Young love, workouts, and Scrabble. Here's how asylum-seekers from Africa and Latin America cope while they wait in immigration purgatory in Mexico.
In this July 26, 2019, photo, people from Africa and Central America sit in chairs as the sun sets at El Buen Pastor shelter for migrants in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.
“Everyone cries here,” says Yanisley Estrada Guerrero, a 33-year-old Cuban economist and former bank manager. She’s now working illegally as a housekeeper at a Juarez hotel for $60 a month, less than half Mexico’s minimum wage. “I still cry almost every day. But I do it in the shower, because I don’t want anyone to see.”
The shelter ripples with often-unspoken bigotries, with ribbons of race and class and education in nearly every interaction. Daily life is marked by brutal summer heat, occasional dust storms, crushing boredom and the guilt of mothers who can’t afford dinner for their children. El Buen Pastor is home to migrants from 11 countries, from Cameroon to Cuba, Ethiopia to Guatemala. Mexican officials estimate there are roughly 13,000 of these migrants in Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people. Across Mexico, there are an estimated 50,000. They arrived after hiking through the jungles of Panama or flying directly to Mexico City. They took buses through Guatemala. They walked.
He has struggled with depression but he doesn’t weep when he talks about their killings, doesn’t ask for sympathy.He sold his gym and his car and fled to Kenya. When that didn’t feel far enough he found a murky middleman named Moses. Alphat paid him $7,000 to arrange a series of flights: Kenya to Ethiopia to Argentina to Mexico City.
“OK, now I’m settled,” he thought as he dropped the coin into the turnstile and began walking above the dry riverbed of the Rio Grande. “Now I’ll get my freedom.”Little did he know that the Trump administration was turning away more and more asylum seekers with a vague promise to process them later. So many migrants lined up on the bridge waiting to cross that local Mexican authorities started assigning numbers, like a ticket for service at a deli, updating the number every day on Facebook.
El Pastor is the lawgiver and the genial benefactor who supplies everything from food to bus fare to toilet paper. In the spring, trouble appeared ready to explode when a Mexican aid organization brought a group of African migrants to the shelter.“Are they going to stay with us?” the stunned residents asked him.
For the most part the migrants have learned to get along. Why bother fighting in a place where everyone is sleeping on the same cheap sponge mattresses, and lining up every morning for the same off-brand corn flakes smothered in sugar? A second administration order, on July 16, effectively denied asylum to most migrants arriving at the border from that day forward, insisting they must first seek asylum in another country they had passed through.
In June, a union representing U.S. asylum officers challenged the January policy of returning migrants to Mexico in a legal brief, saying it’s “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation.” She knew who he was. Everyone did in her neighborhood. He was from MS-13, one of El Salvador’s most murderous gangs.
Early this summer she slipped into the U.S. illegally and filed an asylum request. While she was quickly deported back to Mexico, her request came days before the July 16 deadline. Because of that, she’ll eventually be able to argue her case in a credible fear interview. People who have slept through the day shuffle outside, the “thwop-flop” of their plastic sandals echoing in the courtyard. Scattered laughter is heard. Children run around almost frantically, playing with anything they can find: a balled-up piece of paper, a crushed water bottle stuck to the bottom of a shoe, a broken skateboard. A 17-year-old Nicaraguan girl sits on a bench close to her new boyfriend, a Ugandan in his 20s.
The Ugandans are the most avid players. Their games regularly go through dinner, where gentle bickering about rules and correct spellings mix with wistful talk about the pleasures of steamed bananas and ground nut stew.Samrah can still tell you about her best word: Squeeze. She got 50 points for it. The spiral notebook where she keeps score in blue ballpoint pen is filling quickly, interspersed with notes. “LEGAL STANDARD FOR ASYLUM,” one shouts in capital letters.
In the spring, he and his three children flew from Angola to Colombia, where they met up with a couple hundred other Congolese migrants. The caravan spent 70 days in the jungles of Panama before making their way to Mexico. Then they separated, each rolling the dice on the limited information they had. He went to Juarez; his friends went elsewhere. At least a handful got through U.S. immigration. Some are now living in Maine.
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