MATAMOROS, Tamaulipas. * 26 de junio de 2019.
] AP
The young family from El Salvador appeared in this border city over the weekend with panic on their faces.
They went to the downtown bridge that leads to Brownsville, Texas, where Xiomara Mejia, a migrant from Honduras, explained that the newcomers would not be able to add their names to the long list of families waiting to apply for asylum in the United States until Monday.
“I noticed they were really nervous, scared,” said Mejia, who had arrived in Matamoros with her husband and three children on May 8 and was still waiting to file an asylum application with the U.S. government.
After chatting, the Salvadoran family said they would come back Monday.
“I didn’t think they were going to decide to cross the river,” Mejia said.
But on Sunday, not far downriver from that bridge, the family crossed a popular bike and jogging path and walked down a slope through the brush to the edge of the Rio Grande.
The river does not appear wide there, maybe 20 to 30 yards, but that short distance obscures the dangers posed by the swift-moving current.
In a Salvadoran chat group for people thinking about forming a migrant caravan — a phenomenon that drew the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump last year but has all but vanished since Mexican authorities started cracking down — participants discussed the perils of the journey and whether it’s right for parents to take children along.
“If one goes there, they shouldn’t bring children, because going there is risking everything and a child is not prepared for that,” one message said.
“The thing is, it’s more likely that they give you help with children,” someone replied.
“But that’s only if they manage to arrive there,” came the response.
Migration activists worry people may be driven to more risky measures by recent U.S. policies such as “metering” that dramatically reduce the numbers allowed to apply for refuge, as well as others that send asylum-seekers back across the border to wait in Mexico while their cases linger for months or even longer through a backlogged U.S. immigration court system. Wait lists for registering refugee claims with U.S. officials are in the thousands at some ports of entry.
Mexico has also stepped up its immigration enforcement under pressure from Washington.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday that Mexico had a three-month deadline to get the flow of Central American migrants under control and that the country is making progress.
López Obrador did not explicitly say the Sept. 10 deadline had been imposed as part of talks with the U.S. government to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports, but that appears to be the case.
“We think we are going to be able to moderate the migratory phenomenon. We have to,” López Obrador said. “We have a deadline, which is three months, ending Sept. 10, but we are doing well.”
He added that the number of migrants passing through Mexico had doubled in recent times.
Meanwhile, migrant shelters on the Mexico side are overflowing, and in places like Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located, cartels and gangs extort, kidnap and murder migrants.
At the downtown bridge Wednesday, Mejia was sure she made the right decision to endure the long wait to make her asylum bid, even though she had seen other families grow desperate with the wait.
She has a daughter with a brain tumor who needs surgery, but they have some relatives in Matamoros who they have been able to stay with, she said.
“We don’t want to cross (through the river), we want to enter through legal channels to the United States and make the case,” Mejia said.
