Fwd: Weekly Border Update: October 15, 2021
Molly Molloy
From: Adam Isacson <aisa...@wola.org>
Date: Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 1:44 PM
Subject: Weekly Border Update: October 15, 2021
Weekly Border Update: October 15, 2021
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Biden administration, complying with court order, will soon restart “Remain in Mexico”
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D), who represents Laredo, Texas, said October 13 that the Biden administration would roll out a revived “Remain in Mexico” program, as ordered by a Texas judge, “within the next month or so.” According to CQ/RollCall’s Suzanne Monyak, Cuellar said “That means that you’ll see the tents in the Laredo area be expanded.” By “tents,” the congressman was referring to temporary facilities by the port of entry where, during the Trump administration, asylum seekers forced to remain in Mexico attended their immigration hearings via videoconference.
The term “Remain in Mexico” refers to the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP),” a program begun by the Trump administration in late 2018 and early 2019. It sought to deter and discourage would-be asylum seekers by forcing more than 71,000 of them to await their U.S. hearing dates on Mexican soil, where many were subjected to kidnapping, assault, and other crimes. Candidate Joe Biden criticized this program, and his administration quickly terminated it. On August 13, though, Amarillo, Texas District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk (a Trump appointee), responding to a suit brought by the Republican attorneys-general of Texas and Missouri, ordered the Biden administration to restart Remain in Mexico. The Supreme Court upheld this order while lower-court appeals continue.
At midnight on October 15, the Biden administration submitted its latest monthly filing, required by Judge Kacsmaryk, on the steps it has taken to restart the controversial program. The document reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been “recreating the administrative, personnel, physical, and policy framework necessary to operate MPP and are prepared to re-implement MPP in mid-November, subject to Mexico’s decision to accept those that the U.S. seeks to return.” It adds that “multiple discussions” have taken place with Mexican authorities, who would have to receive the asylum-seekers, about a re-start. Further, the filing notes that construction of Remain in Mexico hearing facilities has begun in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas, as Rep. Cuellar had partially indicated, at a cost of $14.1 million.
Mexico has not yet agreed to take back migrants subject to the Remain in Mexico program. It has not refused, either. A brief October 15 statement from Mexico’s Foreign Ministry expresses “concerns” about the program and about how the United States has implemented Title 42 pandemic-related migrant expulsions (discussed below), but notes that “Mexico will continue the dialogue.”
If the Biden administration finds itself implementing both Remain in Mexico and Title 42 at the same time, a possible result might be a two-tier system in which Mexico’s border towns receive two classes of non-Mexican migrants. The first class would be citizens of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, who might be expelled under the public health authority without even a chance to seek asylum. The second would be Spanish or Portuguese-speaking residents of the “other” countries, many of whom have been arriving in greater numbers lately, as discussed in a section below: Brazilians, Colombians, Cubans, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Right now, Mexico does not accept citizens of these countries as Title 42 expulsions—but under a revived “Remain in Mexico” program, Mexico might receive them as people with pending asylum cases. Those from Mexico and the northern triangle would not have pending asylum cases due to Title 42.
U.S. asylum advocates have issued scathing responses, arguing that the Biden administration has had other options to keep from complying with the court order to re-start Remain in Mexico, such as more swiftly issuing a new memo to “re-terminate” the program with clearer wording about its decisionmaking process.
- “Trump 2.0 policies at the border are a recipe for continued cruelty, disorder, and violations of refugee law,” Eleanor Acer of Human Rights First told The Hill. “The Biden administration must honor its promise to terminate this horrific program.”
- “The Biden administration has had nearly two months to issue a new memo that addresses the district court’s concerns and formally terminate the MPP program for good,” said Jorge Loweree of the American Immigration Council. “The fact that it has not done so and is instead moving forward with plans to restart the program in November is a betrayal of the president’s campaign promises.”
- “There is no humane way to implement a program that was intended by [Trump advisor] Stephen Miller as a way to torture asylum seekers as deterrence model after the national outcry to family separation,” tweeted advocate Alida García, who spent a short stint this year as a White House senior advisor for migration.
Official border crossings to reopen to vaccinated travelers, but “Title 42” persists
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced on October 12 that next month, after 19 months of pandemic-related closures, the United States’ land borders will once again open to documented foreign travelers coming for “non-essential” reasons—as long as they have proof of COVID-19 vaccination. Starting in early November, tourists or people visiting family members will once again be able to enter the United States from Mexico and Canada.
Those who enter will need to present paper or digital proof of having received a full dose of a vaccine approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization. Unlike those who arrive by air, those entering by land will not have to provide proof of a recent negative COVID-19 test.
The pandemic travel restrictions had reduced documented border crossings significantly. 92 million people or cargo vehicles crossed into the United States from Mexico during the first 6 months of 2021, a one-third reduction from 136 million in the first 6 months of 2019.
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As it ends pandemic restrictions on documented border crossers, DHS is keeping in place the so-called “Title 42” policy of swiftly expelling undocumented border crossers, including people seeking asylum. A Biden administration official told CBS News that “the policy considerations are different because migrants are generally held in Border Patrol facilities where social distancing can’t be enforced.”
Between February and August 2021, the Biden administration’s DHS expelled undocumented migrants 704,019 times at the U.S.-Mexico border. 92,676 of them were traveling as families (parents and children). Mexicans and many citizens of Central America’s “northern triangle” countries were pushed back across the border into Mexico. Others, like nearly 8,000 Haitians since September 19, have been flown back to their countries, often in shackles or occasionally worse.
New data obtained by CBS News show that while DHS has carried out more than 1,163,582 expulsions since the Trump administration imposed Title 42 in March 2020, the agency has permitted only 3,217 asylum seekers to petition for protection in the United States, using the higher evidentiary standards of the UN Convention Against Torture. Of these, only 8 percent (272) passed their interviews.
“It’s a heartbreaking thing to see” the expulsions of “individuals who are seeking a better life,” Mayorkas told a conference in Qatar this week. But he insisted that “the Title 42 authority is a public health authority. And it is not an immigration policy. It is not an immigration policy that we in this administration would embrace. But we view it as a public health imperative as the Centers for Disease Control has so ordered.”
Public health experts dispute that. “It’s clearly something that is politically expedient and I think that’s dangerous,” Michele Heisler, the medical director at Physicians for Human Rights, told the American Prospect. Added Paul Spiegel of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, “This is not a public-health issue, it’s a lack of immigration policy and I think we know that, and we can’t let them keep on.”
Harold Hongju Koh, a senior adviser on the State Department’s legal team, shared this assessment. A former dean of Yale University’s Law School and former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Koh resigned his post on October 4, two days after issuing a memo calling the Title 42 policy “illegal and inhumane,” concluding, “It simply is not worthy of this Administration that I so strongly support.”
Yale Law School’s Lowenstein Project, together with 13 non-governmental organizations, submitted an emergency petition to the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) seeking precautionary protection measures for 31 asylum seekers subject to Title 42. “These expulsions,” it reads, “mark persons returned to Mexico as migrants trapped in Mexico, rendering them particularly vulnerable to this rampant violence, including kidnapping, sexual assault, extortion, and other forms of abuse at the hands of organized criminal groups and corrupt authorities.” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney leading one of the main legal challenges to Title 42 in U.S. federal court, noted in the American Prospect that “evidence the organization submitted in trial court indicated that 20 percent to 40 percent of families [expelled under Title 42] are kidnapped by cartels.”
Aftermath of the Biden administration’s mass expulsion of Haitians
As covered at length in our September 27 update, for several days in mid-September a remote sector of the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas saw the sudden arrival of nearly 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants, nearly all of them seeking to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities and request asylum. The Biden administration dealt with the influx by applying Title 42, expelling most of those who did not return to Mexico.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid GEO Group, a controversial private prison and immigrant detention center operator, over $15 million to operate a swift tempo of flights expelling migrants back to Port-au-Prince and Cap Haïtien, Haiti. Most of those expelled via air had not lived in Haiti in a long time: they had fled to South America in the years after a devastating 2010 earthquake, living and working in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere until the pandemic caused employment to dry up. They then braved the dangers of the multi-country journey northward—including Panama’s treacherous Darién Gap jungles—only to be shackled, placed on aircraft, and returned without any chance to ask for protection in the United States.
The expulsion flights began on September 19. Since then—according to Tom Cartwright, who monitors flights for Witness at the Border—there have been 74 flights expelling about 7,900 people to Haiti. The pace appears to be slowing as the number of Haitians in custody has no doubt declined. By comparison, Cartwright points out, the United States repatriated just 5,659 Haitians over the 40 months between January 2018 and April 2021. Counting people sent to Haiti from Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and intercepted at sea, the International Organization for Migration counts 10,218 expulsions and returns since September 19.
It remains unclear how such a large number of Haitians made it all the way across Mexico virtually undetected in mid-September, just weeks after Mexican security and immigration forces harshly blocked four mass attempts to leave the southern state of Chiapas. Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning News looked into it and found “a well-organized effort by human smuggling organizations facilitated through social media, and by Mexican authorities who either looked the other way or were simply overwhelmed.” Ruben Figueroa of the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano told Corchado of Haitians suddenly being allowed to board vehicles in the southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, where Mexican forces had earlier been confining them. “This just doesn’t happen without the complicity of government authorities,” Figueroa said.
Tens of thousands of migrants from Haiti and other countries remain in Tapachula. There since late September, Mexico’s overwhelmed refugee agency (COMAR) has been attempting to process roughly 2,000 asylum seekers per day at the city’s soccer stadium.
Further south, the number of mostly Haitian refugees waiting in Colombia’s Caribbean coast town of Necoclí to board ferries to Panama’s dangerous Darién Gap region has risen to 22,000, up from the 17,000 to 19,000 noted in our October 4 update. Colombian migration authorities report at least 82,000 arrivals in Necoclí since January. Panama’s National Migration Service counted 88,514 emerging through the Darién as of late September, according to Reuters. Of those, 19,000 were minors, perhaps half of them under the age of 5, according to UNICEF.
Journalists continue to document the extreme dangers of the 60-mile pedestrian journey through the Darién, which was once regarded as nearly impenetrable. NPR’s John Otis accompanied a lone Cuban migrant for the start of the trip, before he crossed into Panama, in an audio report posted October 11.
In Colombia, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken is to visit next week for a “high level dialogue,” President Iván Duque said he plans to ask the Biden administration to send messages to Haitian migrants that would “minimize expectations” of being granted protection in the United States.
More scrutiny of migrants from beyond Mexico and the Northern Triangle
In August 2021, 29 percent of migrants U.S. authorities encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border were from countries other than Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras. That, to the best of our knowledge, is the first time this has happened before.
The Haitians discussed above are part of this population, but so are migrants from South America who have been flying into Mexico—which since 2018 has not required visas for several South American countries—then traveling to the U.S. border, crossing, and requesting asylum. During the first 11 months of fiscal 2021 (October-August), CBP reports encountering 46,410 migrants from Brazil, 88,786 from Ecuador, and 37,859 from Venezuela. In most cases, U.S. authorities do not expel citizens of these countries under Title 42: Mexico has not agreed to take them, and long flights would be expensive. A Wall Street Journal article portrayed these new arrivals as “middle-class migrants.” Reporter Alicia Caldwell spoke to a dozen Venezuelans who arrived together near Yuma, who said that their entire journey took about two days.
Reuters reported on Brazilian authorities’ June arrest of a businessman accused of charging would-be migrants nearly $20,000 each to be smuggled into the United States via Mexico. “To pull it off, [Chelbe] Moraes has constructed an international network that includes corrupt cops and officials as well as U.S-based family members,” allegedly coaching clients to pose as tourists in Mexico,” the report reads.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) raised eyebrows by telling Fox News that, on a recent trip to Yuma, he had seen Brazilian migrants “headed for Connecticut wearing designer clothes and Gucci bags.” Attempting to clarify his comments to the Washington Post, Graham said, “Usually when you go to the border, you see people who are dressed really haggardly and who look like they’ve been through hell. This time at Yuma, there were dozens that looked like they were checking into a hotel — and smartly dressed.”
At the United States’s behest, Mexico is now tightening visa requirements for citizens of Brazil and Ecuador. Guatemala, too, has begun requiring visas of Ecuadorians.
Links
- At ProPublica, Dara Lind reports on a new DHS Inspector-General report about a CBP intelligence unit that targeted U.S. citizen activists and journalists it suspected of association with migrant “caravans” in 2018 and 2019. “[A]t least 51 U.S. citizens were flagged for interrogation—often based on evidence as flimsy as once having ridden in a car across the border with someone suspected of aiding the caravan.” As its name indicates, CBP’s “Tactical Terrorism Response Team” was created to respond to terrorist threats, not migration events.
- The Senate Finance Committee will meet October 19 for the nomination hearing of Tucson, Arizona police chief Chris Magnus, the Biden administration’s choice to be CBP commissioner. Magnus’s nomination has been delayed by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), who was demanding that CBP first provide more information about role the agency played in combating protesters in Portland in 2020, during the Trump administration.
- Mexico captured 652 migrants at a military checkpoint in southern Tamaulipas state on October 7. 101 of them were unaccompanied minors from Guatemala, whom Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM, the government’s immigration authority) expelled days later.
- Border Report cites rumors of a “mother of all caravans” being organized by unnamed “activists” for October 23 in Chiapas, southern Mexico. We have seen no other source corroborating this rumor, and colleagues in southern Mexico say they haven’t heard anything.
- “There is a growing gulf between the progressive immigration values President Joe Biden professes and the enforcement policies he’s implementing at the border,” reads an analysis by Vox immigration reporter Nicole Narea, “and it’s led to confusion among immigration officials, uncertainty for migrants, and questions about whether the president has a coherent strategy on immigration at all.”
- “To be a Haitian asylum-seeker knocking at the door of the U.S. is to stand at perhaps the most visible convergence of race and empire imaginable in this hemisphere,” writes Miriam Pensack at The New Republic.
- A retired rear admiral is replacing a retired army general as the head of Mexico’s INM in the northern border state of Chihuahua.
How could the mass migration of Haitians to the U.S. border have been a surprise?
Some say their arrival seemed more like a coordinated effort to ease the overwhelming number of migrants stuck at Mexico’s southern border.
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6:00 AM on Oct 9, 2021 CDT
MONTERREY, Mexico — The mass migration of more than 15,000 Haitians up through Central America to the Texas border was the result of a well-organized effort by human smuggling organizations facilitated through social media, and by Mexican authorities who either looked the other way or were simply overwhelmed, according to multiple sources, including U.S. and Mexican government officials.
The Dallas Morning News interviewed more than a dozen highly placed officials on both sides of the border, former officials from both countries, longtime experts on U.S.-Mexico security, human rights advocates and Haitians who traveled from the southernmost state of Chiapas to Monterrey in northern Mexico.
Many of those interviewed questioned whether the arrival of thousands of migrants in Del Rio was really a surprise. Some said their arrival seemed more like a coordinated effort to ease the overwhelming number of migrants stuck at Mexico’s southern border.
Smugglers used more than 200 buses, trucks, taxis and even a ferry to move Haitians in Mexico up to the Texas border. The numbers skyrocketed on days that coincided with Mexico’s biggest national holiday — Independence Day.
“Such a complex operation on a grand scale that we all saw didn’t happen by chance,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, who served as the commissioner of the Instituto Nacional de Migración, or Mexico’s immigration chief, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador until 2019. “You’re talking 200, 250, maybe more buses. You can’t do that without having an organized structure. I don’t know whether the authorities were indifferent, just didn’t care or just looked the other way.”
“It’s hard to see how this operation happened without authorities knowing about it, or being caught off guard,” he added. “That to me is obvious.”
In the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas, veteran immigrant rights advocate Ruben Figueroa and others documented parts of the journey of the Haitians on video. The movement, Figueroa said, “appeared strange as days before migrants hadn’t been allowed to board buses, or even move beyond the city of Tapachula,” he said, referring to the city on the Mexican border with Guatemala, and “suddenly everyone is leaving, and in mass numbers. This just doesn’t happen without the complicity of government authorities.”
One top level Mexican official vehemently denied that the operation had the tacit approval of the Mexican government, calling the allegations “false and ridiculous.” He described the situation at its southern border with Guatemala as being at a “breaking point” because of the ongoing arrival of migrants. The official, with knowledge of internal intelligence, spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to comment publicly.
The official would not discount “corruption among some authorities” and added that Mexico had warned its U.S. counterparts of the overwhelming numbers of migrants, a majority of them Haitians, amassing on its southern border.
Roberto Velasco, Mexico Foreign Ministry’s chief officer for North America, said the mass migration is a reminder of why “the U.S., Mexico and other countries in the region have to be unified in addressing the migration problem.”
“We need a sophisticated approach to a very complex problem,” Velasco said in an interview in Mexico City. “What’s not going to happen is Mexico magically solving the problem.”
The movement, likened to an efecto hormiga, began slowly, gradually, a slow trickle that exploded. On Sept. 2, 57 Haitians were counted under the international bridge linking Del Rio to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. By Sept. 12, the numbers grew to 1,507, then rapidly climbed to more than 10,500 by the 16th of September, Mexican Independence Day.
More than 15,000 migrants were camped under the bridge, after wading across the Rio Grande, by Sept. 18. That day, Mexico began an operation to stop the flow of people headed to the area by sealing off the state of Coahuila with checkpoints manned by local, state and federal authorities, including the military.
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Migration was a big topic Friday as Mexico hosted high-level security talks with U.S. officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Both governments agreed to revamp the Mérida Initiative, a $3 billion U.S. aid program that has been the cornerstone of security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico. It was started with the administrations of George W. Bush and his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderón, the longtime arch nemesis of López Obrador.
The timing of the mass migration has raised questions about whether the U.S. was pressured during negotiations for the new security accord.
“I find the timing of the big migrant flow interesting. It was the perfect storm,” said Arturo Fontes, a former FBI agent who spent his career on the border and in Mexico and is the founder of Fontes International Solutions, a security consulting firm with high-level contacts throughout Mexico. “Mexico’s way of saying, ‘We too have leverage.’ Where was the shared intelligence between both countries?”
Fontes has been critical about what he calls a “breakdown in cooperation” with U.S. law enforcement agencies under the López Obrador administration.
One U.S. law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly questioned “why it took Mexico so long to react” between the 15th of September and 18th when images of thousands of Haitians under the international bridge were beamed around the world.
While López Obrador has been critical of what he calls too much U.S. meddling in Mexico, Velasco has said both governments “talk all the time.”
The Mérida aid program was a joint response to Mexico’s security challenges and included the “Kingpin strategy” that called for taking down top, powerful cartel leaders. But frustrated Mexican officials, including Velasco and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, said those efforts have proven futile because top cartel leaders are quickly replaced, spawning dozens of smaller, more violent criminal organizations that are now terrorizing large swaths of Mexico. The agreement has failed to reduce violence and weapons smuggling into Mexico, or a record flow of drugs such as fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.
Roberta Jacobson, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, disagrees that the pact was solely about fighting organized crime. She wrote in the latest issue of The Dialogue, a publication about Latin America:
“The real goal of the Mérida Initiative was to be a process — a way of developing a culture of security cooperation between Mexico and the United States,” wrote Jacobson, ambassador to Mexico during the Obama and Trump administrations and more recently an adviser in the Biden administration.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks alongside U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar during a meet and greet with staff members at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Friday, Oct. 8, 2021.(Patrick Semansky / ASSOCIATED PRESS)Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, expected the meetings on Friday would be dominated by the topic of migration, underscoring the sensitivity of the issue for the Biden administration. In recent years, including during the Obama and Trump administrations, migration has significantly changed the dynamics of the bilateral relationship, providing Mexico with much needed leverage over its mighty, fickle neighbor to the north.
For example, under threat of a tariff imposed by President Donald J. Trump in 2019, Mexico deployed about 15,000 soldiers and the national guard to stem the flow of migrants headed to the U.S.
“Every time there’s a surge at the border that creates political visibility on unauthorized immigration, the U.S. turns to the Mexican government to try and control it,” Selee said. “The more the U.S. has to rely on Mexico to contain migration, the more the agenda between the two countries gets reduced to that single issue.”
On Friday, López Obrador met with the U.S. delegation and again pressed the Biden administration for increased investment in Latin American countries in an effort to slow the migration.
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More than 80,000 migrants are believed to be heading from South America to the United States via Mexico. The majority are Haitians fleeing the political, social and economic fallout of the pandemic and a growing backlash from countries such as Brazil and Chile that temporarily hosted them after many fled Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.
“The movement starts from the country of origin, in this case maybe Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and it’s supported by a number of actors that facilitate the journey, from informal to formal actors, from smugglers to corporations like bus companies to corrupt government authorities,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a security expert at George Mason University who has studied the movement of migrants from South America and the Caribbean to the U.S.-Mexico. “Sometimes coyotes arrange the whole trip, but often the migrant has to negotiate from country to country. Think of a massive corporation that is very decentralized.”
As thousands of migrants head for Tapachula on the border with Guatemala, Arturo Vizcarra, who oversees migrant operations in the border region for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, said he’s not worried about the numbers. He fears the “toxic nationalism, the persecution based on race and nationality” that is building up in Mexico against migrants, particularly Haitians. He questioned whether tensions led to their sudden migration north.
“It was strange to see the racism that was building up in Tapachula, and it was very strange how buses all of a sudden were moving all these people,” he said, adding that many protests and scuffles with immigration officials that went viral on social media during failed attempts to form caravans had preceded the exodus. “Strange, because these people had been trying to move for months and suddenly it just happened.”
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Haitians, he added, are “stuck in a no man’s land” between Mexico and the United States, a country that in recent years has been outsourcing its migrants back to Mexico and all its dangers.
“The scariest part is that people are not willing to confront racism for what it is,” Vizcarra said. “This leaves Haitians with no good options, like zero good options.”
When the thousands of Haitians crossed the border into Texas, thrusting the small border town of Del Rio into the global limelight, their presence forced the closure of an international bridge and led to concerns among officials on both sides of the border that there will be more mass crossings.
“I’ve never seen anything like that, but it’s going to happen again, here in Del Rio, the Rio Grande Valley, El Paso, Arizona or California,” warned Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez. “This was a well-orchestrated move and there are thousands more coming from South America as we speak.”
Among those who were headed for Ciudad Acuña were John Brevil, his wife and toddler. They traveled from Chile. Along the journey they met Esther Pierre Louie. She had arrived from Brazil. All left Tapachula sometime around Sept. 12 when word spread via a WhatsApp chat group that a new passage had opened up to escape Chiapas. They said they felt lucky, as though they had been especially selected among the thousands.
The toughest part of the journey was getting from Chiapas to Veracruz, a journey that Brevil said felt at times like “a clandestine” mission in which Haitians zigzagged around some immigration checkpoints in “informal buses” with drivers who seemed to be “escorted” by “unknown authorities.”
“I felt very excited and kept repeating the word, ‘Acuña,’” Louie said.
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But the closer the group got to the border, the more hope dwindled. Suddenly “hundreds of Haitians” were everywhere, all headed for Ciudad Acuña, she said. “I felt I was lied to. I buried my face in my hands and started to cry.”
Brevil looked around the bus and saw that many of the men and women were suddenly crying, too.
“I turned to my wife and said, ‘We’re not going to make it. There are too many Haitians under the bridge,’’' he told her as she also began to weep because they wouldn’t be able to join her family in Florida. “The migration just got out of control.”
Instead of Ciudad Acuña, the group headed for Monterrey, where they decided to apply for asylum in Mexico.
Crackdown at Del Rio migrant camp shows competing powers of sympathy and get-tough policies
DEL RIO, Texas -- By this weekend, the sprawling squalid migrant camp under the international bridge here was silent. At least 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants had come and gone.Alfredo Corchado. Alfredo Corchado has covered U.S.-Mexico issues for The News since 1993. A graduate of UTEP, he's also reported from Washington and Cuba. Before the News, Corchado reported at El Paso Herald-Post & The Wall Street Journal in Dallas and Philadelphia. He’s author of Midnight in Mexico and Homelands.