By Dianne Solis, The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS – The small figure of Rodrigo Castro discovered on the banks of the Rio Grande, a short distance from the Matamoros migrant camp, leader among Guatemalan asylum seekers, his funeral was in many images through those who admired him.
A few days later, another frame crossed the river. By the time the dead man came out of his grave in a cloudy green, he had no IDENTIFICATION. Camera phones projected their lenses like voyeurs. But the video also showed asylum seekers across the river would not be forgotten.
Hundreds of asylum seekers are still in a tent camp across Brownsville Street, with poor physical condition and the risk of kidnapping and violence, which remain deposeful of almost everything and hope.
“All the concern is growing,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, the nun who runs Catholic charities in the Rio Grande Valley and visits the camp. “His only hope was to be in the United States. “
The US asylum formula is the only one in the world to have a nuclear asylum. But it’s not the first time He was almost suffocated by the oxygen of a series of restrictions imposed through the Trump administration. The COVID-19 pandemic then struck, causing more chaos and disrupting court proceedings. Up to a thousand other people live in the depressing muddy countryside. on the banks of the river in Mexico, awaiting its possibility of seeking asylum in the United States. Thousands more live marginal lives in the urban neighborhoods of Matamoros.
Things have gotten worse in recent months, however, many in the United States and Mexico are still locating tactics for migrants with donations of money, food and supplies.
About $100,000 in groceries, firewood and materials still flow to Matamoros each month from Team Brownsville, one of Brownsville’s largest aid groups. Residents of North Texas continue to organize campaigns to collect tents and hygiene materials. Other professionals in North Texas are conducting video intellectual fitness tests to obtain asylum applications.
But anxiety abounds among immigrant families stranded in Mexico while they are legally in a safe haven in the United States.
“They’ve been there for over a year and they’re desperate,” Pimentel said. Asylum and immigration policies will need to replace the United States to deal with migration “in a more humane way. “. . . We were a country that represents the most productive values in the world and we completely failed those other people 100%. “
Newly arrived migrants are suffering to locate homes because they are blocked by Mexican authorities, who have fenced around the clay tent camp, Pimentel said.
Up to 4,000 migrants have discovered homes in Matamoros, he said.
Citizens of veteran camps now fly the flags of their country from Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador and Venezuela in a touch of blue, red, white and yellow, which does not make a Honduran named Rolando feel better.
A wonderful concern is that the asylum population is forgotten, he said. He needed his full call known because of the arranged gangs that attack immigrants.
“We can’t take this place anymore,” Rolando said. “We have not had a quiet night since we arrived. We are waiting for a miracle here. “
Surprisingly, although COVID-19 has gone crazy around the world, only five cases of migrants have tested positive in the camp. Global Response Management, operating from a giant gray trailer with its red logo in the middle of the camp, now has a medical volunteer moment moved in early February to stop the COVID-19 epidemic with a prevention crusade adding masks, hand-washing stations and vitamin distribution. They even set up a cell hospital box in the back of the camp. .
“We expected devastating results,” said Andrea Leiner, a nurse specializing in Global Response.
That’s what happened.
The attenuated effect is most likely caused by higher vitamins, outdoor living conditions, ultraviolet light, masking and early isolation when other people appear to be sick, Leiner said.
“The severity of the disease is very low,” he says. We had a user who needed oxygen. “
The camp reached about 2,500 people before the pandemic was officially declared. Today, its population is estimated between 650 and 1,000.
There have been persistent disorders with water leakage. Many camp citizens do not accept as true what comes from the tap, Rudnik said.
A plague of rats, snakes and mosquitoes occurred in early August when hurricane Hanna storms pushed the river over the banks and flooded parts of the camp, he said. Then the Brownsville team helped pay for the fumigation.
“The challenge is how to continue from here,” Rudnik said.
The citizens of the camp are grateful for the fresh tents that update the tattered ones and the edibles they want to cook their own food, however their prospects are located a few hundred feet north beyond the camp, after the red arches of the Gateway International Bridge, Texas.
And Teams in the Dallas domain, such as the Rio Valley Relief Project nonprofit, continue to collect donations or fulfill special desires, such as sending bath curtains to the camp’s swimming domain or rubber shoes. , she simply tells them: wanting is wanting. ” We all deserve life and everything we have to offer,” Stewart said.
But Rudnik stops when he says this: what we really want are lawyers to help us get through it.
This is a herculous challenge due to increasingly stringent U. S. policies in already restrictive asylum processes in an outdated judicial system.
Much of the legal war takes place on video and in a beige, two-story building where the Matamoros Migrant Resource Center is located, steps from the camp.
Here, lawyers and many others have worked for months on asylum and humanitarian access cases. There are a wide variety of allies, from lawyers to intellectual fitness professionals, who perform video testing in remote cities.
American lawyer Charlene D’Cruz passionately coordinates much of the effort. He moved to Brownsville a year ago to work with the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government. A multilingual lawyer is helping asylum seekers register their own applications. They’ve helped with about 1,600 cases, since about September last year. Most cases register with immigrants who represent themselves, although some personal attorneys also take cases for full representation.
“We have followed due process and completely destroyed it,” he said of the many adjustments to the US asylum formula. But it’s not the first time For the more than three years, or courtrooms along the border. But the pandemic put an end to that.
Still, D’Cruz appealed the losses, everyone deserved their day in court. His motivation comes from his own immigrant roots in Mumbai, India.
“Most of the cases will be rejected, other people tell me,” D’Cruz said. “That is not my starting point. I need due process. I am in the Constitution and I am an immigrant. One of the reasons I came here and stayed. ” in this country there are more (own) processes in this country “.
He also attributes some of his productivity to his staff, adding an affable Honduran asylum seeker who runs through the camp as a letter to tell the desperate his case and the one-year window to seek asylum in the United States.
The camp emerged after the Trump administration implemented migrant coverage protocols in 2019. The program would end what a Trump administration official called a “take and release” for asylum seekers due to persecution in their home countries.
Under the policy, first enacted in January 2019 along the Mexico-California border, the maximum number of newly arrived asylum seekers may no longer wait for their US court dates in the summer. Over the past year, the Matamoros in-position program and camp have become welcoming others waiting to be summoned by the U. S. government for hearings in the new tent courts in Brownsville
According to Syracuse University Research Center called Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, of the 15,600 asylum en instances prosecuted through the Brownsville Bridge courts under the program, 128 have been granted asylum or some form of legal redress.
Several thousand are on appeal.
Some of the immigrants who came north to seek asylum in the United States to be told to wait in Mexico now have to check to resettle south of the border. The UN firm says asylum cases in Mexico have increased dramatically. about 70,000 implemented for asylum, up from 2,000 in 2014, said Sibylla Brodzinsky, spokesman for the UN refugee firm founded in Mexico City.
“Asylum programs have a higher exponential level,” said Brodzinsky, who added that the organization supports Mexico’s greatest efforts.
The UN refugee firm has a permanent in Monterrey, about two hours south of Matamoros, but they do not have a permanent in Matamoros, a delicate point among some who say that the experienced signature can be of great help. The state of Tamaulipas, where Matamoros is headquartered, deserves its designation as one of the greatest damage on the planet. The United States places Syria on the same level.
Some in Matamoros have just moved to Mexico for work and safety.
Dallas attorney Fernando Dubove had a consumer from Matamoros de Cuba who went to a Mexican coast in the city and found a job. Their consumer immigration hearings had been restarted four times. At the border, its consumer “vulnerable and easy to detect”. through Mexican criminals who attack immigrants, Dubove said.
Many describe him as a generous guy who was willing to help those in the desperate diaspora. Upon his death, a monument to the camp featured candles and a crown of blue and white flowers with a belt of golden sequins with the inscription “Rodrigo”.
In the days after his death, around August 18, six more bodies were evicted from the grown Rio Grande, better known in the Mexican aspect as the Rio Bravo.
New rumors have been reported: did they drown or was it an act of crime?