On Mexico’s border with US, desperation as migrant traffic piles up
Many of the migrants said they had spent their life savings and gone into debt to pay coyotes — human smugglers — who had falsely promised them that the border was open after Biden’s election.
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 back to Mexico, where they wait along with tens of thousands of others hoping to cross. The pressure, and desperation, is quickly building among families stuck in Mexico, as shelters and officials struggle to help them.
In the United States, federal authorities are scrambling to manage a sharp increase in children who are crossing the border on their own and then being held in detention facilities, often longer than permitted by law. And the twinned crises on both sides of the border show no sign of abating.
Near the crossing with El Paso, Texas, a group of mothers and fathers clutching their children were sobbing as they walked back into Mexico from the United States on Saturday. They walked unsteadily, in sneakers too loose after their shoelaces were confiscated and discarded along with all their other personal items when they were detained by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
From his office in Ciudad Juárez, Enrique Valenzuela sprang from his chair, leaving a meeting to run to the bridge to meet the families after his daughter, Elena, 13, spotted them coming.
Valenzuela, a coordinator for the Mexican government’s migration efforts in Chihuahua state, knew that if he couldn’t get to them to offer help, organized crime networks who prey on migrants’ desperation to extort or kidnap them for ransom probably would.
The migrants — nine adults and 10 children — wiped their tears as Valenzuela drew near. The moment was one of several such scenes of despair and confusion witnessed by New York Times journalists at the border over three days.
“The border is closed,” Valenzuela said. “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, topped with miles of new concertina wire installed in the final weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration, officials said.
Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old Guatemalan mother of a 3-year-old girl, collapsed in a seat as Valenzuela handed out hand sanitizer.
“I did not make it,” she sobbed into the phone as she spoke with her husband, a butcher in Chicago.
“Biden promised us!” wailed another woman.
Many of the migrants said they had spent their life 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 keep coming, and many officials believe the numbers could be bigger than those seen in recent years, after the pandemic and recent natural disasters in Central America wiped away livelihoods.
Biden is now directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage the thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who are filling up detention facilities after Biden said, shortly after taking office, that his administration would no longer turn back unaccompanied minors.