'It feels like no one is listening': Mexican asylum seekers battle cold as they wait turn

Lauren Villagran
El Paso Times

Children snuggled up to Janeth C. for a warm hug on a frigid morning outside her tent pitched at the foot of the international bridge. She had become an unofficial tía to dozens of kids after two months of waiting in a street encampment to seek asylum in the U.S. 

Her own teenage children were sleeping inside bundled against the cold. 

As temperatures slid toward freezing overnight on Monday, the more than 900 Mexican asylum seekers camped at the foot of the city’s three bridges to El Paso steeled themselves: Many said they would stay as long as it takes for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to call their number.

A young asylum seeker from Zacatecas, Mexico wears an adult sweater as she tries to keep warm as she and hundreds of others camp at the base of the Paso del Norte International Bridge awaiting their turn to cross into the US.

Janeth, a single mother who asked for her full name to be withheld, fled her small town in Zacatecas state with her 13-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son after gangsters kidnapped her eldest and held him for a 200,000-peso ransom. With help from a cousin working in South Dakota, she paid half, or about $5,500, and her son was released — beaten up, but alive, she said.

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They arrived in Juárez in September and joined a growing encampment of Mexican asylum seekers. Now, as the first cold front of the fall moves in, she says she won’t move to a shelter. Nighttime temperatures are expected to hover in the upper 30s and low 40s over the next several days.

“The truth is, we’re afraid if they don’t see us here, it will take longer,” she said, wearing fleece pajama pants, a hoodie and a scarf wrapped around her head. “We have a list of all of us here, with three people in charge of it. To keep order, more than anything.”

Border Patrol apprehended more than 473,000 migrant family units from October 2018 to September 2019, up threefold from 107,000 family units the prior fiscal year. CBP processed about 53,000 “inadmissible” family units over the same period, slightly fewer than the 54,000 processed the year before after CBP tightened controls at international crossings.

CBP has prevented Mexicans, Central Americans, Cubans and others from crossing the international bridges to seek asylum in a practice immigrant advocates call “metering.” Since early 2018, CBP officers stationed at the top of the bridges have turned back would-be asylum seekers, giving rise to unofficial lists that hold a migrant’s place in line.

“We’ll wait as long as it takes to get the help we’re seeking,” Janeth said.

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Many of the Mexican asylum-seeking families have been living at the site, as Janeth and her kids have, long enough to take pseudo-ownership of the broken asphalt street.

On Tuesday morning, women swept up dirt and debris outside their tents and lean-tos. Children played with a green soccer ball, until a bright yellow Transborde bus rolled into the narrow street to pick up passengers planning to cross the border with passports or legal crossing cards.

Banda music blared from a La Michoacana store selling cold aguas frescas; no one was buying. Tarps, tied down to bricks, billowed over the tents.

Across town, hundreds more families camped under the trees of the Chamizal park on the Mexican side and near the Zaragoza bridge.

“We’ve been insisting that the temperature is going to start dropping fast,” said Enrique Valenzuela, director of the migrant aid center that manages a separate list of asylum seekers from countries other than Mexico. “They insist that they don’t want to move because they need to be right there, paying attention.”

“Basically, they don’t completely trust the mechanism they themselves created,” he said.

A family naps in a homemade tent made of plastic tarps and blankets at the base of the Paso Del Norte international bridge.

Each encampment has maintained its own handwritten list of families waiting their turn to make an asylum claim. At the downtown bridge, a woman held fast to a clipboard with names in ink on paper as a dozen people crowded around her – a typical morning meeting to go over the list. 

Janeth and her kids started at No. 63 have risen to No. 9. There are about 220 families on the downtown bridge list alone, she said.

Marta D. arrived with her husband two days ago, also from Zacatecas. She and her husband had three children in the U.S. when they lived and worked in Colorado a decade ago. Both were deported under the Obama administration.

Their youngest — 16-year-old Andres, who is a U.S. citizen — was picked up by gangsters in Zacatecas and robbed of his car, cellphone and money in their small town, she said. Marta and her husband immediately sent him north, to Wisconsin, to live with his older brother and sister. 

Marta and other migrants from Zacatecas repeated similar tales of smaller criminal organizations wreaking havoc on their towns, where once a single criminal group kept control. Even children are targets, they said.

Janeth C., 36, left a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico with two teenage children and has been camped out at the Paso del Norte International Bridge waiting to cross into the United States.

Now they, too, had joined the encampment.

“It feels like no one is listening,” Marta said. “A lot of people are going through what we went through.”

On Saturday and Sunday, the migrants said, CBP called up a single family each day and called no one on Monday.

Lauren Villagran covers the border and can be reached at lvillagran@elpasotimes.com.

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