Despair grows as immigrants press for entry

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO >> The migrants’ hopes have been drummed up by human smugglers who promise that President Joe Biden’s administration will welcome them.

Instead, the United States is expelling them back to Mexico, where they wait along with tens of thousands of others hoping to cross. The pressure, and desperation, is quickly building among families stuck in Mexico, as shelters and officials struggle to help them.

In the United States, federal authorities are scrambling to manage a sharp increase in children who are crossing the border on their own and then being held in detention facilities, often longer than permitted by law. And the twinned crises on both sides of the border show no sign of abating.

Near the crossing with El Paso, Texas, a group of mothers and fathers clutching their children were sobbing as they walked back into Mexico from the United States on Saturday. They walked

unsteadily, in sneakers too loose after their shoelaces were confiscated and discarded along with all their other personal items when they were detained by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

From his office in Ciudad Juárez, Enrique Valenzuela sprang from his chair, leaving a meeting to run to the bridge to meet the families after his daughter, Elena, 13, spotted them coming.

Valenzuela, a coordinator for the Mexican government’s migration efforts in Chihuahua state, knew that if he couldn’t get to them to offer help, organized crime networks who prey on migrants’ desperation to extort or kidnap them for ransom probably would.

The migrants — nine adults and 10 children — wiped their tears as Valenzuela drew near. The moment was one of several such scenes of despair and confusion witnessed by New York Times journalists at the border over three days.

“The border is closed,” Valenzuela said. “Come

with me, I will help.” He led the group to his office near the rusty border wall that separates El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, topped with miles of new concertina wire installed in the final weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration, officials said.

Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old Guatemalan mother of a 3-year-old girl, collapsed in a seat as Valenzuela handed out hand sanitizer.

“I did not make it,” she sobbed into the phone as she spoke with her husband, a butcher in Chicago.

“Biden promised us!” wailed another woman.

Many of the migrants said they had spent their life savings and gone into debt to pay coyotes — human smugglers — who had falsely promised them that the border was open after Biden’s election.

Still, the migrants keep coming, and many officials believe the numbers could be bigger than those seen in recent years, after the pandemic and recent natural disasters in Central America wiped away livelihoods.

Biden is now directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage the thousands

of unaccompanied migrant children who are filling up detention facilities after Biden said, shortly after taking office, that his administration would no longer turn back unaccompanied minors.

Mexican officials and shelter operators say the number of children, with parents or unaccompanied, is reaching levels not seen since 2018. Late that year, tens of thousands of migrants headed for the border each month, prompting Trump’s administration to separate families and lock them up. Hundreds of children remain separated from their parents to this day.

Biden has asked Mexico’s government for help in easing the pileup at the border. So far, Mexico’s response has mostly been to ramp up raids of smuggling rings and to begin sending migrants — most of them from Central America — back home, according to shelter operators in Mexico. The government is also trying to keep more migrants from crossing into Mexico from Central America, as it did during the Trump administration, officials said.

A Mexican Foreign Ministry official said the government was within its

right to deport unauthorized migrants but did not comment on whether raids had increased in recent weeks or whether the Mexican government was responding to a U.S. request.

At the international bridge on Saturday, Dagoberto Pineda, a Honduran migrant, looked shocked as he discreetly wiped away tears and held his 6-yearold son’s hand. He had thought he was entering the United States, but here he was in Ciudad Juárez, crying underneath a Mexican flag. He asked Valenzuela and New York Times journalists for help: Was he allowed in or not?

A massive hurricane hurtled through Pineda’s town late last year, destroying the banana plantation he worked on, owned by Chiquita Brands International. After years of paying Pineda about $12 a day to help fill American grocery stores with fresh fruit, the company laid him off. When coyotes offered him a chance to cross into the United States for $6,000 — more than his annual salary — he took it.

Pineda had crossed from Tamaulipas state into southern Texas, where he was detained by U.S. officials

for several days. When he was flown 600 miles to a second detention center in El Paso, Texas, he thought his entry into the United States had finally been granted.

Instead, on Saturday, Border Patrol agents released him on the Paso del Norte bridge, linking El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, and told him to walk in the direction of the Mexican flags.

Over the past week, Mexican officials and shelter operators like the International Organization of Migration said they had been surprised by the Department of Homeland Security’s new practice of detaining migrants at one point of the sprawling border only to fly them hundreds of miles away to be expelled at a different border town.

The United States is doing this under a federal order known as Title 42. The order, introduced by Trump but embraced by Biden, justifies rapid expulsions as a health measure amid the pandemic. But cramming migrants into airplanes and overcrowded detention facilities without any coronavirus testing defeats the purpose of Title 42, observers say.