which allowed immediate deportation without any procedure. Since then, the migrant flow has been increasing. Official figures from the US Border Patrol threaten to break all recent records. The forecast is more than 300,000 arrests recorded for this year.
The flood has increased pressure on the Democratic Government of Joe Biden, who faces re-election next year in a campaign of high tension with the Republicans. To the reinforcement of police on the ground along the 3,200 kilometers of border – nearly 25,000 agents since May – and the reactivation of rapid and massive deportations, the president has added a measure that until now seemed anathema: a decree published this week left without effect 26 federal laws, leaving the way clear to build 32 kilometers of fence in south Texas. Biden thus turns one of his principles on immigration matters into a dead letter upon arriving at the White House: “no more American taxes will be used to build a wall.” A symbolic measure that sought to put an end to Donald Trump’s heavy-handed policy.
Despite the shielding announced by the United States, the perception within the El Good Samaritan shelter, on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, continues to be that the most obvious danger continues to be on this side of the border. “We are more afraid that they will arrest us in Mexico and deport us to our country,” says Brisel, a 25-year-old Honduran who left Tegucigalpa with her family to escape death threats. Her husband had a blacksmith shop and the mafias demanded 40 dollars a week, more than half of the money they earned in the small business. They have been at the Mexican border for almost three weeks. They have requested political asylum and are waiting for confirmation of the appointment through the digital application that the US launched months ago. Meanwhile, she and the two small children barely leave the shelter. “My husband leaves in the mornings because he has found work in construction. But I don’t go out. I’m afraid. The Mexican police also robbed us and beat us along the way,” she says as she searches through a bag of donated clothes that just arrived at the house.
The fire
More than six months after the fatal fire that claimed the lives of 40 men, the migrant detention center where the tragedy occurred is sealed. But you can still see the marks on the wall sticking out like black tongues through the narrow windows and the metal door that the guards locked before escaping. Despite the mountain of negligence, only seven people, including custodians and regional directors of the National Migration Institute (Inami), are prosecuted for different crimes. Also, the director of the organization, Francisco Garduño, for a crime of illicit exercise of public service.
While the slow Mexican justice machinery advances, Garduño, who is following the process at large, remains at the head of the agency. In August, he returned to Ciudad Juárez in the middle of the umpteenth crisis. The company that manages the freight trains that migrants board to travel north, including the disastrous and famous Beast, announced that it was suspending activities due to the crowds that gathered and the dangers that were increasingly evident. Garduño limited himself to promising more police presence on the trains and announcing the inauguration of a new shelter for 500 migrants. When consulted by this newspaper, Inami has not responded to questions about its current “rescue” policies, the euphemism for migrant detentions.
“The fire episode tells us that the strategy of attempting socioeconomic integration for the large groups of migrants that the city receives has long since ended,” says Jesús Peña, researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte study center (Colef). During the years that Donald Trump, who imposed on Mexico that asylum seekers in the United States wait on the other side of the border for their case to be processed, sometimes for months, even years, an accommodation was attempted for migrants.
At that time, migrants had a work permit while their application was being processed and some began to work, for example, in the Juárez maquilas, the cheap labor factories deployed on the border. “Now all that is over and the bet is on deportations, which will increase distrust among migrants, pushing them underground. That is, into the arms of the human trafficking mafias,” adds the Colef researcher.
In the center of Ciudad Juárez you can see groups of migrants with plastic bags and blankets on their shoulders. The shelters are almost full and many prefer to look for a cheap motel as close as possible to the border crossing or directly a park where they can spend the night. For example, through the city’s red light district, between brothels and exchange houses. Ciudad Juárez long ago became a stigma city. A black hole for hundreds of women murdered or missing in the 2000s, and the scene after one of the most barbaric wars between drug trafficking mafias.
In 2010 it reached number one on the list of cities with the highest homicide rate in the world. Today, in the midst of the wave of generalized violence that is once again hitting Mexico, it occupies the first places again. It is the largest city on the border with a million and a half inhabitants, almost triple that of its Texan neighbor of El Paso. But he wasn’t always a monster. In the 70s it was known as Mexican Las Vegas for its party halls and nightlife. The arrival of the maquilas engulfed the small town that lived on cotton and alcohol. In the nineties, coinciding with the signing of the free trade agreement with the United States, the population practically doubled. Juárez became a city of Mexican workers and migrants. And in recent years, also from Central American, Venezuelan or African migrants.
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