Another migrant surge building at the border
Arrivals come with warmer weather, easing pandemic, new president
McALLEN — A Border Patrol bus had just disgorged 60 more Central American adults and children into a pop-up COVID-19 testing lab in this border city when Emerson Mayorga pulled to the curb, straining for a glimpse of his wife and toddler son.
“I have been searching for days,” Mayorga, a commercial painter from Port Arthur, said as he considered the white tents of the testing center. “I haven’t heard anything since they crossed the river.”
Mayorga, 32, had not held his wife, Beverly Cardona, or his 21-month-old son,
Matheo, since the child was a newborn. The pandemic and the Trump administration’s immigration clampdown had made travel home to Honduras impossible.
Then COVID-19 claimed Mayorga’s beloved grandmother and mother in quick succession a few months ago. Now, with a new president in the White House, Mayorga had decided it was time to reunite with what remains of his family. So he sent for them. He admits it was hardly an original idea.
“We heard that mothers with small children were being allowed in,” said Mayorga, who has been a legal U.S. resident for a decade. “All Hondurans — everyone — want to come here.”
With the northern spring arriving, the pandemic easing and President Joe Biden
vowing to be more humane than his predecessor, migrants have begun flocking to the U.S. border by the thousands again.
While Biden administration officials struggle with their messaging — calling the latest spike a “challenge” but rejecting the term “crisis” — U.S. immigration agents continue quickly turning back the vast majority of unauthorized migrants as soon as they enter, officials say.
Still, thousands of teenagers migrating alone and adults with young children are being processed and released to relatives and other sponsors in the U.S. Crisis or not, the surge of migrants, mostly from Central America, has created what most everyone agrees is a chaotic crush.
Border Patrol agents detained 9,500 children and more than 19,000 families in February. Some 71,000 adults traveling alone — many of whom have made repeated crossings — were apprehended as well.
All told, the numbers of those detained marked a 30 percent increase from January, the final month of President Donald Trump’s administration. Experts expect the numbers to continue rising.
While nearly all the adults migrating alone are quickly sent back across the border, U.S. officials announced Thursday that some 14,000 unaccompanied minors are now in U.S. detention.
Several thousand unaccompanied children are being held at a makeshift camp in Donna, near McAllen. Officials plan to temporarily house up to 3,000 migrant boys at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas. More youths are being held at a converted oil workers camp in Midland.
Federal officials are converting large family detention camps in Dilley and Karnes County into immigrant processing centers.
“We have to do what we do regardless of what anybody calls the situation,” said Roberta Jacobson, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who is now helping coordinate border and immigration policy at the White House.
“And the fact is, we are all focused on improving the situation, on changing to a more humane and efficient system,” she said.
Floundering economies, endemic corruption, violence and gangland crime have been driving migrants north for decades from the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Experts say the flow has been swelled by the destruction caused by back-to-back hurricanes last fall and by the belief that the new U.S. administration will treat migrants more favorably.
As vice president in the Obama administration, Biden played a lead role in quashing a similar 2014 rush to the border — spurred by smuggler-fueled rumors of easily obtained U.S. residency for youths and families.
Some 68,000 unaccompanied children and a similar number of adults and children traveling as families were detained then. Most were from the Northern Triangle, and most of them crossed the border into South Texas.
That tide abated once word spread in Central America that being admitted temporarily to await a court hearing was no guarantee of U.S. residency. Mexico and the U.S. toughened border enforcement.
Trump squelched yet another surge three years ago — one marked by thousandsstrong migrant “caravans” traveling from Central America through Mexico — by further tightening already draconian immigration policies.
The Trump administration pressured Central American and Mexican leaders to stop the caravans. And it forced more than 70,000 asylum seekers to remain in Mexico or their home countries while waiting for their cases to be heard.
Last year, the administration began refusing entry to nearly all unauthorized immigrants on the grounds that they posed a risk of bringing COVID-19 into the U.S. The Biden administration so far has continued that policy, known as Title 42, and uses it to turn away most migrants.
“The border is not open,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. “And the vast majority of people are being returned under Title 42.”
The Biden administration has terminated the so-called Remain in Mexico program and is allowing entry to many of the 25,000 migrants whose asylum petitions are pending. Overwhelmed immigration courts have approved less
than 1 percent of recent asylum requests.
‘The crisis is coming’
Still, here along the final stretch of the Rio Grande, an unknown number of lucky adults traveling with infants, toddlers and preschool children are being released into the U.S. That is largely because the bordering Mexican state of Tamaulipas has refused to accept them.
The Lower Rio Grande Valley, stretching some 100 miles upriver of McAllen to the Gulf of Mexico, has long been the most transited section of the entire 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, accounting for nearly threequarters of U.S. immigration detentions.
As word spreads that some migrant families may be treated more leniently under Biden, the flow might well increase this spring. In fiscal year 2019, before the pandemic stopped almost all immigration, some 340,000 unauthorized migrants were apprehended in the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, nearly all of them from Central America.
“You can stand at a lectern and say the border is closed, but word of mouth is powerful,” said analyst Adam Isacson, who tracks immigration policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank.
Last week in Reynosa, the Mexican border city nearest McAllen, evangelical pastor Hector Silva eyed the playing children and sullenly huddled adults on the patio of the migrant shelter he founded 26 years ago on the banks of the Rio Grande.
“It’s not a crisis yet,” Silva said with a shrug. “But the crisis is coming.”
“We are receiving the impact of the hope the government of the United States has given to these people,” Silva said. “Many families are arriving, and many others are being sent back. It’s a nightmare.”
Some 175 men, women and children were sleeping and eating at the shelter — a fraction of those who have
stayed there at any one time over the past year. But now, Silva is allowing in only those who have been tested for COVID-19.
Silva used to limit stays to three days for migrants passing through, but he dropped that requirement when Trump’s policies dammed the flow into the U.S. Now, all newcomers are required to be quarantined in a separate building for two weeks. Those who have completed quarantine stay on for weeks longer.
Last week, 45 adults and children were packed into the quarantine room, sleeping on old mattresses or gym mats. Meals are served through the doorway. Those under quarantine didn’t mingle with other shelter residents even when they were allowed outside.
Some of those in quarantine had been forcibly deported from Texas. Others had only just arrived after long bus rides across Mexico, unimpeded by Mexican immigration agents or police.
The danger lurking in the migration routes through Mexico was underscored in January, when the charred bodies of 19 migrants, nearly all from Mayan communities in the Guatemalan highlands, were found in the Mexican border town of Camargo along the Rio Grande. Mexican authorities said they were victims of rivalries between smuggling gangs. Twelve Mexican state police officers were arrested in the investigation.
In June 2019, a Guatemalan mother, her toddler son and two other young children died of exposure in thick bush near McAllen. They apparently had become lost and disoriented after smugglers took them across the river in a boat.
Still, the gangs that control the Mexican banks of the river have got their business running smoothly, migrants interviewed along the Rio Grande said.
Fees vary, but smugglers currently charge about $600 a head for the quick raft ride to the U.S. side. Passengers
are given life jackets. The smugglers send cellphone photos to family members who paid for the crossing, as proof of service.
A video showing dozens of migrants lined on the Mexican bank, waiting to be ferried across, recently went viral on the internet. Customs and Border Protection officials say that so far this year, agents have encountered 19 groups of 100 or more migrants crossing into the Valley.
Once on the U.S. side, the migrants are usually on their own, advised to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents. Several migrants at the shelter in Reynosa said they had to search an hour or longer to find the Border Patrol.
“We are coming now because of the new government,” said Rudy Cruz, 25, who traveled here from his hurricane-damaged coffee farm in Honduras with his 6year-old son. “You see a child as a passport into the United States. It’s not easy, but it’s the only way.
“There is nothing in Honduras,” he said. “We’re just looking for a better future.”
Finally reunited
Who gets to stay and who is sent back across the river seems haphazard at best.
Emerson Mayorga said his cousin, along with her husband and two young children, crossed the Rio Grande on March 12 — in the same raft as Mayorga’s own wife and son. The cousin and her family were returned to Mexico three days later.
“It appears to be pure luck who gets in,” said Mayorga, who immigrated to the U.S. a decade ago and obtained a green card with sponsorship from his grandmother, a U.S. citizen. “That’s why I was so worried.”
After four days of searching for his family members, Mayorga got a call from his wife Tuesday afternoon. Beverly Cardona told him she and their son were being released in Brownsville that afternoon. They had been held in a chilly, crowded building where the food was bad and many people were sick with colds, she said.
Mayorga found them on the open-air platform of the city’s downtown bus station, amid a throng of other migrant adults and children awaiting rides to the U.S. heartland.
Parents sat on hard chairs with thousand-yard stares as their children played with coloring books and other toys distributed by a humanitarian group called Team Brownsville.
Mayorga approached his family carrying a few snacks and a toy helicopter for his son. Cardona broke into a wide grin when she noticed him. Matheo eyed Mayorga warily as they all embraced.
Mayorga guided them from the bus station to his car parked at the curb.
He was taking his family home.