‘We Have Faith’: Migrants Still Arriving, Despite Biden’s New Executive Order

The following article about migrants’ hopes and fears about the conditions they face at the border was originally published by Melissa del Bosque from the Border Chronicle on June 11, 2024, and republished by tribunodelpueblo.org. 

On Friday, we pulled up to a makeshift migrant campsite near the border wall east of Sasabe, Arizona. A group of men and women sat under a mesquite tree. It was early in the afternoon and already over 100 degrees and climbing in the Sonoran Desert. In Spanish they told me they’d come from Mexico and Guatemala. It had taken them nearly five hours to arrive at this campsite, assembled by a coalition of humanitarian groups from southern Arizona, who had stocked it with food and water, so that people could survivethe triple-digit heat.

None of the group knew that three days earlier, President Biden had issued an executive order restricting asylum. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, they said. A man in his 30s wearing a baseball cap told me he was from the state of Aguascalientes, Mexico, where he had owned an egg business. Cartel members, he said, “kidnapped me and held me for three days. They tortured me. They said from now on you work for us, and you pay us.” The man agreed to cooperate with the cartel, he said, to save his life. When they let him go, he left immediately with his family. “We had no choice.”

Another man said he was from Chiapas. “It’s gotten very ugly in Chiapas,” he said. “Too much fighting. Too much violence.”

Whether they received asylum in the United States, the group told me, was in God’s hands. I’d heard this many times over the years: “Temenos fe” (we have faith), no matter the odds or executive orders against them.

The five men and two women were exhausted from walking through the desert and were anxiously waiting for Border Patrol to pick them up so that they could request asylum. Dorothy Chao, a nurse and volunteer with Tucson Samaritans, cleaned and bandaged one of the men’s blistered feet.

Three hours later, we came upon a Border Patrol pickup truck that had crashed into the border wall. I learned from an agent waiting for a tow truck that two Border Patrol trucks had collided. I surmised that driving too fast had something to do with it.

Earlier, I’d witnessed agents in four trucks arrive at another migrant camp driving so fast that they’d fishtailed through the gravel, dust billowing behind as they swerved to a stop to pick people up at the camp. Now one of these trucks was smashed against the steel border wall, the airbag inflated like a giant marshmallow.

The Arivaca Fire Department confirmed that four asylum seekers had been taken by ambulance to a local medical facility, and an agent airlifted to a Tucson hospital. I wondered whether the man from Aguascalientes, or anyone else from the group we’d talked to, was among the wounded.

On Monday, a CBP official said in an email that everyone had been treated and released Friday evening. And that the accident was being investigated by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility. But the agency would give no further details. I called the nonprofit Casa Alitas in Tucson, which receives migrants who have been processed by Border Patrol and given immigration court dates, asking if the injured had arrived there. They said they couldn’t provide me with that information.

Perhaps the man from Aguascalientes had already been deported to Mexico? A Biden administration memo issued last week instructed border agents to give “‘the highest priority to detaining migrants who can be easily deported,’  followed by ‘hard to remove’ nationalities requiring at least five days to issue travel documents, and then ‘very hard to remove’ nationalities whose governments don’t accept U.S. flights,” the Associated Press reported Saturday.

This memo didn’t bode well for the Mexicans or Guatemalans I had spoken with at the border wall, especially when it was already so difficult for them to attain asylum, even before Biden’s executive order. In 2023 only 4 percent of Mexicans were granted asylum in the United States, and for Guatemalans a slightly higher 8 percent.

“You don’t know from day to day what’s going to happen,” said Gail Kocourek, a volunteer with Tucson Samaritans. Kocourek cofounded Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant resource center in Sasabe, Sonora, which has been shut down since October due to cartel violence. Much of the town’s residents were forced to flee as factions of the Sinaloa Cartel battle over control of this section of border. On the way to the migrant camps, we had stopped at the port of entry so that Kocourek could give one of the town’s remaining residents a bag of food for the dogs left behind by their owners.

A teenage girl in flip-flops walked toward the port of entry between Sasabe, Sonora, and Sasabe, Arizona, trailed by a dozen dogs or more as CBP agents watched us closely. Kocourek handed her the bag of food, and the parade of dogs, large and small, wagged their tails with anticipation. “Next time I’ll come back with a bigger bag,” Kocourek said apologetically, and the girl smiled and thanked her.

Last fall, as gunmen kidnapped town residents, and automatic gunfire rang out, families from the town fled for their lives, Kocourek said. The port director of the Sasabe, Arizona, office told Kocourek and Dora Rodriguez, the other cofounder of Casa de la Esperanza, that he would admit only one family a day for an emergency temporary visa. “He called us bleeding-heart liberals,” she said of the U.S. port director. Left with no choice, desperate families went to the edge of town and cut an opening through the border wall. “We stayed with them on the U.S. side and insisted they be processed by Border Patrol,” she said. “And they did get emergency visas.”

Some homesick townspeople, like the teenage girl’s family, had already returned to Sasabe, Mexico, but violence was flaring up again. Factions were still at war over rights to the valuable territory for human smuggling and drug running. As we drove along the border wall, Kocourek counted the number of places where the wall had been cut through by cartel members, then patched together by U.S. welders. After counting 20, she gave up. “It’s a money pit,” she said of the wall. “The only people benefiting are the cartels and the welders.”

Several miles east of Sasabe, people crossed at a gap in the wall, usually arriving at night when the temperatures were cooler. Border Patrol typically picked up women and children first while the men waited, sometimes for hours. A coalition of volunteer humanitarian groups, including the Tucson Samaritans, had built a shade structure stocked with water and food. Sister Lika Macias, director of the Casa de la Misercordia migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, stood under the shade structure Friday speaking with migrants, most of them from Central and South America, who were waiting for Border Patrol.

Macias said she was there to assess the situation after Biden’s announcement. “Right now, we receive people at the shelter who are applying through the CBP One application. But we believe we are going to start seeing a lot more deported people, which will make things a lot slower and more complicated,” she said. “In the case of the desert here, most crossing are from Central America or from Mexico’s bloodiest states: Guerrero, Michoacán, Chiapas. There are several states where the cartel situation is very, very difficult,” she said.

I asked whether she thought Claudia Sheinbaum—Mexico’s newly elected president and the first woman to hold the job—might make a difference. Macias’s expression turned skeptical. “I don’t know,” Macias said. “I trust in her intelligence. And I’m proud as a woman to have our first female president. But what we are afraid of is that she is in the shadow of the current president and will continue to follow his policies. That’s what makes me despair.”