Migrants still clinging to hope
Many who arrived in 2018 caravans wait in limbo in Tijuana, while others build fragile lives in the U.S.
Many who arrived in 2018 caravans wait in Tijuana, while others build lives in U.S.
TIJUANA — The images and stories captivated the world’s attention.
An exhausted 4-year-old fell to the ground crying, her legs unable to carry her another step.
Thousands of Central Americans, many fleeing gang violence in Honduras, gathered at the base of a tall yellow fence at the border with Mexico in Tecun Uman, Guatemala, ready to break it down.
The crowd stretched down the road as far as the eye could see.
A year later, some of those iconic images and stories cannot be forgotten, even as the people in the caravan that arrived in Tijuana on Nov. 19, 2018, have scattered: some building tentative and fragile lives in the United States; some back in Honduras; some working and living in Tijuana; still hoping for their chance at the American Dream.
“I still have faith I will get a chance to make a life,” said David Enamorado, a 22year-old from Honduras who arrived in Tijuana last November. Working 12 hours a night in a nearby factory for the last year, Enamorado said he is waiting for his turn to make an initial U.S. asylum claim.
He did not put his name on Tijuana’s long waiting list to approach U.S. border officials when he first arrived. “I was hoping to find a sponsor first in the United States because none of my family [there] will help me,” he said.
Enamorado said a man pulled a knife on him in Honduras, put it to his throat and threatened to kill him for being gay.
Enamorado said he is still hoping to find a sponsor — someone who will assure the U.S. government he will continue appearing at his asylum hearings and support him financially as his case proceeds through court.
The notoriety of the caravans that arrived in this region in recent years was fueled partly by President Trump, who tweeted regularly about them as they made their way north through Mexico.
Trump labeled the people in the caravans “invaders,” and deployed troops to the border, foreshadowing a confrontation that brewed for weeks before U.S. border agents used tear gas on asylum seekers in Tijuana the day after Thanksgiving.
The Trump administration made sweeping changes to the U.S. asylum system in response to the caravans. Many of those initiatives are still being challenged in court. Mexico has also changed its approach to immigration as a result.
It recently used its National Guard to stop a caravan of about 2,000 people, mostly from Africa, from traveling northward.
“Already, there are so many op-eds being written in Mexico and commentaries on television that Mexico has essentially become the wall for the United States,” Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, told Bloomberg News in June. “Rather than following through on Donald Trump’s promise to make Mexico pay for the wall, Mexico is the wall for the United States and it will essentially stop migrants from coming up through the country.”
The caravan’s far-reaching effects could hardly have been predicted when the Central Americans started their journey.
On Oct. 13, 2018, the original group of about 1,000 set out from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, “with nothing more than a suitcase full of dreams,” reported the Spanish-language newspaper El Heraldo.
Thousands joined the caravan as it moved northward. Many said leaving their home was a matter of life or death.
“I’m not going to leave this world for lack of struggling. I’m going to fight for my life,” a migrant from Guatemala recently told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Others wanted to bring the world’s attention to the violence and oppression they faced in the Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Some wanted to highlight the oppression migrants face from other countries when they flee for their lives, a goal experts say they largely achieved.
“There are sick children here, and we are cold and hungry,” Carlos Lopez said last year. Lopez, a Honduran, led a group to the El Chaparral border crossing on Thanksgiving Day 2018.
At the time, he said it was inappropriate to shelter women and children outside in the muddy, makeshift Benito Juarez shelter in Tijuana.
“The whole world is watching what is happening here,” he said.
Through all the desperation and harsh conditions, some of the most unforgettable moments were ones of tenderness, community and resilience amid seemingly hopeless circumstances.
There was the barber who set up shop in El Barretal, a vacant event space on the outskirts of Tijuana that was turned into a shelter. There was the white flag signaling peace that waved in front of the caravan’s marches to the line at the El Chaparral border crossing.
Couples fell in love, and people from the LGBTQ community said they found acceptance for the first time in their lives.
Last week, groups of Central American migrant children, some as young as 3, organized themselves into temporary classrooms in a Tijuana shelter.
They sat in a circle Thursday, teaching each other what they remembered of mathematics, in the absence of any formal system for schooling.
Yenni Lopez, a 32-yearold migrant from Honduras, came north with the caravan that arrived in Playas de Tijuana in October 2018, just before the larger group arrived.
It was a trip she had made several times before.
Lopez is now the director of the Tu Casa shelter in Tijuana.
Before last year’s caravan, she said she had made the more than 4,000-mile trek to Tijuana from San Pedro Sula three times, starting when she was 14.
Each time she was deported from the United States for entering illegally, she would immediately leave Honduras and make her way back to the U.S.-Mexico border, she said.
As a lesbian woman and now an outspoken advocate for migrants, she fears she will be killed at home, she said. Knowing the journey well, Lopez said she helped members of the 2018 caravan make it to the U.S. border.
“I would give them encouragement and say ‘Come on! You only have a little more to go,’ ” she said.
During an earlier trip, she became best friends with a transgender woman named Roxsana.
“We were like sisters,” Lopez said. “We would share the same plate of food. We were so close.”
Recently, Lopez flipped through pictures on her phone of her and Roxsana and others who bonded as they made their journey to Tijuana. Roxsana died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May 2018 from complications associated with HIV.
Lopez said the fate of her friend drives her to keep fighting for people to understand the plight of migrants around the world.
Alfonso Guerrero Ulloa is a Honduran migrant who caused an uproar last year by going to the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana and delivering a letter suggesting the U.S. should pay $50,000 to each person to return home.
He said he is still in south Mexico, awaiting a response from the U.S.
“The only answer I got out of that letter was them arresting me and holding me prisoner,” Guerrero said recently. “That was the only answer I had from that letter,”
Guerrero said some important issues in his letter haven’t been answered, such as the United States’ role in the humanitarian crisis in Honduras.
But, he said, the U.S. pledged billions of dollars in investment to develop Central America, along with Mexico, and the caravan successfully drew the attention of the U.S. media to the corruption in the Honduran government.
Pointing to the national coverage of the drug trafficking trial of Tony Hernandez, the brother of Honduras’ president, arrested in November 2018, Guerrero said he accomplished part of his goal.
But coverage of problems in migrants’ home countries did not completely change the minds of caravan critics.
Paloma Zuniga, a dual U.S. and Mexican citizen, became the face of the opposition to the migrant caravan in Tijuana, selling red “Make Tijuana Great Again,” hats.
A year later, she said her views about the migrant caravan have softened.
“It was very impactful,” she said, agreeing that the caravan caused lasting changes.
“We actually got to know a lot of the migrants. A lot of them are good people. I got to know a lot of them personally at the shelters,” said Zuniga, who said she remains in contact with a few people she met last year in Tijuana.
She said she is raising a black lab puppy that a man brought from Honduras and could no longer care for in the shelters. The dog, named TJ Chapulin, now weighs more than 100 pounds.
Zuniga conceded that her opinion about some of the migrants who arrived in Tijuana last year did change, but she still disagrees with what they were trying to do, which she described as “using Tijuana as a trampoline to get to the United States.”
“We showed the rest of Mexico we weren’t going to allow this to happen,” she said.
For migrants still waiting in Mexico or the United States, life remains in limbo, as it has for the last year.
Michel, a migrant who made it to San Diego, said he worries every day about whether he will get to keep his restaurant job and where he will live long-term, after his asylum case is resolved.
He declined to give his last name for fear that talking to a reporter would hurt his asylum chances.
“I just wake up every day and thank God I have this opportunity. God has blessed me,” he said. “I am thankful for those who have supported us along the way.”
In Tijuana, Isreal Greñaldo Silva of El Salvador is also praying. His prayers are for the life of his unborn son.
Silva and his partner, who did not want to be identified, went to a hospital in Tijuana on Thursday seeking prenatal care, but they were turned away, they said. They hope that when labor begins, someone will help them deliver the baby in a hospital or medical setting.
“My biggest hope?” Silva said. “I just want him to have the opportunity to be born and grow old.”
‘I just wake up every day and thank God I have this opportunity. God has blessed me. I am thankful for those who have supported us along the way.’ — Michel, a migrant now seeking asylum and living in San Diego