DEL RIO, Texas — A giant camp in this small border city is shrinking fast, with local officials saying Thursday afternoon that fewer than 3,200 mostly Haitian migrants are still living and sleeping under the international bridge.
“So we’re seeing some rapid movement,” said state Rep. Eddie Morales, an Eagle Pass Democrat who represents Del Rio, via Zoom while participating in a Texas House panel’s hearing about conditions at the Texas-Mexico border.
In the morning, authorities had estimated roughly 4,000 were in the makeshift camp, where at one point almost 15,000 had been awaiting processing by federal officials after making their way across the Rio Grande in recent weeks to seek asylum.
Meanwhile, with each get-tough measure aimed at the wave of newly arrived asylum seekers by the federal government and the State of Texas, there is a backlash.
Thursday morning, the Biden administration’s special envoy to Haiti resigned, protesting “inhumane, counterproductive” expulsions of Haitian migrants back to that island-nation which has been rocked by civil strife and natural disasters. Daniel Foote had only been in his post as envoy since July, after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s president. He cited armed gangs as part of daily life there.
“Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my policy recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own,” he said. Foote’s resignation comes as the U.S. federal government placed more than 1,000 Haitians on daily flights back to Haiti.
State Department spokesman Ned Price responded by thanking Foote for his service, adding that no ideas are ignored. “Not all ideas are good ideas,” he added. “It is unfortunate that, instead of participating in a solutions-oriented policy process, Special Envoy Foote has both resigned and mischaracterized the circumstances of his resignation.”
The Biden administration also has told U.S. border officials to suspend patrols by agents on horseback in the Del Rio after images emerged last weekend showing Border Patrol agents chasing migrants in an apparent attempt to push them back into the Rio Grande.
The change, announced by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, comes days after the White House expressed horror at the images. Several agents are on administrative leave while an internal investigation is under way.
At the Austin hearing of the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee, Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez of Val Verde County, of which Del Rio is the seat, said the “vast majority” of the migrants at the bridge are from Haiti, though “some are Cuban, some are Venezuelan.”
Many of the Haitian migrants left the island nation years ago after earlier strife, including the massive 2010 earthquake that killed at least 200,000 people. Many fled then to places such as Brazil and Chile, where the coronavirus has recently led to economic suffering that prompted them to head to the U.S.
Martinez noted that many of the Haitian migrants have lived in South America long enough to learn Spanish. Martinez, the sheriff, said he sifted through documents strewn by the Rio Grande River and found evidence some of the Haitian migrants arrived in Chile as early as 2012. Others lived in recent years in southern Mexico, he said.
“Hopefully, by Saturday, there’ll be nobody left under that bridge,” Martinez said.
By Thursday, some Haitians in Del Rio, learning of the airplane expulsions, had started fleeing back into the Mexican border town of Ciudad Acuña across the Rio Grande. It was unclear how many were in that city’s hotels and an encampment there.
Morales and Martinez also said they’ve heard reports that more busloads are wending their way northward through Mexico, possibly also heading to Ciudad Acuña.
“There’s talk about more buses, but there’s also talk about the Mexican state of Coahuila doing its part and not allowing the Mexican buses to come in and unload,” Sheriff Martinez said.
Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, testified that “there’s even intelligence in terms of ... a Haitian caravan going to Reynosa,” Mexico. Reynosa is in the Rio Grande Valley, across the river from McAllen.
Texas is also still coping with other migrant surges, McCraw told the committee. “We’ve continued to see a surge in Central Americans into the Rio Grande Valley,” he said. “We’re concerned about that.”
A growing number of immigration advocacy groups, including the Haitian Bridge Alliance, have called for the end of expulsions of Haitians under a COVID-19-related public health order known as Title 42 that was issued by the Trump administration and kept in place by the Biden administration. Those groups charge that Title 42′s quick expulsions violate the due process rights of migrants, especially those seeking asylum in the U.S.
Guerline Jozef, the president of the advocacy group Haitian Bridge Alliance, said Thursday that her group supported Foote’s decision to resign in protest of the expulsion of thousands of Haitians back to Haiti. “Black asylum seekers need compassion, not an endless cycle of inhumane and careless treatment,” she said in a statement. Jozef has been in Del Rio meeting with Haitians for the past week.
The Texas NAACP demanded a cessation of the expulsions, too, and voiced support for an independent investigation into the horse-charging incidents.
Wade McMullen, a lawyer with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights nonprofit in Washington, D.C., called the camp “a black box” and said lawyers need to have access to the asylum-seekers to let them know of their rights.
“First and foremost the U.S. needs to stop the mass expulsions,” McMullen said outside a Del Rio respite center for newly arrived migrants. “The asylum-seekers are not the crisis. The militarized response is the crisis.”
Thursday, Kerry Kennedy, president of RFK Human Rights and daughter of the slain U.S. senator, arrived in Del Rio and gained access to the migrant camp, where she described conditions as “horrific.” Expulsions back to Haiti must stop, she said, noting that Haiti now has a do-not-travel warning from the State Department that matches Afghanistan.
“They need to parole Haitians into the community, pending their asylum claims, exactly like they do Afghans,” Kennedy said. “It is confusing to me why we treat Afghans one way and the Haitians another.”
A steady caravan of state troopers in black vehicles could be seen making their daily trek into Del Rio from Uvalde on rural Highway 90, where a sea of mesquite trees stretches across the horizon. Many are staying an hour away from Del Rio, where hotels are saturated with law enforcement and media. Those troopers from the DPS and the Texas National Guard are part of the huge presence ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican running for reelection, to block further mass border crossings.
The sprawling camp is marked by squalor and poor sanitary conditions with people sleeping outside on the ground, or in tents in the heat. Though it has shrunk in size, it’s still larger than a camp of migrants that sprung up in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, two years ago.
This year, the Legislature has funded nearly $3 billion of border security requests from Abbott, who has blamed the Biden administration for “promoting and allowing open border policies,” including one that led to the huge influx of Haitians and others in this small border city of 35,000. That includes $1 billion of state taxpayer money to help construct a border barrier.
In their lines of questioning in Austin, committee members remained cordial but took unmistakably partisan slants.
Arlington GOP Rep. Tony Tinderholt, who traveled to Del Rio on a DPS plane on Wednesday to inspect conditions at the bridge, commended Abbott and McCraw for sending hundreds of state police vehicles and parking them as a barrier to the inflow of migrants.
Tinderholt said he was proud of Texas National Guard soldiers and state police he saw assisting Haitian migrants on Wednesday.
But Tinderholt said he was “absolutely disgusted with the federal government and the Biden and Harris administration because I blame them for this.” He waved at Biden’s decision to discontinue Trump’s construction of a border wall.
“When I flew in, I saw a border wall laying on the ground,” he said. “It was already paid for, it could be put up, and it would force individuals that are coming across illegally to be funneled into specific areas instead of having chaos like it is.”
Responding to committee Republicans, Laredo Democratic Rep. Richard Peña Raymond said both parties have spurred illegal immigration for decades by failing to impose tough sanctions on homebuilders and other employees who hire unauthorized workers.
“I understand the political rhetoric, I get it,” Raymond said. “Politically, the governor’s being challenged from the right and all that stuff.”
As long as jobs are a magnet, and Americans consume most of the world’s illicit drugs, border problems will persist, he said.
“We have to start de-incentivizing,” he said, by making employment without papers next to impossible. Also, all elected officials and government agency chiefs should be required to be tested regularly for drug use. “We have to lead by example,” Raymond said.
In Del Rio, after being released by federal agents or otherwise making their way, many Haitian families, including pregnant women, arrive at bus stations, the small airport or the respite center run by a faith-based nonprofit, the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition.
Some at the respite center wore bulky black ankle monitors, while others carried manila envelopes with documents given to them by the Department of Homeland Security instructing them to report to a sister agency within 60 days of reaching their final destination. Many already have family in the U.S.
Gurlandine Josapha waited with her six-year-old daughter and her husband to catch a van ride north. Like many others, she had fled Haiti after the 2010 earthquake rattled the already rickety economy. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit their new South American home hard, too, and they left.
“Chile is a little complicated,” she said. “When you work without documents the money you earn isn’t enough. We pay so much for the electricity and the rent, it just doesn’t stretch far enough.”
Suddenly her little girl Layla shouted at her mother, “ya vamos” — “let’s go.” They had to catch their ride north.
Immigration reporter Dianne Solis reported from Del Rio and Austin Bureau Chief Robert T. Garrett reported from Austin. Staff writer Sami Sparber contributed to this report.
