‘This was cruel’: Inside a border shelter, migrants await Trump’s next move...WaPo
Molly Molloy
‘This was cruel’: Inside a border shelter, migrants await Trump’s next move
The migrants at El Buen Samaritano shelter had waited months to enter the United States through the CBP One app. Now they are stuck in Mexico.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The news had barely registered by the time lunch rolled around Monday for a dozen families at the church-run migrant shelter that had been waiting for their chance to legally enter America.
The fideos, or noodles, were ready. The aguas frescas were served. It was time to say grace.
“Lord, you know our situation,” began Gloria Lobos, a Guatemalan woman who said she fled her home in the Mexican state of Chiapas after three neighbors were murdered and her family was told they were next. They had managed to get an appointment with U.S. immigration officers to request they be allowed in to pursue asylum claims, but now it had been canceled.
“We may not be able to understand this, we may be disappointed, and we may be frustrated,” the 54-year-old said, her words interrupted by a growing chorus of sobs from throughout the room. “But with time, maybe we will understand. Our destiny is in your hands, Lord.”
In one corner of El Buen Samaritano’s cafeteria, a 12-year-old’s tears fell into her bowl after her mother decided to return home to one of the most violent Mexican states instead of crossing “al otro lado” to be with the girl’s father. The cook, herself trying to flee bloodshed in Mexico, whispered prayers to God for guidance. A penniless Venezuelan mused about the consequences of closing one of the few legal pathways left for asylum seekers such as herself.
“My head is going to explode,” said Mishel Liendo, 22, pulling her hoodie over her jet-black hair as she considered what to do next.
All of them had applied through the U.S. government’s CBP One app to be granted parole and enter immigration proceedings. They were patient for three, six and 11 months for that coveted appointment. The Biden administration created the program to discourage migrants from crossing the border illegally and turning to criminal organizations for help doing it.
The mobile application process was unpopular with a wide spectrum of political opinions on immigration policy. Human rights activists criticized the Biden administration for restricting hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to one narrow, glitchy conduit. For critics of then-President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, CBP One permitted people who ordinarily may not have had any right to enter the country to do so in extraordinary numbers.
President Donald Trump argued in an executive order signed hours after his Monday swearing-in that the program violated federal law. More than 900,000 people had entered the country using the app, and the new administration claimed that many of them present threats to national and public security, and had “abused the generosity of the American people.”
But in the absence of congressional action to reform immigration law to match the current realities of migration, the app was an imperfect tool for the orderly management of an overwhelmed southwestern border security apparatus.
For Evelin Vásquez, it meant hope. The Guatemalan mother of three was first in line for her Monday afternoon appointment. She had flown into Juárez days earlier from Tapachula, a southern Mexican city, where she had been waiting months for this opportunity. She slept in the freezing airport for two nights with her children until it was time. Her husband is waiting for them in California, having entered the United States this month using the app.
They followed the rules. They got in line. They waited for their turn, Vásquez said. Everything was legal, or so they thought.
The Trump administration canceled the program one hour before U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers had told Vásquez to report to the port of entry. Everyone around her broke down, but the 29-year-old didn’t want her children to see her cry. Mexican officials took her to El Buen Samaritano shelter that afternoon, where other shocked asylum seekers were trying to decipher the moment and what it meant for them.
Vásquez settled into her bunk bed and waited until she was alone to weep.
“I looked around and realized I was not where I was supposed to be,” she said. “That’s when I lost it. The only thought that sustained me through all this was knowing the suffering would soon be over.”
Late Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency injunction in D.C. federal court, arguing that shutting down the app essentially eradicated the right to asylum at the border. It reassured Vásquez and other appointment holders that it wasn’t over yet — however fleeting that hope may be.
“If only they had told us things would end on such and such date and shut off new appointments, then we could have prepared,” said José Gregorio Loaiza, 52, of Venezuela. “This was cruel.”
The images of his wife, Margelis Tinoco, and her anguish minutes after officials halted the app ricocheted worldwide. The couple is indebted to friends and family members who paid ransoms after they endured two kidnappings.
The migrants spent most of the next morning hunched over their phones in the shelter’s frigid courtyard, fruitlessly refreshing the CBP One app to see whether the decision had been reversed. They pored over social media messages appearing to give new instructions or purporting to help them troubleshoot to reopen their spots. They moved their chairs clockwise throughout Tuesday morning with the movement of the sun to stay warm, while they combed the web for some morsel of reliable information.
Pastor Juan Fierro García has watched this cycle of hope and disappointment so many times in the past decade that he has a practiced line for migrants seeking answers: “Maybe your moment hasn’t come. But trust God. His timing is perfect.”
The shelter, with its razor-wire-topped cinder block outer walls and robust security camera setup, has adapted to each new president and their border policy. Fierro García took over the facility in 2015 when it was a small operation in need of repair. For four decades, it had catered primarily to local men and had capacity for 40 people.
But by fall 2017, migration had changed drastically. Caravans of Cubans arrived by the hundreds when only three shelters were operating in the border city, and El Buen Samaritano — the Good Samaritan — had but two bathrooms. The various Caribbean migrants were unaccustomed to the chiles endemic to the kitchen’s local Mexican fare, so they modified the menu for a less piquant palate.
Then came the pregnant women who needed special accommodations. Soon, children sought refuge alongside their travel-weary families, so the pastor reconfigured the infrastructure, converting the kitchen into a women’s area and creating a play area, to make room for nearly 300 people. The needs grew beyond food and a bed. They came to include trauma therapy, legal and medical aid, and education. Donations poured in, and the government helped.
“We had to change as migration changed and adapt our regulations to each new culture, to create a space for everyone to feel at home,” Fierro García said.
From Trump’s first-term “Remain in Mexico” policy, to the expulsions under Title 42 during the pandemic, and later, Biden’s reversal of his predecessor’s regulations and Mexico’s more aggressive enforcement, the Methodist minister said he has grown inured to the jolts of political decrees.
“Every new policy appears promising at first, but by the end you realize it was unjust and didn’t work,” he said. “People will always find a way to come as long as the world continues to worsen for most and the U.S.A. continues to appear to most as a safe haven.”
With the second Trump administration promising to deport millions, the pastor expects his operation will have to evolve again.
Itzil Galindo is not waiting to find out. The 30-year-old from Guerrero — the southwestern Mexican state that is home to Acapulco — waited nearly five months with her two children, ages 2 and 12, at the shelter for an appointment. When the app shut down, she bought bus tickets back. She will now depend more than ever on her husband’s remittances from the United States for the future of their kids.
“I wanted to be there, not here. But we won’t try to enter the U.S. any way that isn’t the safe and legal way,” Galindo said.
Her compatriot Roxana Girón, 50, fled horrifying violence in her home state of Chiapas, where criminals threatened to kill her husband and take over their barbershop. Their sole contingency is to wait out Trump at the shelter, where she helps cook meals, clean and serve what she expects will be a growing number of people stuck in Mexico: “The plan is to survive.”
Liendo, the 22-year-old Venezuelan, had spent 36 hours sitting in the same chair, charging, scrolling, video-chatting and recharging her phone to quiet her mind. It wasn’t working. Rumors were running amok in her migrant group chats. Even if they weren’t true, she was hanging what little hope she has left on information she said she knows is probably false. So she wondered.
“Surrendering at the border wall means paying a coyote. Then what if they just deport me back?” she said aloud. “If I leave this shelter, Mexican police can grab me and ship me to Tapachula. … I don’t have money to go back to Venezuela. … But I couldn’t feed my son there. … I have a friend in Colombia. Maybe she’d take me in?”
Liendo decided to stop thinking about it, save for one last thought: “Things are going to get out of control at the border if they don’t propose something else,” she said. “With those who applied for appointments, they knew who we were. They won’t know those who come illegally.”
As the sun reached its zenith, the courtyard was flush in light and a few negligible degrees of warmth. Vásquez, the Guatemalan immigrant, watched her children play. Her 11-year-old daughter, Elisabet, recorded a video of her brothers, 9-year-old Angel and 3-year-old Liam, gliding down a slide. She sent it to her father. It was the child’s way of telling him they were okay.
But her mother is not sure. Gang members, she said, had been tracking her movements in their country after her husband refused to pay extortionists. They came close to kidnapping Elisabet. Vásquez said she has not told her parents back home everything, to save them heartache.
After lunch, everyone quieted into mind-numbing chores. There were tiles to be mopped. Dishes to be washed. Floors to be swept. A teenager interrupted the melancholic toiling with stunted chord-playing on a keyboard tucked behind a curtain in the meal room. He sang softly into a microphone, his words of faith and salvation drifting across the courtyard. His mother, Lobos, said he was trying to alleviate his grief through prayer.
The shelter’s front door buzzed. Mexican immigration officials in orange polos ushered in a new group of backpack-toting migrants in need of refuge. All of them had had Tuesday appointments and reported to the bridge as instructed. None of them walked across.
Anna Watts contributed to this report.