Global Courant 2023-05-12 00:39:29
Border cities like El Paso, Texas, are preparing for a very probable increase in migrant arrivals, numbers that have already broken records and that now, with the end of Title 42 this Thursday, could further test these nearby communities. to the southern border with Mexico.
“We have been working for this day (…) We are preparing for the unknown, because we don’t know who is coming, if they are families, if they are single adults,” El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser insisted.
After a tour on Wednesday, Leeser acknowledged that the numbers of migrants on the city’s streets have dropped but warned that even so, he estimates that “between five and eight, maybe 10,000” people have gathered on the other side of the border with the intention to cross into United States territory.
“And this is what we have been preparing for,” the mayor said in a meeting with the media, showing them one of the shelters that the city has prepared for those who are legally processed at border entry points.
Continuing to attend to the number of migrants that is expected, in a flow that is not expected to stop, “will be hard, hard every day,” Leeser said.
“We have seen that the numbers have gone down, but we do not know what will come the next day. We don’t know what will come in the next 10 days. We know that they will continue to come and we will continue to make sure that we help them”, stressed the mayor of El Paso.
72 hour shelter
In total, the city has prepared three temporary reception centers that it will open as needed. The first of them will have capacity for about 500 people and together with the rest it will add more than 4,000 capacities.
“Our goal is to make sure they are here between 24 and 72 hours. This is just a temporary shelter and it’s to make sure we help them get to their next destination,” Leeser said.
Although the El Paso authorities will not provide financial aid to migrants who want to continue on their way to other areas of the US, they will provide shelter, food and assistance. “We want to make sure that we help them. We need to decompress the system,” added the mayor.
Despite the fact that the Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, insisted that the end of the sanitary measure did not mean that the border was open, “quite the opposite”, hundreds of people gathered on the Mexican side still maintain hope of be able to access asylum in the US.
Many are waiting to be able to schedule an appointment through the CBPOne application, which after the end of Title 42 and the application of Title 8, with its new regulations, will be one of the few legal ways to access protection within the United States.
El Paso, one of the busiest corridors both for those who are processed at official points of entry and for those who cross irregularly, decreed a state of emergency to handle the unusual increase in the arrival of migrants of different nationalities, a declaration that assures federal support in an effort that El Paso is struggling to fund.
There is still a lot of misinformation
“We have known for months about all the people who are in Juárez,” said Enrique Dueñas Aguilar, spokesman for the El Paso Fire Department and Emergency Office, who agreed that the community has taken the experiences accumulated in recent months to be ready for this new stage.
Dueñas stated that “there is a lot of misinformation out there, especially for those groups of migrants,” who are unaware that the lifting of Title 42, a measure that allowed asylum seekers to be returned to Mexico; It does not mean that the border will suddenly open.
On the contrary, the US announced this Wednesday a tightening of the asylum requirements for irregular migrants under Title 8.
“We have seen a lot of people who have grossly misinformation. (…) So we are expecting large groups. This week we are about to enable our shelters and also, if possible, start to enable buses and transfers,” Dueñas said.
According to the official, they are still finalizing the details, but what they are looking for is “to be able to assist the non-governmental organizations, the city shelters that have been trying to handle this entire emergency, which are at a point where they are at the limit and we need to enable this assistance to be able to continue supplying this entire group,” he said.
Migrants “arrive with what they are wearing”
“We have been working with overcrowd for almost two weeks now, on April 25 we received a group of 70 immigrants. Most of Venezuela and that group grew to 150 the next day and continues to increase exponentially until Sunday,” Aracelli Martín, a spokeswoman for the Opportunity Center in El Paso, told VOA.
According to the activist, the shelter had “850 people outside the building, sleeping outside the building, but receiving services such as food, clothing, and advice on navigating the transportation system.”
“We were working with 1,000 people. Daily and obviously, feeding them (…) the people who come here arrive with what they are wearing and many times they have not eaten. So, our immediate thing is that, to provide them with food and also access to showers,” explained Martín.
The shelters in El Paso are mostly ships or basic facilities that work with the essentials to offer a bed and hot food, something invaluable for migrants who have been on the journey to the United States for months. One of them, 22-year-old Venezuelan Miguel Ángel Peña Suárez, considers these shelters a blessing.
“We look for the right way to settle somewhere, be it on the floor, be it in a cardboard neighborhood, be it on a sheet, because life as migrants is not easy,” he told VOA from the Reception Center.
He said that the road was hard and that they sleep outside the shelter while the women and children are more protected.
“We have been enduring all that journey from Venezuela to Colombia, the Darien jungle, Panama, Costa Rica. Mexico, which was one of the most difficult countries to pass. But thank God we already have our document, ”he added with relief.
Peña Suárez was among the irregular migrants who voluntarily turned themselves in to border authorities on Tuesday in the hope of being legally admitted.
Although new arrivals like this young man will soon continue on their way, at the Reception Center they know that it is a matter of time before more migrants in need of help arrive.
“We are prepared and we have been working together with various sectors, both from the local government and from other non-profit organizations to be prepared for the unknown, because we do not have an exact number of the number of people who are going to come,” he insisted.
very few options
For the state coordinator of the Immigration Reform for the Alliance of Texas (RITA), Bety Camargo, “the concern is about the humanitarian crisis that has been seen since December.”
The fight for the existence of infrastructure to welcome those who arrive at the southwestern border of the United States is one that organizations in defense of the rights of migrants have sustained for decades.
The idea is that “migrants can come with respect and dignity to ask for the opportunity of an asylum process, which is these systems that we had to re-implement. Right now there are no options, migrants do not have options, so when the narrative of invasion and criminals begins, it is, it is a false narrative, ”he denounced.
Camargo maintained that the option to schedule appointments through the CBPOne app is very limited so far.
“90% of the migrants here did the CBPOne, there was never a response. The other 5% did receive an answer and it was negative. Everything is at the discretion of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and there is no appeal system,” she warned.
The Department of Homeland Security announced that it will expand the app’s services from 300 to 1,000 appointments a day and vowed to improve the system.
“I think we have to start bringing solutions to the table because this is going to continue every 6 months, every 8 months we are going to have a flow of migration and we have to see how we are going to solve it,” said the state coordinator of the Reform of Immigration for the Texas Alliance.
“The sky will not fall”
The tightening of the conditions for asylum in the US has not been well received by other activists such as the director of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, Fernando García.
“We are seeing the implementation of extreme measures against immigrants, on the one hand Title 8, which is arrest, deportation and jail for those who reoffend, and it is going to be terrible for many families, and the other part is the explicit rejection and de facto of those who are requesting asylum, that is, the deportation of people who request refuge,” he said.
One of García’s concerns is that migrants do not understand “that what awaits them is a possible deportation, it is a possible raid.”
“The sky is not going to fall, as many extremist Republicans are proposing, saying that there will be a great invasion of people. It will not happen, but we are going to see an initial increase in people who cross, but they are going to run into an aggressive, harsh, very anti-immigrant policy and I think that is going to dissuade them,” he said.
According to the veteran activist, what is going to “aggravate is the humanitarian crisis” that is already seen on the border.
“We are going to see more camps on the Mexican side, of people who have been deported and not expelled, deported. We are also going to see in the United States the increase in the number of people who are going to be sent to jails for the question of re-entry, etc., so this humanitarian crisis worries us, ”he concluded.
