Hundreds of migrants crossed the Rio Grande and entered El Paso after dark on Sunday (11) in a caravan of people coming mainly from Nicaragua. It was the largest mass border crossing in West Texas in years.
The mass arrival of migrants has raised eyebrows even in El Paso, which in recent months has been overwhelmed by a steady flow of migrants from Central and South America — more than 50,000 people in October alone.
Like the Venezuelan migrants who flooded the city this year, those arriving from Nicaragua cannot be summarily expelled under the terms of a pandemic-era public health policy known as Title 42, which authorities apply to migrants from other countries, such as the Mexico.
Thus, the scenes seen in El Paso offered a preview of the challenges authorities may face across the southern border after Title 42 comes to an end. Barring an intervention by the courts, that should happen next week.
Most of the migrants who arrived on Sunday turned themselves over to federal authorities for processing. They will soon join thousands of others who have crossed over in recent days, many of whom have been released to seek assistance and food. Some gathered at the central bus station. At night, when the temperature dropped to almost zero degrees, they lay down to sleep on cardboard sheets.
“I’m going to Nashville,” said Gabriel Moreno, 21. He left a poorly paid job at a textile factory in Nicaragua, was mugged while crossing Mexico and, on Monday, was one of the migrants gathered at the El Paso bus station looking for ways to continue their journey in the United States.
Due to the fraying of its diplomatic relations with the authoritarian Nicaraguan regime, the US has limited chances to expel Nicaraguans under the terms of the public health measure and cannot repatriate the country’s citizens. And Mexico has so far not agreed to accept Nicaraguans if they are expelled from the United States.
As a result, most detained Nicaraguans are either released on short-term probation, fitted with a tracking device, or else provisionally detained by the immigration agency (ICE), where they are usually released after a few days. Later, they will all be summoned to an immigration court to receive deportation orders.
Huge numbers of people arrived in El Paso over the weekend — about 2,000 a day, according to officials. The group of between 800 and 1,000 people that made the crossing on Sunday night appears to have been the largest.
Blake Barrow, director of the El Paso Rescue Mission, said his shelter is overcrowded with the influx of migrants. “The number of people arriving is like nothing I’ve seen in the last 25 years.”
As late as August, he said, nearly all the people receiving assistance at the shelter were homeless US citizens. “Today, homeless Americans make up about 30% of the people we help,” said Barrow. “The whole dynamic has changed with the large number of people arriving from countries like Nicaragua.”
He said he’s putting people to sleep anywhere he can find them. “Frankly, I don’t know how to solve this problem,” he said. “We are totally overwhelmed.”
The number of migrants has far outstripped the large caravan that arrived on Sunday and does not appear to be decreasing. Rosalio Sosa, who runs a network of shelters, including in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, said there were still migrants crossing the border as of Monday afternoon. A queue had formed on the other side of the river, with the most recent arrivals waiting to be processed by the American authorities.
“The queue is endless,” he said.
It was the second time in recent months that the arrival of large numbers of migrants at once threatened to strain the resources of the border city and federal immigration authorities, already under pressure from the steady flow of migrants this year. More than 5,000 migrants were at the Border Patrol’s central processing facility on Monday, according to officials in El Passo.
“We are overwhelmed,” said state senator César J. Blanco, who represents the area and has called for humanitarian aid from the state and federal governments. According to him, El Paso has become the point of entry for desperate migrants, as was Ellis Island. “Like it or not, that’s the reality.”
On Monday migrants, mainly Nicaraguans, were seen clustered on city corners or waiting in front of the bus station.
“I have five people staying with me now at my house and I let another three sleep in my truck,” said Almaraz Saucedo Isidro, who lives in one of the apartments opposite the bus station. “It’s cold. They don’t have food or warm clothes. They were just dumped here.”
The number of people crossing from Mexico has increased sharply in the El Paso region in recent months. In October, the most recent month for which data is available, 53,000 encounters were recorded by border agents in the area. That’s more than anywhere else along the US-Mexico border. In the last 12 months, federal agents recorded a record number of encounters along the entire southern border: nearly 2.4 million.
Images of migrants in large numbers crossing shallow sections of the Rio Grande on foot in El Paso recalled earlier moments of crisis on the southern border, most recently in the small town of Del Rio, Texas, where last year more than 9,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, they squeezed in conditions of absolute precariousness in a temporary camp under a bridge over the river.
Nearly 7,000 migrants were released from federal immigration custody last week in El Paso — a weekly total that surpassed even the numbers seen during the big wave of arrivals of Venezuelans this year. Most of those released into El Paso eventually leave the city, but before that they often seek food, shelter and assistance.
John Martin, deputy director of the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in El Paso, said he was informed on Monday that another 2,500 migrants would be released this week. The center, which works primarily with the homeless local population, operates several shelters, most of which are already overcrowded, according to Martin.
The scenes –of large groups crossing the river at night, of migrants sleeping on the city streets— offered a potential glimpse of the situation that the authorities are preparing to face, possibly as early as next week, when the health policy expires. 42.
Adopted by the Trump administration and continued under the Joe Biden administration thanks to a court order, the policy has allowed US authorities to summarily expel migrants to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The group that arrived on Saturday included migrants from several Central and South American countries, as well as Haiti, who had been granted temporary legal status in Mexico that allowed them to move freely in that country for 180 days, said Santiago González Reyes, director of human rights offices in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.
According to Marcos Chavez Torres, mayor of Jiménez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, some of the migrants were part of a large group that was kidnapped along the way and extorted until Mexican authorities managed to secure their release.
On Sunday afternoon, González said, the government of Chihuahua sent a caravan of 1,100 migrants by bus to Juárez. The 19 buses were paid for by the Mexican government, he said, which argued that the migrants would have walked north anyway and arranged for a police escort to ensure their safety.
The group didn’t stay long in Juárez. Around 4 pm the migrants decided to cross the border en masse, he said. Hundreds of others joined them. “They left on foot and crossed the river,” said González.
The processing center in El Paso is currently running over capacity, something border authorities have managed to control on previous occasions.
Felix Acuna, 41, arrived at the border on Sunday from Nicaragua after a 25-day journey. He spent seven hours held by federal authorities before being released and was told to call in two weeks to find out when he is due to appear in court. Acuna said he was trying to get in touch with his family in Miami and get a bus ticket there.
“It’s very difficult in Nicaragua at the moment – there’s no work,” he said. “I came here looking for work, because I have four daughters at home.”
Until recently, the city of El Paso paid for bus fares for migrants heading north and east. In September, the number of migrants crossing the city reached 2,000 on some days, most of them Venezuelans.
Local officials suspended the shuttle program — which had evacuated nearly 14,000 people from the city, of which 10,000 went to New York — in October, when the Biden administration changed its policy and began enforcing the Title 42 health order to large numbers of Venezuelans arriving at the border, most of whom previously could stay and await the processing of their asylum applications.
In downtown El Paso on Monday, some of the migrants gathered near the bus station ventured out into the surrounding area.
Carmen Tercero, 37, was sitting on a bench next to her two daughters, aged 8 and 17. After leaving Nicaragua and crossing into Mexico, they crossed the border last week and were released from a processing center on Monday morning.
“All I want is a better life for my daughters,” said Tercero, who worked at a beauty salon in Managua. As they waited for a bus to Houston, where her sister lives, she continued, “I’ll cross the border another hundred times if I have to to help them.”
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