Migrant camp on border is a growing health crisis
MATAMOROS, Mexico — A smoke-filled stench fills a refugee camp just a short walk from the U.S.-Mexico border, rising from ever-burning fires and piles of human waste. Parents and children live in a sea of tents and tarps, some patched together with garbage bags. Others sleep outside in temperatures that recently dropped to freezing.
Justina, an asylum-seeker who fled political persecution in Nicaragua, is struggling to keep her 8month-old daughter healthy inside the damaged tent they share. The baby, Samantha, was diagnosed with pneumonia and recently released from a hospital with a dwindling supply of antibiotics.
“I face cold, hunger and everything because I don’t have resources, and my daughter doesn’t either,” said Justina, who didn’t want her last name used out of fear for her safety.
The camp is an outgrowth of the Trump administration’s “Remain
in Mexico” policy, which has sent more than 55,000 migrants, including Justina and Samantha, south of the border to wait and pursue their asylum cases.
A humanitarian crisis is worsening each day at the camp across the border from Brownsville. As many as 2,000 immigrants are waiting for U.S. court hearings amid deteriorating medical and sanitary conditions.
Safe drinking water is scarce. People regularly line up for a halfhour to fill milk jugs and buckets with water. Some people bathe and wash their clothes in the Rio Grande, known to be contaminated with E. coli and other bacteria. They rely on donors who bring meals, or they pull fish from the river and fry them over wood fires.
The conditions show the health risks associated with the Remain in Mexico policy and how nonprofit groups are struggling to provide health care and other basic services without more support from the U.S. or Mexican governments.
Doctors Without Borders says that in three weeks in October, it did 178 consultations at the camp in Matamoros for conditions that included diarrhea, hypertension, diabetes, psychiatric conditions and asthma. More than half the patients were younger than 15.
“Speaking from having seen other humanitarian crises in the world, this is one of the worst situations that I’ve seen,” said Helen Perry, a nurse practitioner and operations director for Global Response Management, which runs a sidewalk clinic at the camp. “It is only going to get worse, and it is going to get worse rapidly.”
Officials in Matamoros and Brownsville are working with nonprofits to get flu vaccines, more medicine and new tents as winter approaches. Authorities also are watching for any signs of diseases such as measles.
The government in Tamaulipas state has tried to move migrants to a new shelter it recently opened with room for several hundred people. But migrants have largely refused to go for fear of missing their hearings.