Asylum-seekers stuck in Mexico camps fear they will be forgotten
The small body of Rodrigo Castro was found on the bank of the Rio Grande, a short distance from the migrant camp in Matamoros. He was a leader among the Guatemalans seeking asylum. His memorial service was captured in many photos by those who admired him.
Days later, another body floated along the river. By the time the dead man was pulled out from his murky green grave, he had no identification. Camera phones cast their lens like voyeurs. But the video also broadcast the fact that asylum-seekers at the river bank wouldn’t be forgotten.
Hundreds of asylum-seekers are still holding on in a tent camp across the river from Brownsville. Poor health conditions and the threat of kidnappings and violence are with them always. They remain dispossessed of nearly everything but hope.
“All the fear just amplifies,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, the nun who runs Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley and regularly visits the camp. “Their only hope was to be in the United States.”
The U.S. asylum system was already nearly choked of oxygen from a series of restrictions handed down by the Trump administration. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing more chaos and disrupting court processes. As many as a thousand people are living in the miserable, muddy camp along the banks of the river in Mexico, awaiting their chance at asylum in the U.S. Thousands more are living marginal lives in the urban neighborhoods of Matamoros.
Things have worsened in recent months, but many in the U.S. and Mexico are still finding ways to help the migrants
through donations of money, food and supplies.
About $100,000 in groceries, stove wood and supplies still flows monthly to Matamoros from Team Brownsville, one of the area’s biggest aid groups. The Florida-based medical nonprofit Global Response Management operates a day clinic at the camp, providing care and largely successfully combatting COVID-19. North Texas residents still organize drives for tent and hygiene supplies. Other North Texas professionals work on video assessments of mental health that will bolster asylum petitions.
But anxiety runs rampant among the immigrant families stuck in Mexico while legally seeking refuge in the U.S.
“They have been there for over a year and they are desperate,” Pimentel said. Asylum and immigration policies must change so that the U.S. faces migration “in a more humane way. We were a country that represents to the world the best values and we’re failing these people, totally, 100 percent.”
Newly arriving migrants find it hard to get housing because they’re often blocked by Mexican authorities, who have put fencing around the dirt camp of tents, Pimentel said. As many as 4,000 migrants have found housing throughout Matamoros, she said.
The veteran camp dwellers now fly their country flags of Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador and Venezuela at one site in a splash of blue, red white and yellow color. That doesn’t make a Honduran there named Rolando feel any better.
A big fear is that the asylumdwellers will be forgotten, he said. He didn’t want his full name known because of organized gangs that prey on the immigrants.
“We can’t put up with this place any longer,” Rolando said. “We haven’t had a tranquil night since we got here. We are waiting for a miracle here.”
Few COVID-19 cases
Remarkably, as COVID-19 has rampaged around the globe, there have been only five cases of migrants who have tested positive at the camp. Global Response Management, operating from a big gray trailer bearing its red logo in the middle of the camp, now has a second clinic just outside the camp. Medical volunteers moved early in February to stem COVID-19 outbreaks with a prevention campaign that included masks, handwashing stations and vitamin distribution. They even put in a mobile field hospital .
“We were expecting devastating results,” said Andrea Leiner, a nurse practitioner with Global Response. It hasn’t happened.
The muted impact is probably due to the vitamin boost, outdoor living conditions, UV light, maskwearing and early isolation when people appear to be ill, Leiner said.
“The severity of illness is very low,” she said. “We only had one person who needed oxygen support.”
The big contagion now is anxiety. That’s caused by the continuous crushing of asylum processes by the Trump administration, the pandemic, Hurricane Hanna, flooding, rodents and growing crime from the cartels of Northern Mexico, aid workers said.
Team Brownsville assists with apartment rent for a handful of the thousands who have found shelter in the city, said Andrea Rudnik, a retired teacher and co-founder of the group. They also purchase groceries, bottled water and other items for camp residents.
The camp swelled to about 2,500 people before the pandemic was officially declared. Now, its population is 650 to 1,000.
An infestation of rats, snakes and mosquitoes came in early August when storms from Hurricane Hanna caused river waters to rise and flood into portions of the camp, she said.
“The biggest challenge is knowing how to proceed from here,” Rudnik said.
Camp residents are grateful for the fresh tents that replace those that are tattered and the groceries they need to cook their own food, but their sights are set beyond the camp, past the Gateway International Bridge — on Texas.
And Dallas-area groups like the nonprofit Rio Valley Relief Project continue to collect donations, or meet special needs like sending shower curtains for the bathing area of the camp. When Cassie Stewart of the project is challenged to help those in the U.S., she just tells them: Need is need. “We are all deserving of life and all that has to offer,” Stewart said.
But Rudnik always pauses when she’s told this: “What we really need are lawyers that will help us cross.”
End of ‘catch and release’
The camp sprouted after the 2019 rollout of the Migrant Protection Protocols by the Trump administration. The program would end what a Trump administration official derided as “catch and release” for those seeking asylum because of persecution in their homelands.
Under the policy, first enacted in January 2019 along the MexicoCalifornia border, most newly arriving asylum seekers could no longer await their court dates in the U.S. By the summer of last year, the program was in place in Matamoros and the camp grew to accommodate people waiting to be summoned by U.S. authorities for hearings at new tent courts in Brownsville.
Of 15,600 asylum cases handled at the Brownsville bridge courts, only 128 have been granted asylum or some sort of legal relief, according to the Syracuse University research center called Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Many thousands of cases are on appeal.