When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas sent busloads of migrants to New York City and Washington, D.C., it was widely scorned as a political stunt, a simple Republican rebuke of Democratic hypocrisy. |
But Megan K. Stack noticed that without grandstanding and little attention, “the Democratic-leaning, immigrant-rich, majority-Latino city of El Paso” had been sending buses full of migrants to New York, Chicago and Miami “in waves that have dwarfed the trickle of buses dispatched by the governor.” |
The city had tried to take care of the thousands of Venezuelan migrants who had been streaming over the Rio Grande in a desperate bid for asylum while a quirk of international relations let them enter the United States. |
“You can disagree politically and say they don’t have the right to be here,” Peter Svarzbein, an El Paso City Council member, told Stack. “But we see them here, and we feel an obligation to do something.” |
But the city was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. Soon after welcoming them, El Paso officials and aid groups helped them move on. |
Stack worked along the border early in her career as a reporter, first at The El Paso Times and later as the lone correspondent in the now-defunct Rio Grande Valley bureau of The Associated Press. She came away with a deep affection for El Paso and its people. Reading about the historic influx of asylum seekers and the resulting busing program, she wanted to see for herself what the city was going through and how the border had — and had not — changed. |
In a guest essay this week, Stack describes how she met a family of Venezuelans as they climbed the banks of the river, followed them to a Border Patrol control center and saw how they and their fellow asylum seekers were shuffled from detention to care centers and onto buses north. She found a city that was doing its best, but that wasn’t enough. |
“If people don’t have places to go, what are we supposed to do?” asked Kari Lenander, executive director of Border Servant Corps. “I think everyone is circling that question.” The buses, she said, aren’t so political as much as “what must be done.” |
Read the full essay here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/opinion/el-paso-migrant-buses-republicans.html
El Paso Shows Migrant Buses Aren’t Just for Republican Politicians A barrier along the Rio Grande near the Paso Del Norte bridge into El Paso. Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times EL
PASO — The Rio Grande ran thin through downtown, slimy and clay-colored
from recent rains, coursing along concrete banks and through tangles of
wildflowers, a liquid boundary marking the end — or, if you like, the
beginning — of the United States. The river was easy to wade across,
even for 9-year-old Margelis Polo Negrette, who crossed over from Mexico
with her parents, clambered up a sandy rise and headed straight for the
uniformed Border Patrol agents. The
mother and daughter had worn skirts and tied their hair back for their
arrival. Placid as churchgoers, the family of three advanced with steady
steps into the United States. Tejano accordions drifted over the water
from somewhere, and the early October sky was bruised with gathering
rain. The immigration was as simple and incongruous as a dream. The
family was Venezuelan, and so they would be allowed to stay. There
wasn’t anywhere else for them to go: Mexico had banned Venezuelans from
returning and, with U.S.-Venezuelan relations gone cold, there was no
simple way to deport them. The parents were schoolteachers; they had
fled Venezuela, they said, after a politically active family member was
jailed and tortured. Agents didn’t ask them about any of that, though.
Not yet. They were Venezuelan; that was enough. ImageMargelis
Polo Negrette, 9, getting a hand from a Customs and Border Protection
officer after she and her parents, Marielith Negrette and Eduardo Polo
Diaz, crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso in early October, a few days
before a policy change that would have barred them from the country. Margelis
Polo Negrette, 9, getting a hand from a Customs and Border Protection
officer after she and her parents, Marielith Negrette and Eduardo Polo
Diaz, crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso in early October, a few days
before a policy change that would have barred them from the country.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesMargelis
Polo Negrette, 9, getting a hand from a Customs and Border Protection
officer after she and her parents, Marielith Negrette and Eduardo Polo
Diaz, crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso in early October, a few days
before a policy change that would have barred them from the country. The
mother, Marielith Negrette, told me it was her birthday. She was now
29. She smiled at the auspiciousness of this timing: New year, new land.
Yes, it had been hard for the child to endure the harsh journey. “But
she did well,” said her husband, Eduardo Polo Diaz, pulling his daughter
close. “Really, you wouldn’t believe it.” Everything
had to happen fast. More people, more families, were already climbing
up behind, and more behind them, and on and on in a bone-weary human
train stretching all 3,000 miles to Venezuela. Another family emerged
from the riverbank. Next, three men and a woman. The people kept coming. Hopeful
and exhausted, they were all headed for a processing center beneath an
overpass in downtown El Paso. There, amid trailers, tarps, generators
and cheap, portable furniture, the Border Patrol received the crush of
asylum seekers pouring into the city. ImageA
federal processing center for asylum seekers that was set up recently
under an El Paso overpass to deal with the flood of migrants, mostly
from Cuba and Venezuela, turning themselves in to border officers. A
federal processing center for asylum seekers that was set up recently
under an El Paso overpass to deal with the flood of migrants, mostly
from Cuba and Venezuela, turning themselves in to border officers.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesA
federal processing center for asylum seekers that was set up recently
under an El Paso overpass to deal with the flood of migrants, mostly
from Cuba and Venezuela, turning themselves in to border officers. Cargo
trucks groaned above like distant thunder. A length of wall built
during the Obama administration stood disconnected from the section of
wall built during the Trump administration, so disjointed and
insufficient it was hard to discern how they could be part of a coherent
project. Across the river lay Mexico, which never did pay for that
wall, with its warehouses and convenience stores, so close you almost
feel you could land a flying leap over the divide. Eduardo
Polo accepted the clear plastic evidence bag from agents who instructed
him to seal the family’s documents, money and phones inside. Even
shoelaces had to be yanked out, for the family was now in federal
custody; they would be held incommunicado for a few days. The girl’s
pink plastic bracelet was dropped into a dumpster. Off
they went to show their identity documents; to have their faces and
eyes scanned; to press their fingerprints onto a sensor. Assuming no
criminal background or warrants, they’d be locked up for a few days in
an overcrowded facility for more checks. Then they would almost
certainly be set free in El Paso. And, from there, they would probably
end up on a chartered bus headed out of town. They didn’t know it yet, but they’d come just in time. ImageA migrant waiting to have his eyes scanned for identification purposes at the federal outdoor processing center. A migrant waiting to have his eyes scanned for identification purposes at the federal outdoor processing center.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesA migrant waiting to have his eyes scanned for identification purposes at the federal outdoor processing center. Since
last spring, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas dispatched the first group
of migrants to the District of Columbia as a theatrical rebuke to the
Biden administration, migrant buses have become a potent and toxic
symbol of our political dysfunction. Vivid proof, depending upon whom
you ask, of Republican ruthlessness or Democratic hypocrisy. But
quietly — without fanfare or grandstanding, political punchline or
taunt — the Democratic-leaning, immigrant-rich, majority-Latino city of
El Paso has been sending daily fleets of buses to New York, Chicago and,
at times, Miami, transferring asylum seekers over state lines in waves
that have dwarfed the trickle of buses dispatched by the governor. (At
this writing, El Paso has sent more than 280 buses; Mr. Abbott more than
65.) El Paso officials I spoke with
do not want to be confused or even associated with Mr. Abbott’s busing
antics, which are broadly regarded here as dehumanizing. The El Paso
buses, they say, are a pragmatic, even compassionate, initiative from a
city that simply doesn’t have the manpower or money to otherwise cope
with the arrival en masse of asylum seekers. El Paso is one of the
poorest major cities in the United States, officials point out, and they
are doing the best they can. From
one bus to another: a white Department of Homeland Security bus,
foreground, that just dropped off a load of asylum seekers at El Paso’s
migrant center, and buses rented by the city to carry migrants to
destinations elsewhere.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times From
one bus to another: a white Department of Homeland Security bus,
foreground, that just dropped off a load of asylum seekers at El Paso’s
migrant center, and buses rented by the city to carry migrants to
destinations elsewhere. “Letting
people get released out in the streets is not acceptable, not as an
elected official and not as a fellow human being,” said Peter Svarzbein,
an El Paso City Council member. “You can disagree politically and say
they don’t have the right to be here, but we see them here, and we feel
an obligation to do something.” This
isn’t even the first time migrants have been bused out of El Paso,
although previous charters were arranged by local nonprofits. At various
times during the Trump years, buses from El Paso carried groups of
asylum seekers to Denver, Albuquerque and Dallas. Those buses were
neither intended nor advertised as a political statement, though, so the
rest of the country took little notice. But
as bus after bus crossed the country recently, outrage began to erupt
on the other end of the journey. Just hours after 9-year-old Margelis
Polo Negrette and her parents crossed the river, New York City declared a state of emergency,
citing logistical problems created by the influx of asylum seekers.
Mayor Eric Adams singled out El Paso, imploring it to stop sending
buses. His request was met here with a
collective shrug. It’s fruitless to lecture El Paso about the hardship
of receiving buses: The Department of Homeland Security has been busing
hundreds upon hundreds of people into the care of the city government
every day. And while this detail often gets lost in the bitter bickering
over immigration — Governor Abbott persists in referring to the
passengers as “illegal immigrants” — the people in question are in the
United States legally as they wait for their day in immigration court. ImageMigrants awaiting buses headed to Chicago, Miami and New York City at El Paso’s migrant center. Migrants awaiting buses headed to Chicago, Miami and New York City at El Paso’s migrant center.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesMigrants awaiting buses headed to Chicago, Miami and New York City at El Paso’s migrant center. “What
places like Washington and New York are frustrated about, we’re also
frustrated about,” Mr. Svarzbein said. “We’re missing a larger strategic
response.” Somewhere in this chain of
disconnects — in the fact that El Paso couldn’t find common cause with
either New York or the governor in Austin, and that everyone blamed the
federal government — lies a longstanding, albeit unpopular, truth of
border policy: With the exception of Donald Trump’s most abhorrent
anti-immigrant tactics (family separation, the Muslim ban, “remain in
Mexico”), it would be hard to figure out which party was in power by
studying the border. Political factions tell different stories about
what they’re doing, but the reality along the southern frontier doesn’t
change as much as you might imagine. The ranks of the Border Patrol more than doubled under Bill Clinton. Barack Obama built the “cages” that held children separated from their parents. And
this fall’s crush of crossings led the Biden administration to seize,
just last week, upon Mr. Trump’s heavily criticized pandemic expulsion
order, known as Title 42, to keep Venezuelans out. The Polo-Negrette
family, as it turned out, had waded across the Rio Grande on one of the
last days it was still possible. The same Border Patrol agents who took
the girl and her parents into custody and set them on the path to
immigration court would, a few days later, start expelling their
desperate compatriots back into Mexico. By that time the family had made
it to New York. ImageEl Paso is paying for buses to carry migrants north and is feeling the strain of the cost. El Paso is paying for buses to carry migrants north and is feeling the strain of the cost.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesEl Paso is paying for buses to carry migrants north and is feeling the strain of the cost. And
so how do we understand the buses? True, Governor Abbott launched human
beings northward like undesirable hot potatoes while El Paso organized
and funded trips to the asylum seekers’ preferred destinations. But the
underlying message was the same: States and municipalities shouldn’t
have to bear the burden of these influxes, and they won’t. “I
really don’t see it any different, to be honest,” said Victor
Manjarrez, a former Border Patrol chief who is now the associate
director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of
Texas, El Paso. “It’s like saying ‘Thank you’ really nice, or ‘Thank
you’ in a terse way. At the end of the day, it’s the same thing.” Dr.
Manjarrez is the first generation of his family born in the United
States. Early in his career, he told me, he pulled his Border Patrol
vehicle into his parents’ driveway in Tucson and climbed out, only to
hear his father tell the people inside, ¡Escóndanse! ¡Viene La Migra!”
(Hide! It’s Immigration!) Lawmakers
used to visit the border in bipartisan delegations, Dr. Manjarrez said,
and debate amiably among themselves as they toured the crossings and
outposts. Now, he said, they come on party-segregated trips and, instead
of investigating and brainstorming, they are mostly seeking fodder for
arguments they’ve staked out in advance. “They’re looking for what they’re looking for,” he said. “Getting lost in the verbiage instead of focusing on the problem.” Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times I’ve
been thinking about this border for decades now, ever since I got my
start in journalism at The El Paso Times in the late 1990s. I spent
years crisscrossing the Rio Grande from here to the Gulf of Mexico,
documenting how this boundary worked its way through communities and
lives. I’ve come to suspect, despite
the rancor of our political debates, that the southern border functions
more or less the way the United States wants it to function — not that
any one of us approves of it wholly, but that it reflects our aggregated
desires and the understanding we have of our nation. The
border, I think, is imperfect by design: Porous enough to ensure that
some people will inevitably manage to get through, delivering a steady
supply of cheap and under-the-table labor. Closed enough to prevent a
glut of newcomers. Lenient at times because we are a land of immigrants,
but punctuated with attention-grabbing crackdowns to dissuade too many
people from trying their luck. Venezuela
has collapsed into authoritarian rule and economic stagnation, a
descent that has only been worsened by U.S. sanctions. Children are
picking their way past their dead and dying countrymen on their way
through the Darién Gap, entire families hitting the road, lured in part
by reports that they wouldn’t be turned back. ImageA view from the federal processing center of a barbed-wire barrier along the Rio Grande. A view from the federal processing center of a barbed-wire barrier along the Rio Grande.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesA view from the federal processing center of a barbed-wire barrier along the Rio Grande. The
spectacle of the harrowing journey carries an uneasy edge of Darwinism:
Not everyone would survive, and not everyone would reach the border
before the laws shifted yet again. Only the strong and the lucky would
make it onto U.S. soil. The medical director of a migrant shelter in
nearby Las Cruces, N.M., told me, through tears, that as many as 80
percent of the Venezuelan women and girls of childbearing age have been
raped or sexually abused on the way here. What
I heard in El Paso, most of all, was a plea for national leadership.
Many people I interviewed suggested that Venezuelan asylum seekers could
be lodged at neighboring Fort Bliss — thousands of Afghans lived there a
year ago, they point out, and the base has been used to house
unaccompanied migrant children. Mr. Svarzbein recalled the efforts made
to resettle Cuban refugees. The city was looking for something like
that: a national solution that was generous to the newcomers, but fair
to El Paso. Instead, the government
will buy time and quiet some of the criticism. Under Mr. Biden’s new
plan, thousands of Venezuelan refugees will be eligible to come to the
United States — if they apply overseas, convince somebody to sponsor
them financially for two years and travel by airplane. Meanwhile, untold
numbers of desperate people who rushed north overland when the United
States cracked the door will be expelled using an ethically dubious
legal mechanism. The result: A humanitarian crisis has been pushed back
into Mexican border communities like Ciudad Juárez, where asylum seekers
will suffer, but U.S. voters can more easily ignore them. The
new restriction on Venezuelans should ease the pressure on El Paso, but
it’s difficult to predict how it will play out. While the largest
proportion of migrants reaching the city in recent weeks have been
Venezuelan, asylum seekers from elsewhere in Latin America have also
been crossing at high rates. Nor is it clear how many Venezuelans can be
expelled to Mexico — the Mexican government has indicated it may accept
only 24,000 Venezuelans, which would fall short of addressing the surge
of asylum seekers. For now, multiple buses are leaving El Paso every
day. Still, none of the overarching
problems will be touched: this year’s record-breaking flows of migration
at the southern border; desperately backlogged immigration courts;
broken U.S. commitments to asylum seekers. This suggests a more ambiguous interpretation of the buses: What if the stunt is bad, but the message is righteous? ImageMigrants crossing the river in the shadow of the Paso Del Norte international bridge. Migrants crossing the river in the shadow of the Paso Del Norte international bridge.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesMigrants crossing the river in the shadow of the Paso Del Norte international bridge. The
border is not an easy place to think about the border. Daily human
rhythms tend to obscure the grand questions, or render them moot:
Sovereignty, nationalism, human rights, asylum. It’s like stepping so
close to a painting that you can no longer see what the frame depicts,
only the granular detail that’s right in front of your eye. This
is especially true in El Paso, a bustling, bilingual city isolated from
the rest of Texas by long, monotonous stretches of desert but pressed
nose to nose with its closest neighbor, the adrenalized manufacturing
hub of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. El
Pasoans, many of whom are either immigrants or the children of
immigrants, flow casually back and forth between nations, busy with
family or errands or friends on the opposite riverbank. The
international frontier boils down to a mundane and inevitable fact — a
turnstile bureaucracy, a traffic jam, a job opportunity. In layout and
interaction, Juárez and El Paso are one great sprawl of city sliced into
unequal halves by a river. When you
hear about the border on the news, it’s often a fearsome story. The idea
of immigration over the southern border veers immediately in our
collective imagination of race, economy and public safety, and
politicians have been stoking those lurid nightmares for many decades.
Crises are declared even when the statistics don’t bear them out. Legal
asylum seekers are conflated with drug traffickers and criminals. ImageA
parade in downtown El Paso. In this immigrant-rich, majority-Latino
city, there is great sympathy for asylum seekers, but also worries about
handling the influx. A
parade in downtown El Paso. In this immigrant-rich, majority-Latino
city, there is great sympathy for asylum seekers, but also worries about
handling the influx.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesA
parade in downtown El Paso. In this immigrant-rich, majority-Latino
city, there is great sympathy for asylum seekers, but also worries about
handling the influx. But
reading reports from El Paso earlier this month, I understood that
something had truly shifted. The city government — which had generally
left nongovernmental and faith groups to care for migrants while
municipal workers busied themselves with the workaday concerns of
education, policing and sanitation — has ended up running a large-scale
interstate busing operation for asylum seekers. Since when, I wondered,
were desperate and destitute South Americans a city problem? I started making calls, and the answer was swift and unequivocal: Since now. El
Paso, I learned, was suffering the strain of a unique convergence of
problems: Annunciation House, a storied nonprofit that for decades led
the work of resettling migrants, recently closed its largest shelter,
citing maintenance problems and insufficient helpers. The
volunteers who used to keep the shelters running have been lying low
since the pandemic. And, more crucially, the Venezuelans crossing into
the El Paso sector at a clip of 1,000 a day were different from their
predecessors in one critical way: About half of them had nobody to turn
to in the United States — no family, no friends, not even an
acquaintance to lend them money for bus fare. Ruben Garcia, the head of Annunciation House, calls these disconnected Venezuelan travelers “first-generation refugees.” “The
other nationalities have been arriving in the U.S. for years. You ask
them if they have somebody and they say, ‘Yeah, I have a brother. I have
an aunt.’ They buy a ticket and they’re on their way,” Mr. Garcia said.
“The Venezuelans say, ‘Not only do we not have anybody, but we have no
money and nobody we can turn to for money.’ That’s caused things to back
up, and caused border cities to look to the interior.” ImageSome
of the migrants who cross into El Paso end up at a shelter in Las
Cruces, N.M., about 40 minutes away. Fernando Coello Marquez, 9, of Cuba
talked to a family member back home in the shelter’s common area. Some
of the migrants who cross into El Paso end up at a shelter in Las
Cruces, N.M., about 40 minutes away. Fernando Coello Marquez, 9, of Cuba
talked to a family member back home in the shelter’s common area.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesSome
of the migrants who cross into El Paso end up at a shelter in Las
Cruces, N.M., about 40 minutes away. Fernando Coello Marquez, 9, of Cuba
talked to a family member back home in the shelter’s common area. An
average of 2,100 people were coming over the border into El Paso every
day, a Border Patrol spokesman, Landon Hutchens, said last week. More
than half of those are Venezuelans. Mr. Hutchens said there had been a
“slight decrease” in migrant arrivals since the new rule restricting
Venezuelans was announced. At El
Paso’s municipal “welcome center,” a cavernous warehouse perched near
the edge of an Army airfield, I watched one Homeland Security bus pull
through the gates and then another. The doors swung open and out climbed
dozens of men. They wore ill-fitting clothes; the smell of soap wafted
off them like smoke. They came shuffling over the dirt and gravel and
lined up in the courtyard. A light rain began to fall. A
slight woman with stylishly ripped jeans and a French manicure climbed
onto a picnic table and launched into a speech. The speaker, Gina Buzo,
usually works at the El Paso Office of Emergency Management; she was
among some 125 city employees who had been pulled out of their usual
jobs to work with the asylum seekers. She’d repeated these lines so
often she knew them by heart. All the faces turned up to listen, masks
of trepidation, boredom, anticipation. Ms. Buzo kept it simple. “You are in the city of El Paso, Texas,” she told them in Spanish. “You are now free to leave at any time,” she added. Ms.
Buzo explained that everyone should go inside and contact any family
they had in the United States. They should inform their loved ones of
their arrival, and ask them to buy a ticket to somewhere else. “This is not a shelter or a refuge,” she told them. “We will help you advance.” “Stay orderly and keep the place clean,” she called out, hopping to the ground. “Thank you,” the men responded. The next bus had already arrived, and was disgorging another load of people. The
center was rudimentary but clean, with phone chargers, free Wi-Fi and a
smattering of toys donated by members of the Fire Department.
Partitions created a breastfeeding room, and soccer games played on
televisions mounted on the walls. Water and sandwiches were available at
lunchtime; another bag of food was handed over to anyone who was about
to climb onto a bus. Mostly, there were people — to pass out food, keep
an eye out for scuffles, or help explain how a family might reach Dallas
(the New York bus stops there for gas). I
wandered in the crowd, listening to the stories of dangerous passage
and fragile hope. On the riverbank downtown, I’d heard from federal
agents that everyone seeking asylum would get to speak confidentially
with an asylum officer while in detention. But I couldn’t find anyone
who’d even been offered a conversation like that while in custody. Most
of the people I met had been released with nothing but a telephone
number and instructions to phone after 60 days to get a court date. ImageThe Las Cruces shelter is a former armory. The Las Cruces shelter is a former armory.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesThe Las Cruces shelter is a former armory. In
other words, the entire system was so jammed up that people couldn’t
even get started. The processing center was already filled beyond
capacity, and the Border Patrol was sending planeloads of asylum seekers
to other sectors every day. When the
chartered buses pulled into the parking lot of the welcome center, their
destinations were shouted out. Lugging children, clutching envelopes
full of documents, people filed out and climbed aboard. The doors sighed
shut, and they were gone. None of
this is free, or even cheap: This relatively bare-bones operation was
costing El Paso $250,000 to $300,000 a day. A City Council member,
Isabel Salcido, calculated that El Paso, which runs on an annual budget
of $1.2 billion, would spend $89 million on asylum seekers in a year if
the pace continued. The city is
eligible for reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
but there is anxiety and ambiguity about whether all the cash being
spent can be recouped. The federal reimbursement is meant to pay back
expenses for only 30 percent of the total number of people being helped.
El Paso is banking on FEMA to make an exception. When I asked
Representative Veronica Escobar about the city’s chances, she said she
was optimistic, but she added, “I can’t predict the future.” Ms. Salcido said she was starting to get calls of alarm from some constituents. “Everyone
is really pressed right now,” she said. “People are thinking about
their tax dollars and what are they paying for. The financial strain
they have personally, and then seeing their dollars go this way. It’s
scary.” All of these discussions end
up circling back to Washington. Some say it diplomatically, and others
less so, but everyone I spoke with mentioned the glaring lack of federal
guidance. If you don’t like the buses, they said, suggest another plan. “If
people don’t have places to go, what are we supposed to do?” asked Kari
Lenander, executive director of Border Servant Corps, who is running
the Las Cruces shelter under the umbrella of Annunciation House. “I
think everyone is circling that question.” The buses, she said, aren’t
so political as much as “what must be done.” ImageVisitors
to an overlook in El Paso can see the red “La Equis” (“The X”)
sculpture in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. To the left of the sculpture are the
Rio Grande and its canal. Visitors
to an overlook in El Paso can see the red “La Equis” (“The X”)
sculpture in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. To the left of the sculpture are the
Rio Grande and its canal.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesVisitors
to an overlook in El Paso can see the red “La Equis” (“The X”)
sculpture in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. To the left of the sculpture are the
Rio Grande and its canal. Twilight
was gathering downtown, and strings of light twinkled to life in the
boughs of the ash trees ringing San Jacinto Plaza. It was a balmy
evening, and the annual arts festival was in full swing, with bands
rocking out in the plaza and children scrawling on the streets with
pastel chalk. Half the city seemed to have turned out: Wandering among
the booths, I kept running into people I’d planned to interview. A
towering El Paso native, John Martin is deputy director of the
Opportunity Center for the Homeless, a downtown shelter that has been
“inundated,” in his words, by dozens of walk-in asylum seekers who’ve
avoided the city’s efforts to bus them onward. We stood by a bounce
house emblazoned with Disney characters; Mr. Martin introduced me to his
wife, who had moved over the river into the United States from Ciudad
Juárez. The couple’s 8-year-old son scrambled in circles around us as we
talked. I’d heard the shelter had
been forced to turn people away; Mr. Martin said that he and his staff
squeezed sleeping spaces into offices and crammed floor mats together
until the shelter, meant to fit 84 people overnight, at one point held
140. But people kept coming and, in the end, there was simply no more
space. “Immigration in the United
States is broken, but one side of the fence wants to study the root
causes of the problem, and don’t want to see what’s happening right
here,” Mr. Martin said, squinting beneath the brim of his cowboy hat.
“And the other side wants to build a wall which would become a dam and
eventually burst.” He paused, and chuckled at himself. “That’s about the most political answer I’ve ever given,” he said. The
next morning, I drove along the border to southeastern El Paso and
stopped at a small city park just up the road from the Zaragoza Bridge —
a laid-back, blue-collar area wedged between the border and Interstate
10. A nearby broom factory had announced a few days earlier that it
would close at the end of the year, taking dozens of jobs with it. On
the grassy slopes of the park, Cecilia Macias tossed balls for her
dogs. I told her I was writing about the border, and Ms. Macias
immediately did the usual El Paso thing: She smiled and told me about
her own connection to that river. She and her parents crossed when she
was 14, leaving Ciudad Juárez behind. Ms.
Macias, who described herself as self-employed, didn’t have simple
feelings about the people flooding into the city. She felt sorry for
them, she said. She wanted to help them. And she understood their
plight, because she, too, had come to build a life here, although she
was careful to stipulate that she and her parents had immigrated
legally. But, at the same time, she’d
been struggling to pay for her groceries lately, forgoing even eggs.
Friends and family members had applied for government services, but were
turned down. These experiences gave her the feeling that there wasn’t
enough to go around: not enough money and not enough houses. “They can’t stay,” she said. “What are we going to do with all these people?” More on Venezuelan migrants Correction: Oct. 20, 2022 An
earlier version of this article misstated the status of Annunciation
House. While it closed its largest shelter, the group itself remains in
operation. Megan
K. Stack, a contributing Opinion writer and fellow at the George
Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, has been a
correspondent in China, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Mexico and Texas. @Megankstack |
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