CIUDAD JUÁREZ — As the clock ran out, Texas National Guard members stood by freshly installed concertina wire near the U.S.-Mexico border, blocking access to migrants waiting in the dry riverbed.
Drones hovered overhead. Unmarked SUVs drove by. Hundreds of migrants waited for hours to turn themselves in to border agents. Near a makeshift camp along the Rio Grande, a few dozen migrants pleaded with U.S. immigration authorities.
“You’re not coming in,” said one border agent.
It was a watershed moment that left thousands of migrants facing an uncertain future following Thursday night’s expiration of Title 42, the pandemic-era policy used to swiftly expel hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. in the past three years.
Near the Rio Grande, Deivis Jose Melendez, a migrant who crossed but was deported back to Ciudad Juárez, watched the scene unfold. “This doesn’t look like the country I dreamed about,” he said. “This looks like a scared nation.”
Migrants in northern Mexico faced more uncertainties about a new online system for appointments to seek asylum in the U.S. Some migrants still waded apprehensively into the Rio Grande, defying officials who shouted for them to turn back, while elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border people hunched over cell phones trying to access an appointment app that may change their future.
President Joe Biden’s administration introduced the new asylum rules in a bid to get asylum-seekers to stop coming across the border illegally by reviving and sharpening pre-pandemic penalties and creating new legal pathways to asylum that aim to cut out unscrupulous smugglers.
A federal judge in Florida dealt a potentially serious legal setback to the plan by temporarily blocking the administration’s attempt to release migrants more quickly when Border Patrol holding stations are full.
In the same vein, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton late Friday filed a motion in federal court for a temporary restraining order on the Biden administration policy that would allow migrants to be paroled into the U.S. without court dates.
“There are no words that can fully describe the unmitigated catastrophe that Joe Biden has created on our southern border,” Paxton said in a statement. The emergency order filed by Paxton aims to stop the administration from enforcing the new policy that the attorney general said undermines border security.
‘Two years of preparation’
Authorities did not see a substantial influx of migrants overnight, said Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, at a Friday briefing.
“The transition overnight is the result of nearly two years of preparation,” he said.
This week, the daily rate of migrants taken into custody hit 10,000, according to U.S. authorities. That’s double the average daily encounters of March. Border Patrol held nearly 29,000 migrants in its custody Wednesday, with more than 6,000 of those in El Paso, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
“While we continue to manage high levels of encounters, we are focused on ensuring the safety and security of our personnel, noncitizens and our communities,” Nuñez-Neto said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to add thousands of beds in its detention centers in the coming days, he said. ICE will also stop COVID testing people in its custody at intake, transfer or release.
Entering the waters
At Matamoros, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, migrant families — with some parents holding children — hesitated only briefly as the deadline passed before entering the waters of the Rio Grande, clutching cell phones above the water to light the way toward the U.S.
U.S. authorities shouted for the migrants to turn back.
“Be careful with the children,” an official shouted through a megaphone. “It is especially dangerous for the children.”
Separately, at an outdoor encampment of migrants beside a border bridge in Ciudad Juárez, cell phones were alight as migrants attempted to book an asylum appointment online through an app administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“There’s no other way to get in,” said Venezuelan Carolina Ortiz, accompanied by her husband and children, ages 1 and 4. Others in the camp had the same plan: keep trying the app.
While Title 42 prevented many from seeking asylum, it carried no legal consequences, encouraging repeat attempts. After Thursday, migrants face being barred from entering the U.S. for five years and possible criminal prosecution.
Sleeping on the ground
At the U.S. border with Tijuana, there was no visible reaction among hundreds of migrants who were in U.S. custody between two border walls, many of them for days with little food. They slept on the ground under bright lights in cool spring air. Shelters across Tijuana were filled with an estimated 6,000 migrants.
It was not clear how many migrants were on the move or how long the surge might last. By Thursday evening, the flow seemed to be slowing in some locations, but it was not clear why, or whether crossings would increase again.
“Our buses are full. Our planes are full,” said Pedro Cardenas, a city commissioner in Brownsville, as recent arrivals headed to locations across the U.S.
The administration hopes that a new system will be more orderly, and will help some migrants to seek asylum in Canada or Spain instead of the U.S. But Biden has conceded the border will be chaotic for a while. Immigrant advocacy groups have threatened legal action, and migrants fleeing poverty, gangs and persecution in their homelands are still desperate to reach U.S. soil at any cost. Holding facilities along the border already were far beyond capacity.
Legal action
Late Thursday in Florida, U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell halted the administration’s plan to begin releasing migrants with notices to report to an immigration office in 60 days when holding centers reach 125% capacity, or when people are held an average of 60 hours. The quick releases were also to be triggered when authorities stop 7,000 migrants along the border in a day.
In a statement, Customs and Border Protection said it would comply with the court order, while calling it a “harmful ruling that will result in unsafe overcrowding ... and undercut our ability to efficiently process and remove migrants.”
Weatherell blocked the releases for two weeks and scheduled a May 19 hearing on whether to extend his order.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had already warned of more crowded Border Patrol facilities to come. “I cannot overstate the strain on our personnel and our facilities,” he told reporters Thursday.
On Wednesday, Homeland Security announced a rule to make it extremely difficult for anyone who travels through another country or who did not apply online to qualify for asylum, with few exceptions. It also introduced curfews with GPS tracking for families released in the U.S. before initial asylum screenings.
Minutes before the new rule took effect, advocacy groups sued to block it.
The ACLU and its partners sued the administration over what advocates are calling a new asylum ban, mimicking Trump-era policies. Katrina Eiland, managing attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the new measure violates U.S. asylum laws and places vulnerable asylum-seekers in danger.
“We’ve been down this road before with Trump,” Eiland said. “The asylum bans were cruel and illegal then, and nothing has changed now.”
The filing argues that U.S. legal code does not allow the administration to restrict access to asylum based on a migrant’s manner of entry, or whether they’ve applied for asylum elsewhere. The case also cites the recent adoption of requiring migrants to use CBP One, the app known for its issues and barriers for asylum-seekers looking to schedule one of less than 800 daily appointments.
The U.S. asylum system was designed to protect people fleeing imminent danger who often do not have the luxury of waiting for an elusive appointment, said Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, an ACLU partner.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, alleges the Biden administration “doubled down” on a policy proposed by former President Donald Trump that the same court rejected. The Biden administration has said its new rule is substantially different.
The administration also said it is beefing up the removal of migrants found unqualified to stay in the U.S. on flights like those that sent nearly 400 migrants home to Guatemala from the U.S. on Thursday.
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, joined other leading nonprofit groups in criticizing the administration’s new rule. The asylum measure strikes human rights leaders as antithetical to the progressive immigration campaign Biden ran on.
“Not long ago, Biden promised to preserve America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and uphold their legal right to seek asylum,” Matos said at a news conference in Brownsville. “Well, he has done exactly the opposite with this asylum ban.”
Making the trek
Sheidi Mazariegos, 26, arrived with her 4-year-old son just eight days after being detained near Brownsville.
“I heard on the news that there was an opportunity to enter, I heard it on the radio, but it was all a lie,” she said. Smugglers got her to Matamoros and put the two on a raft. They were quickly apprehended by Border Patrol agents.
Mazariegos said she made the trek because she is poor and hoped to reunite with her sisters living in the U.S.
Near El Paso, in Sunland Park, N.M., three young men who called themselves smugglers were at work Friday. One 17-year-old smuggler, who would only identify himself as Saul, said two Central American families were trying to cross into the U.S. near the intersection of New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Over the past 24 hours, the smugglers have been contacted by more families that want to evade authorities and get to their destination in the U.S., he said.
At shelters in northern Mexico, many migrants chose not to rush to the border and waited for existing asylum appointments or hopes of reserving one online.
At the Ágape Misión Mundial shelter in Tijuana, hundreds of migrants bided their time. Daisy Bucia, 37, and her 15-year-old daughter arrived at the shelter more than three months ago from Mexico’s Michoacán state fleeing death threats, and have an asylum appointment Saturday in California.
Bucia read on social media that pandemic-era restrictions were ending at the U.S.-Mexico border, but wasn’t sure if it was true and preferred to cross with certainty later.
“What people want more than anything is to confuse you,” Bucia said.
Alfredo Corchado reported from Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and Arcelia Martin reported from Dallas. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
