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By Caitlin Dickerson
MATAMOROS, Mexico – A buttery yellow sun rose over the tent camp over the Texas River and thick heat cooked the rotten debris underneath, an addition of damaged toys, human waste, and unsused food filled with flies.
Clothes and sheets hung from trees and dried after being soaked and muddy last week.
When citizens emerged from the zippers of their canvas houses this August morning, some crawled with buckets in hand to water tanks to bathe and wash dishes. Others have piled up in front of the sinks with their arms full of children’s underwear and pajamas. They awaited the arrival of the first hot meal of the day, although it made them nauseous.
Members of this network of displaced people sought refuge in the United States, but were sent back to Mexico and asked to wait. They came after exclusive tragedies: violent assaults, oppressive extortion, murder enjoyed. in common: having nowhere to go.
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t stand it,” said Jaqueline Salgado, who fled to camp from southern Mexico, sitting in front of her tent in a bucket while her children were playing on the ground. “But when I have it all, past the worst situation, I come back to the conclusion that I have to wait. “
Ms. Salgado is one of six hundred other people stranded in a position that many Americans might have no idea would ever exist. It is a refugee camp on the doorstep of the United States, one of many camps that have sprung up along the border for the first time in the country’s history.
After its first appearance in 2018, the camp across the border from Brownsville, Texas, exploited nearly 3,000 more people the following year under a policy that forced at least 60,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their full legal cases, which can take years.
Those who have not given up and have returned home or who have had the means to move to shelters or apartments while waiting have been trapped outdoors since then in this camp, or in others like him who are now hanging on the southwest border.
Many have been in frayed tents for more than a year.
Trump’s leadership has said the policy of “staying in Mexico” is to end the exploitation of U. S. immigration law and alleviate overcrowding at border patrol facilities after nearly two million migrants crossed into the United States between 2017 and 2019.
The Mexican government has blamed the U. S. government for this situation, but it also refused to designate the outer areas as official refugee camps in collaboration with the United Nations, which at the time could have provided infrastructure for housing and sanitation.
“This is the first time we’ve been in this situation,” said Shant Dermegerditchian, director of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Monterrey, Mexico. “And we don’t actually do it. “
The U. S. Supreme Court agreed this week to review the policy after its challenge to the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. The case will not be resolved until after the election, so those living in the camp have months to wait, if not longer.
The camp attracted attention during Thursday night’s pre-prospective debate, when former vice prospective Joseph R. Biden Jr. noted, “This is the first prospect in the history of the United States of America that anyone seeking asylum will have to do so. in some other country. . . “he said. ” They’re sitting in danger on the other side of the river. “
The arrival of the coronavirus made things worse. Although only a few cases have occurred in the camp, the maximum U. S. aid personnel entering to distribute materials have stopped arriving, hoping to avoid transporting the virus.
The Gulf cartel, which traffics drugs across the border and is as strong a force as local law enforcement, has intervened to fill the void.
Gangs charge tolls on camp citizens crossing the river alone and infrequently kidnap them for ransom. regulations on when and where they are allowed to leave their tents.
Nine bodies have appeared on the banks of the Rio Grande near the camp in the past two months; The Mexican government reported that most of the deaths were from increased gang activity during the pandemic.
“I didn’t do anything, I didn’t borrow anything and I still have to keep running. Why?” said Salgado that August day.
She said she and her children fled her abusive husband, who drank too much and beat them when he got angry, and because her brother had been kidnapped and killed. Just then, his 11-year-old son, Alexander, who seemed to only paid indistinct attention, left his toys and began to get up.
“He’s nervous, ” said his mother. ” Every time we fought, his anxiety made him lose his health and he ended up vomiting.
Most young people in the camp have not attended formal school since they left home; parents wonder if they will be able to make up for lost time; some have cared enough to throw their children across the river on the backs of smugglers, sending them alone on the final stretch of their dangerous adventure to the United States.
Those who cannot bear to take such a resolution are tormented by doubts.
“I’m afraid I’ll never see him again because that’s all I’ve got,” Carmen Vargas said, grabbing the arm of her 13-year-old son, Cristopher, who has a bush of curly brown hair and is tall for her age. “But my son has to go to school. He’s only thirteen years old and he’s almost lost two. “
Cristopher cried as he listened to his mother describe the life array had left He took out id cards that appeared to have been municipal police in Honduras, but said his good luck had become a disadvantage when he imprisoned a tough member of a drug cartel in Honduras. 2018. In hours, the poster announced an opposite blow to Vargas, who and Cristopher fled leaving the ornate wooden furniture he had set aside and a fridge full of food.
With her palms cut off, Ms. Vargas took drops of sweat that ran down her forehead as she spoke. He apologized for the stench; as he left his tent, the insects crawled around a pile of faeces that had dragged the floods from the river. “We have to put up with everything here: the sun, the water, the cold, the heat, we have everything. “
Camp dwellers suffer from chronic flu virus diseases and abdominal insects that move through tents and with breathing disorders bothered by dusty air, and their skin is hailed by the crowds of mosquitoes that invade the camp after rain.
Most agree that life on the other side of the border would not be charming, especially if they lost their asylum records and had to do so in the shadows.
“Without papers, is it bigger to be in America than here?Yes, it’s a thousand times bigger,” said Lucía Gómez of Guerrero, Mexico, as she picked up clothes and toys strewn through the doors of her tents through hurricane winds. “They can simply locate him, hold him and deport him,” he said. But if you can, you can put food on the table. “
In his arms, his youngest son, an 8-month-old boy named Yahir, whose back was covered in a bumpy rash, his 16-year-old son, William, put cherries in his mouth from a plate full of flies.
Gomez said her circle of relatives fled to camp from southern Mexico after they ransacked her house and shot dead her husband and stepfather. “A guy came in and yelled, “Raise your hand!” lifting his arms as if holding an imaginary gun.
“That is why we are waiting,” he said. We are leaving to go through this unworthy life. And we go out for the sake of our children.
Teams of volunteers bought the sinks and water tanks, as well as hand-washing stations and a row of concrete showers that, after months of drying in the middle of the camp, were recently connected to a water source.
But his efforts have seemed in vain. Since the rise of the camp, the invisible wall of policies that prevent its population from entering the United States has only grown and strengthened.
Some have discovered tactics to improvise a minimum of comfort. Antonia Maldonado, 41, from Honduras, was standing in a kitchen with which she had retouched under shreded blue canvases hanging from trees and placed a raw bird on a shelf on an open flame, a piece of rescued wood placed on two piles of cubes upside down as a countertop.
He said he is on the hunt for elections in the hope that a new administration could ease some of the restrictions imposed by President Trump.
“Not a leaf enters this country without your permission,” Maldonado said, adding, “I just need to live with dignity. I’m asking for wealth. “
Some parents pinch weights to buy ornaments and treats in the supermarket trash cans for their children’s birthdays, but many walk through the camp with their eyes injected into blood, on the edge of tears or in a zombie state, as if they had stopped emotionally.
When Rodrigo Castro of the Parra angels arrived in Matamoros, he altered the emotional extremes, in the area of a year had gone from being a shy high-level student who liked to stay up late at night and draw flowers in his wallet in the head of his total circle of relos angelestives. That after the 18th Street gang, the ultimate brutal and tough gang of Guatemalan angels, murdered his mother and sister, indicating a grudge that meant he and the rest of his circle of relos angelestives could be next on his murder list.
“I can’t sleep,” she said one afternoon, sitting in front of the tents where she lived with her wife, daughter, grandmother, orphaned niece and 16-year-old sister, who had given birth upon arriving at the camp. “Sometimes I feel hysterical. ” He said he feared that someone else in his family circle might die.
But just two weeks after the angels, it was Mr. Castro of the Angels Parra who was dragged down the river on one of the edges of the camp. His death was a mystery. Police investigated a imaginable homicide, but we finally decided he had drowned.
His wife, Cinthia, was still surprised when he took a bus back to Guatemala City for the repatriation of her husband’s body, and also hoped to update the documents soaked in her pants when she died.
She’d want her 2-year-old to go out again when she got back out.
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