Opportunity and risk

Migrants at border face uneven luck

For many Americans, the scenes unfolding at the U.S.-Mexico border are visceral and jarring.

A 7-year old girl from Honduras walking in the darkness to keep up with strangers she met on the perilous journey from northern Mexico to Texas.

A migrant woman deported from the U.S. crying at a park across the international bridge in Mexico. A group of men standing in the shadows of the border wall after being spotted — and soonto-be deported — by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

For those crossing, particularly unaccompanied children, there are opportunities and risks.

A new U.S. president promised to dismantle his predecessor’s policies governing asylum seekers who arrive at the southern border. Exactly who the new administration is allowing into the country is unknown, but thousands of children from Central America and Mexico who arrived in recent weeks are now in U.S. custody.

Some families have been sent to relatives in the U.S. while they wait for asylum court appointments. And thousands of others have been expelled, mostly to Mexico, where they will decide whether to cross again or return home.

Migration flows at the U.S.-Mexico border are increasing for the third time in seven years under Republican and Democratic presidents.

Unlike the Trump administration, President Joe Biden has chosen not to expel immigrant children — like the unaccompanied 7-year-old girl from Honduras photographed in Texas this week by the Associated Press — who arrive at the southern border without a parent.

And new rules put in place by the Biden administration mean some families with “acute vulnerabilities” are being released to family in the U.S. and allowed to pursue asylum, while others in almost identical circumstances are not.

For migrant children and teens journeying from Mexico to the U.S., there is uncertainty, fear, hope and lots of waiting. On a recent day at a plaza near the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge point of entry into the U.S., a deported migrant boy launched a paper plane into the air while playing with other migrant children in Reynosa, Mexico.

A day earlier in Brownsville, Texas, a young child clutched a migrant woman’s arm as they waited for a humanitarian group to process them after Border Patrol agents processed and released them at a bus station.

Similar scenes play out every day in towns in Mexico and the U.S. — snapshots of the uneven luck met by immigrants arriving by the thousands at the border.

(AP/Julio Cortez) A 7-year-old migrant girl from Honduras (left) walks with Fernanda Solis, 25, (center) also of Honduras, and an unidentified man as they approach a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center to turn themselves in while seeking asylum moments after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Mission, Texas. The girl’s journey illustrates the extraordinary risks taken by parents to get their children across the border, even if it means abandoning them for the most perilous part of the trip.

(AP/Julio Cortez) A migrant woman cries as she talks on a cellphone at a park after she and a large group of deportees from the U.S. were pushed by Mexican authorities off an area they had been staying after their expulsion in Reynosa, Mexico.

(AP/Julio Cortez) Genesis Cuellar, 8, a migrant from El Salvador, sits in a waiting area to be processed by Team Brownsville, a humanitarian group, helping migrants released from U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody in Brownsville, Texas. The group will facilitate travel so Cuellar, who is traveling with her mother, Ana Icela Cuellar, can be reunited with her brother, Andy Nathanael, 4, and their father Marvin Giovani Perez Bonilla, who have been residing in Maryland after being released from custody. The Cuellar family separated in August, when they tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

(AP/Dario Lopez-Mills) A child sleeps under a gazebo at a park in Reynosa.

(AP/Dario Lopez-Mills) A father helps his daughter after they were smuggled on an inflatable raft across the Rio Grande in Roma.

(AP/Dario Lopez-Mills) Migrant families, mostly from Central American countries, walk through the brush after being smuggled across the Rio Grande river in Roma, Texas.