MATAMOROS, Mexico – Edwin Vaquiz’s frustration was rising as the 42-year-old Honduran asylum-seeker passed out supplies from a tent with a hand-lettered “Tienda No. 3” sign. There was little water available for drinking at Store No. 3, but there were two kinds of soap for washing clothes in the dirty Rio Grande. There were few portable toilets, but plenty of toilet paper.
Soon the camp of asylum-seekers would be blanketed in darkness and there would be no security.
“Miserable,” Vaquiz said last week of conditions at the migrant camp where he and his wife and daughter have been waiting for the last five months.
This sprawling camp is one of the most visible signs along the border of how the U.S. asylum process has slowed to a crawl, leaving thousands of people essentially stranded in Mexico, many in danger because of the high crime rate and violent cartels.
The violence in the state of Tamaulipas, where Matamoros sits, has forced about 2,000 asylum-seekers to cluster for protection here at the banks of the Rio Grande and along the Gateway International Bridge into Brownsville in Texas. A former Army nurse here estimates 18 people were kidnapped through October, probably by the dominant criminal group in this region. Then she stopped counting.
Volunteers from around the U.S. — from Dallas and Houston to Florida and Maine — regularly cycle through the border’s camps with food, tents, blankets, jeans, sweat shirts, diapers, toys — and even songs for the children. While the efforts are extraordinary and a patchy organization is slowly emerging, it clearly isn’t enough.
Vaquiz is grateful for the kindness. But what he could really use to protect his family is a battery-powered lamp. That way no one could sneak up on their tent.
Many people here whisper about the dangers. Migrants are taken by the local cartel members and their lookouts, who openly walk into the camp, at any hour, said a Honduran who didn’t want to be identified because he feared for his safety. A Honduran woman who has been at the camp for several months said a man posing as an asylum-seeker within the camp has molested two small girls. “We can’t complain. It’s a mafia and they will come and beat us,” she said.
No one runs the camps. There are no controls for who enters the encampment. Some migrants have clustered their tents on the sidewalks leading to the nearby Gateway International Bridge to be ready if their asylum cases are called, but they’re also hoping for more safety. Passing cars provide a bit of light. But the vast majority of people, hundreds more, have secured space on the tree-lined grounds near the river where the camp has grown. They are the most vulnerable.
“This is one of the worst situations I have been in, merely for the fact there are so few resources and security is so bad,” said Helen Perry, a former Army nurse who now runs operations for the small nonprofit Global Response Management. “We know people are trafficked out of the camps, and kidnapped. … It goes back to not having formal camp management.”
Traditionally, the United Nations refugee agency might be one of the groups that would play a role in organizing and running the place. But danger is keeping the usual help away.
Mike Benavides, a veteran of the Iraq War and a co-founder of the nonprofit Team Brownsville, said much more help is needed.
“It infuriates me. This is a crisis,” Benavides said.
Conditions were more sanitary in Iraq than they are here at this camp, Benavides said. Infectious diarrhea and dehydration are two of the biggest dangers. Recently, children have been coming down with the flu. And there are many pregnancies.
Giovanni Lepri, the deputy representative for Mexico for the U.N. refugee agency, praised Team Brownsville and other volunteers for work he called “amazing.” But they aren’t trained in camp management, he said. The U.N. was focused more on Mexico’s southern border where Mexico’s tiny refugee agency maintains an office, he said. They also opened an office in Monterrey, about four hours west of Matamoros.
Lepri acknowledged that the U.N.’s security advisers warned against opening a permanent office in Matamoros because of the danger in the region, which includes the more dangerous cities of Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo. “Our security unit, which is the U.N. security unit, has recommended for the moment we don’t establish a permanent presence,” Lepri said.
In November, the U.N. began using a mobile unit in the region. The staff sleeps on the U.S. side of the border, Lepri said.
The U.S. State Department has issued its harshest no-travel warning for the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas – a level 4 warning like the ones in war-torn Syria and Somalia.
More than 56,000 asylum-seekers who have made it to the U.S. border from Central America and other places have been sent back to Mexico by U.S. authorities to await the processing of their cases under what the Trump administration calls the Migration Protection Protocols. The policy was phased in earlier this year; in the past, once asylum-seekers got to the U.S., they would await the outcome of their cases in the States.
Most asylum-seekers wait in Mexico in the haphazard camps. Those with more money might rent apartments — but that can make them even more vulnerable to gangs.
Kidnapping is rampant in Matamoros, said immigration attorney Charlene D’Cruz, who runs a Lawyers for Good Government resource center near the camp. Asylum-seekers expect to be kidnapped and the risk increases the longer they stay.
“The resignation to die is how we dehumanize them,” the attorney said.
Life in the camp
In the stench of the camp, families have begun building their own ovens with mud bricks. They cut wood branches from trees for fires. And the smoke covers the smell of feces.
In a country of music-lovers, there is no music here. Muffled conversations come from inside tents. Sometimes, children can be heard laughing, but even that is infrequent.
Some families have been given pallets to place their tents on in case of rain. Others string clothes lines among the trees or place laundered clothes on fuchsia-flowering bougainvillea bushes near the entry lanes into Texas.
Last Sunday at the camp, some of the children received an early Christmas with gifts from a Brownsville group called Angry Tias y Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley. The volunteers wrapped the gifts and tagged them with the names of children they saw regularly.
Others in the group prepared to read to the children, who in a normal world would be in school. There are geography lessons with an emphasis on the countries of origin of the migrating families. And lessons on the colors of the rainbow.
“Apurate,” shouted a skinny little girl to a smaller companion. “Apurate!” Hurry up, the little school is about to start, she urged.
On another night, a Houston volunteer plopped herself on the sidewalk to read to children a story from a picture book illustrated with Monarch butterflies, a symbol of migration.
“You are very valiant. You are so strong. Your journey is a miracle. I admire you,” she told the children in Spanish.
Then, she explained, “That’s what the butterfly says because they have flown so far.”
Another group of boys played checkers, using bottle caps made of creamy white and red plastic.
Other boys sat comfortably on flattened cardboard that covered the powdery dirt. They pushed their plastic green dinosaurs through a kingdom of the imagination. Then a child hit another on the head. Wails began. A father came to scold the group.
Another day, a toddler in a diaper waddled toward a hammock in stripes of blue, purple, yellow and red. But he was sullen. Vaquiz, the Honduran, stroked his puffy cheeks and called him “Donald Trump.” Why? “Because the child is always angry,” the Honduran said.
Grasp as they might for a normal childhood and a normal world, the children’s anxiety levels are high, medical doctor and volunteer Anjali Niyogi said. Some seem traumatized by the violence they fled in their home countries — and some are traumatized by the dangers within the camp.
“We see a lot of depression, anxiety, PTSD,” said Niyogi, who teaches at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans.
Some children in the camp are even emotionless, so strong is their depression, the doctor said. “Moms tell me, ‘He just stopped eating.’ “
Recently, fierce dust storms swept through the camp, making it difficult to see until the wind died down. The doctor fears fecal matter has been scooped up into the air and children will be most susceptible to health risks.
The asylum program
Every weekday, immigrants’ names will come up for hearings in the U.S. immigration courts near the international bridge. Hearings are held in tent courts in Brownsville. Asylum-seekers cross into the U.S., and are sent back to wait in Mexico unless their asylum cases are advanced so that they can formally enter the U.S.
In Brownsville, hearings under new program began in September. The asylum caseloads there have rapidly made this the border’s second-busiest area for Border Patrol apprehensions through November, according to the Syracuse University nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.
Already, through November, a fourth of all Migrant Protection Protocol asylum cases — nearly 14,000 — are pending here, TRAC data shows. About 16,400 cases are pending in the El Paso area.
“How can we really say that somebody can make a free choice to continue an asylum claim in the U.S., when they have to spend several months ... risking to be kidnapped or worse?” said Lepri, the U.N. representative.
Mexicans, too, are showing up in the camps. An increasing number of them are mostly indigenous Tzotzil Mayan people from the southernmost state of Chiapas. About a dozen Chiapans told The Dallas Morning News about a resurgence in violence there related to decades-old oppression against their people, including the murder of family members and the seizure of their land and homes.
Under U.S. asylum law, a well-founded fear of persecution because of race or nationality would be acceptable grounds for an application.
But a man from Chiapas who wanted to be identified only as Osiel said, “The guard just told us that asylum has been shut down. We are suffering here,” he said.
“We want to know if there is still asylum. If not, we don’t want to be here suffering,” he said.
Nearby, Gloria, a Honduran woman, said some parents are so worried about lengthy waits at the camp that they’ve sent their children alone across the border. “At times, it is the only exit one has,” she explained.
Jodi Goodwin, a Harlingen immigration attorney, said she faces difficult choices in what she tells asylum-seekers. Still, she persists in giving sidewalk workshops near the bridge to let them know their rights, or threading them into the volunteer network of Lawyers for Good Government.
They are like the kid with his finger in the dike. Only 4 percent of immigrants in the Migrant Protection Protocols program are represented by lawyers, according to TRAC.
What does Goodwin tell an immigrant who feels hopeless?
Sometimes it’s, “You got to fight and fight to the end.” But other times, she says she is brutally honest.
“Why sit here in squalor without the ability to minimally take care of your family for a case that I can tell you right now has zero chance of winning,” she explained.
Goodwin fears that the attorneys’ work will get only more difficult in January when asylum cases will be partially transferred to judges who sit in a year-old immigration court center in Fort Worth, which handles cases by video conference. Government attorneys are in another courtroom in another city and immigrants can be in yet-another location.
“It is so messed up,” Goodwin said. “This is not how you practice law.”
Caught amid the camp squalor, the danger and the tent court system, many immigrants aren’t showing up for their asylum hearings. TRAC found that of those required to wait in Mexico, about half failed to show up for a hearing. By comparison, 9 out of 10 immigrants who are allowed to remain in the U.S. while their cases are adjudicated attend every court hearing.
Trying to help
Into this misery flows charity aid – everything from beef burritos and chicken soup, sliced oranges and cashews, powder milk and plastic buckets for hauling water of dubious quality to volunteer medical teams. Late last week, a huge water purification system was being tested thanks to a charity donation from a group called the Planet Water Foundation.
“We need to build everything to U.N. standards so, should the U.N. show up, all this will stay,” said Blake Davis, a volunteer with Global Response Management. The paramedic from Maine was overseeing the prize donation of the water purification system, hoping it would make a significant change in the bleakness and sickness at the camp.
Businesses, veteran charities and foundations, and some freshly formed nonprofits all lend assistance. Among them are Samaritan’s Purse, Church World Service, Physicians for Human Rights, Good Neighbor Settlement House, Manos Juntas of the Mexican Methodist Church, Lawyers for Good Government, and an anonymous T-Mobile manager who forgave a huge bill run up when migrants at the Brownsville shelter called family in Central America instead of the U.S.
Cassie Stewart, a former child protection social worker, started her nonprofit Rio Valley Relief Project during the summer of 2018 when she was shocked by seeing migrant parents separated from their children, causing global protest. Stewart began collecting donations, clothes, powdered milk, and diapers for long drives to a respite center run by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
Sometimes, she would bring along her husband, immigration lawyer Daniel Stewart, who inspired her with stories about his work.
This night, the Rio Valley Relief Project distributed 1,000 beef tamales and 850 bean burritos as the sun set in hues of pink and orange. Cassie Stewart’s group spent hours in the Brownsville kitchen of the nonprofit Good Neighbor Settlement House, where asylum-seekers lucky enough to pass U.S. review can shower, get new clothes and move on to their next destination.
Later, a slow-moving man dressed in soiled clothes shuffled along the sidewalk to ask if there was any comida left. No, Stewart quickly said. Then, the Dallas woman took note of his brown eyes, his small, thin frame. She told him to wait.
Stewart grabbed the last canister of cashews and almonds and poured a mound on a white paper plate with some dried mangoes.
The man took the plate and disappeared into the indigo night.
