Border city struggles to find space for migrants

MATAMOROS (AP):

At a massive encampment near an international bridge along the US-Mexico border, migrants from Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela and elsewhere have turned scraps of plastic, poster board and rope into makeshift homes.

Mexico’s immigration agency and a Catholic aid group are offering what may be at least a partial solution to conditions in this and other camps just south of Brownsville, Texas, where thousands of people wait with the hope of eventually entering the US. Last week, they opened a temporary outdoor shelter in Matamoros for up to 850 people.

On the first day, 500 Haitians who were living at an old gas station and about 150 people who camped by the river moved in.

The outdoor shelter appears woefully inadequate to accommodate the thousands of migrants living in the city and the others who arrive each day, Mexican authorities say it may expand.

For many, it’s a step in the right direction.

“We are here, and we feel safer than how we were living over there exposed to everything,” said Luisa Hernandez, a 34-year-old Venezuelan woman who described being kidnapped in Mexico. For weeks, she had been living at the encampment near the river that stretches the length of four laps around an Olympic-sized track.

Hernandez’s Venezuelan companion, who identified herself only as Luisa out of fear for her safety, said many prefer to stay in encampments because they fear being deported from the temporary shelter, despite assurances from Mexican officials that they faced no such risk.

The US government’s attempt to create a more orderly system for people to seek asylum by creating a new mobile app has not eased the situation at the camps in Matamoros, though other cities in Mexico have reported improvements.

Tijuana, the largest Mexican border city, reported less crowded migrant shelters after the app, CBP One, expanded to 1,450 appointments a day in May and made other changes. People with appointments line up three times a day at a Tijuana border crossing to San Diego, the same spot where authorities forcibly evicted migrants from a squalid camp in 2021.

Mexican authorities in Chihuahua state, which includes Ciudad Juarez, reported that migrant shelters fell to 60 per cent occupancy after the changes in May.

But in Matamoros, a city of about 500,000 people known for drug-fueled violence, those who have coveted CBP One appointments become kidnapping targets. Filth is everywhere.

“We bathe in the Rio Bravo, which we were told is polluted,” said Edith Waldan, a 29-year-old Honduran who is now in the US but kept her CBP One appointment a secret while in Matamoros because she feared being kidnapped. “We go hungry. We’re in the heat. We suffer, but there’s no other way.”