This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
MATAMOROS, MEXICO – At its height, more than 3,000 asylum seekers lived in the tent city in Matamoros, on the shores of the Rio Grande—a stone’s throw from another life in the United States. The encampment first began to take shape in 2019, just a few tents in a plaza abutting Gateway International Bridge, as the newly implemented Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) took effect. Also known as Remain in Mexico, this Trump administration policy required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings, sometimes for months or years.
In border cities like Matamoros or Reynosa, criminal cartels thrive, their hold amplified by an increasingly militarized border that migrants cannot easily cross. They prey on those migrants, confident that they can extract American dollars that the migrants’ relatives in the U.S. can wire—to pay the cartels to release the migrants they’ve taken hostage. Melvin, an asylum seeker who spoke to the Prospect from a shared apartment in Matamoros, said he was kidnapped in Matamoros and held for six days until his father sent money from Maryland.
The few tents in the plaza became dozens and then hundreds as migrants found solidarity and relative safety in numbers. Within a few months, the camp had moved to a city park across the street. Media coverage and local awareness grew. Volunteer groups like Team Brownsville and Angry Tias y Abuelas (Aunts and Grandmothers) sprang up to support the camp.
This was a refugee camp created by America’s policies, yet its residents weren’t refugees under American law. They were asylum seekers. This distinction meant that the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) never declared it a refugee camp like dozens of others around the world, which meant that UNHCR could not offer the accoutrements of refugee camp life, such as U.N. medical care, food, and other basic necessities. In its early days, there was scant public safety, no access to bathing facilities or bathrooms, and little adequate shelter. There were public-heath challenges, including an outbreak of chicken pox, even before the global coronavirus pandemic.
Despite those impediments, asylum seekers created a sense of community in the camp. They raised international awareness of their plight, fueling media coverage from around the world. On the campaign trail last year, Jill Biden visited the Matamoros encampment. After her visit, asylum seekers in the camp and their advocates sent hundreds of postcards to her, asking her to end Remain in Mexico should her husband win the election.
Once her husband won and took office, President Biden’s attempt to apply a moratorium to deportations was stymied by a Trump-appointed judge. However, his administration was turning its attention to the thousands of asylum seekers waiting in Mexico. The MPP program had enrolled nearly 70,000 asylum seekers, but only 26,000 had open cases when Biden took office. Advocates argue that asylum seekers whose MPP cases were closed should have a chance to appeal. Lawyers say the process was rife with due-process violations and that the program violated the United States’ own laws barring “refoulement,” forcing migrants to return to a country where they may be in danger.
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On February 19, the Biden administration began processing asylum seekers with open MPP cases. The administration enlisted UNHCR to help with management, and despite logistical hurdles, Biden’s team processed hundreds every week. At the outset, the administration prioritized the Matamoros camp, which saw the asylum seekers at the Matamoros port of entry processed far more speedily than those at other ports of entry.
But because the administration is only processing those with open MPP cases, dozens of asylum seekers in the Matamoros camp were left behind. Lawyers prepared a joint motion to reopen the cases of those who remained, and the administration made an exception—a testament to the high profile of the Matamoros camp in particular. On March 12, Melvin and his brother Henry, crossed into the U.S. after nearly two years in Matamoros. As of the end of March, nearly 4,000 asylum seekers’ cases had been transferred out of MPP courts, indicating they have been allowed to cross into the U.S. Data indicate that most are Cuban nationals. The administration gradually opened the process to additional ports of entry. As of publication, six ports of entry are processing asylum seekers with open MPP cases, and by the end of April the administration had processed more than 8,000 asylum seekers in the program.
Biden’s rhetoric and his scrapping of the MPP program has signaled a major reversal of the cruel policies of his predecessor. But his administration has also sought to temper expectations, knowing the challenges to fully reversing and reckoning with Trump’s immigration system. For their part, while acknowledging that wholly altering Trump’s immigration system cannot happen overnight, immigrant rights advocates criticize the administration’s defense of some Trump policies, even as Biden reverses others. Indeed, many immigrants’ own experiences along the border belie promises of safety and humanity and illustrate the dire need for haste.
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The nearly vacant tent camp for asylum seekers, located in a park in Matamoros, Mexico, in late March 2021
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WHEN I SAW THE Matamoros camp in late March, it was nearly vacant, as the Biden administration had begun processing asylum seekers with open MPP cases. The asylum seekers who remained had closed or otherwise complicated cases. On the final day of the camp’s existence, roughly 60 asylum seekers remained. With cruel irony, their dwindling numbers made them more vulnerable to abuse, though the camp had never been particularly safe.
In what amounted to a crackdown, the Mexican government had fenced the park and dispatched guards to prevent new migrants and asylum seekers from entering. That followed its August 2020 decision to bar all newcomers and media from entering the camp, arguing it was a COVID risk, even though the pandemic had started much earlier. Critics called the policy a media blackout, and an attempt to obscure the international profile of the asylum seekers. In March 2021, even the volunteer medical staff was relegated to a clinic in a neighboring building. Global Response Management (GRM), an international nonprofit organization that staffs medical personnel in crisis environments around the world, took up residence across the street and continued treating camp residents as well as other migrants. But staff said that the increased security made it difficult to treat remaining residents, including pregnant women.
“The mission of GRM is to establish that as migrants move north, they have continuity of care,” Mark McDonald, a project manager for GRM, told me, referring to the patient rapport the group has developed with asylum seekers. “We are elated to see that people are crossing that have been in the camp for well over two years. But yesterday, we were denied entry at the gate to provide medical care.”
On March 8, with camp conditions deteriorating, the remaining asylum seekers collectively made the difficult decision to leave the camp and move to a shelter deeper in Matamoros. Some went to other shelters or apartments. They worried, however, that without the visibility of the camp they would be left behind and forgotten.
The day after they departed, volunteers were granted access to the camp to salvage what they could.
As the volunteers walked through the abandoned grounds, they told me of all the work that asylum seekers and volunteers had done to make the campground livable. Trenches half a foot deep carved up the dusty earth. Solidarity Engineering, a women-led nonprofit, had designed and constructed the trenches to prevent flooding and disease by directing water around the tents. Proceeding through the camp, we saw several large water containers connected to sinks for washing clothes and to showers. Charging stations composed of power strips drilled to a center plywood pole had enabled residents to charge their phones. Some families had assembled taller tents, stitching one tent atop another to ease cooking indoors. Old washing machines were recycled into stoves and connected to an underground electrical wire from a city line. A newly constructed soccer pitch lay in the center of the camp, and a playground stood empty by the camp’s edge. A “free store” still stood, where camp residents had been able to pick up anything they needed for free. That tent was now empty, strewn with packaged razors, CDs, Q-tips, multivitamins, and lone socks. At one point, the camp had 44 showers and three free stores.
Wandering through the empty campgrounds was bittersweet for some volunteers, who rejoiced that their friends had entered the U.S. but had already begun to miss both them and this unusual period in their own lives. “I told myself I was not going to come back in here,” said Brendon Tucker, a Texas native who first arrived as a volunteer in 2018 and helped build much of the camp’s infrastructure. “It’s a weird feeling to be here now that it’s empty.” He walked between rows of unzipped, now abandoned tents that sliced the camp into a quasi–city grid, and spoke about the infrastructure volunteers and asylum seekers had constructed to make the park more livable, to give it more dignity. Even as he spoke, city workers were already deconstructing everything, piling tents and other belongings onto trucks, leaving chalky park grounds behind.
Bending over, Tucker retrieved an abandoned cowboy hat, smashed it atop his baseball cap, and continued surveying the remnants of what was once a small city—boxes of Band-Aids, toothbrushes, a child’s lone Croc. The scattered remnants of the encampment illustrated the rush to gather up lives led here, pack it into luggage, and cross into the U.S. in search of a new life.
THE CAMP MAY BE gone, but new migrants and asylum seekers continue to arrive in Matamoros, and others in the MPP program who have yet to be processed remain. I met one such asylum seeker, Jaquelyn, who sat on the edge of the bed she shared with her nine-year-old daughter, as, clasping her hands, she told me her story.
She had left Guatemala in July 2019, leaving behind a husband and three other children. Her nine-year-old daughter needed medical attention. When they presented themselves at the border, they were taken into custody and expelled to Mexico as part of the MPP program. Together with other mothers also seeking asylum, Jaquelyn and ten others were piled into one taxi “packed like sardines,” she said, and driven to a hotel where they pooled their resources for two rooms.
Eventually, Jacquelyn found the two-room rental, where she met with me nearly two years later. She described being unable to move freely around the city. “You always have to be looking around to be sure no one is following you,” she said. “There are people who have been kidnapped and put in cars and disappeared, so it’s not safe.”
Volunteers rejoiced that their friends had entered the U.S. but had already begun to miss both them and this unusual period in their own lives.
Jacquelyn became increasingly desperate about the wait and worried for her daughter’s deteriorating health. She paid someone to cross the Rio Grande, but the smuggler failed to inform the cartels in advance. When the mother and daughter were ready to cross, cartel members seized them, thrusting a gun to Jacquelyn’s head. Threating to kill Jacquelyn, they demanded to know who she had paid. They photographed Jacquelyn and her daughter, returned them to their apartment, and took down their names. The cartel forbade Jacquelyn from trying to cross again. That’s why the two never leave their apartment and why her daughter doesn’t play outside anymore, she said.
Asylum seekers like Jacquelyn and her daughter are generally processed based on their enrollment date in MPP, but some asylum seekers have been given priority because of urgent health issues or other particular vulnerabilities. Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, a volunteer who has helped Jacquelyn find medical care for her daughter, said the two should be prioritized. The fact that the two have been living in an apartment rather than the encampment may have been slowing their processing. But on March 17, the pair received a call from UNHCR, informing them of their appointment to cross into the U.S. and await their court date here. The two are currently living in Michigan.
The administration has processed just over 8,000 asylum seekers out of the more than 25,000 eligible in phase one of unwinding MPP. That leaves thousands waiting with open cases and another 30,000 or more whose MPP cases are closed but who should be able to appeal, advocates say. The special case of those in the Matamoros encampment who were able to appeal sets a precedent for those 30,000 others. But there are thousands of new asylum seekers and migrants arriving at the border regularly. Since March 2020, they have been barred from entry and barred from asylum.
AS THE PANDEMIC took hold, the Trump administration concocted a new restriction on immigrants and asylum seekers: the Title 42 order. Conceived under the Centers for Disease Control’s existing authority, the order bars entry to migrants and asylum seekers at the border, ostensibly to stop the spread of COVID-19. But numerous public-health authorities have said that rationale is meritless. The border has remained open to Americans, who cross daily without so much as a coronavirus test. With Title 42 still in effect despite the change in administrations, the only way that asylum seekers can enter the U.S. is by having a pre-existing open MPP case.
By reversing some Trump policies but still enforcing others, Biden’s presidency has created both hope and despair among migrants and their advocates. When the administration began processing asylum seekers in MPP, other asylum seekers not in the MPP program or newly arrived at the border became optimistic. Administration officials’ pleas to migrants and asylum seekers to wait did not obviate the root causes compelling individuals and families to flee their homes.
In fact, the same day the remaining asylum seekers departed the Matamoros camp for other shelters and apartments, a new group of Honduran migrants arrived. They had wanted to join the camp, believing that the protection and solidarity that the camp had represented could help them.
Hundreds of miles west, in Tijuana, another migrant encampment had already been forming since the day Biden began processing open MPP cases. First predominantly populated by Haitian asylum seekers, the camp was full of immigrants seeking refuge but not yet able to access the new Biden policies. According to Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Haitian asylum seekers in the camp had been waiting between one and a half and five years for entry. Most were not enrolled in MPP, giving them no recourse but the hope that the visibility of sleeping in tents in sight of the port of entry would dramatize their plight.
Though El Chaparral Plaza tent camp in Tijuana is currently home to about 2,000 migrants and asylum seekers, few Haitian families now remain, volunteers said. The target of anti-Black racism from other migrants—even death threats—forced them to seek shelter elsewhere. As one Haitian asylum seeker told Al Jazeera in April, “The discrimination is very strong from other migrants, but even from Mexican organisations working in the camp.”
DENISE CATHEY/AP PHOTO
Thousands of asylum seekers have been processed under MPP, but pandemic-related health orders have still kept most immigrants out of the U.S.
PAST THE 100-DAY MARK of the Biden administration, immigrant rights advocates are wondering why Biden’s rhetoric isn’t yet fully matched by his actions. Biden has extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans and Burmese, but advocates also want the program extended to refugees from Haiti, where political unrest and a stagnated recovery from a vicious 2010 hurricane have sent thousands fleeing, and to those from Cameroon, where five armed conflicts have enveloped the country.
It’s not as if the new administration hasn’t been working at reversing Trump policies. Biden has proposed sweeping legislation to create new pathways for citizenship and legal residency, and established a task force to reunite children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. (Thus far, just four families of over a thousand separated families have been reunited.) His administration has ended the asylum cooperative agreements with Central American countries, which restricted eligibility for asylum seekers, and moved to restart the Central American Minors program, an Obama-era strategy to create more legal pathways for humanitarian protection.
Nevertheless, the administration has also worked hard not to appear “weak” on the border, and in mid-March brokered a deal with Mexico in which that country enforced stricter migration controls along its southern border in exchange for vaccines. As the number of unaccompanied children in government custody spiked to unprecedented levels, the administration repeatedly told migrants, “Don’t come.” To its credit, the administration worked around the clock to move children into the care of sponsors, but the situation became fodder for Republicans to pillory the president on immigration. In response, it appears that the president’s actions on immigration have fallen short of his rhetoric. Biden’s commitment to end border wall construction, for instance, is belied by reports that the administration has been considering filling “gaps” in Trump’s construction. The administration has also not yet reinstated the immigration judges’ union, a group that has campaigned for greater judicial independence and due process in immigration proceedings.
Title 42 endures, and Biden officials defend it. “The use of Title 42 is not a source of pleasure, but rather frankly a source of pain,” said Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alexandro Mayorkas, on April 30. “But it is something that is condoned by the reality that we are building an asylum system in a COVID environment, and we have other challenges, as well as we inherited the dismantlement of our operational capabilities to administer our nation’s asylum laws.”
The order has resulted in hundreds of thousands of expulsions and a virtual end to asylum, except for those with open cases. The Human Rights First tracking report has tallied 1,544 public reports of murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, and assault against people returned to Mexico under the policy. A separate report documents 490 reports of kidnappings, rape, and other violent attacks on people returned to Mexico under Title 42 just since Biden became president.
“The Trump admin’s longheld goal was to block refugees/asylum seekers under public health grounds,” tweeted Kennji Kizuka, associate director for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “The pandemic gave them a pretext to do so. It’s shocking that Biden’s @CDCgov & @CDCDirector have not reversed this xenophobic order orchestrated by Stephen Miller.”
Immigrant rights advocates are wondering why Biden’s rhetoric isn’t yet fully matched by his actions.
The administration has begun to revise parts of the order. In early April, Biden began allowing more migrant families and those with particular vulnerabilities attempting to seek asylum to cross. Since November 2020, the government has not expelled unaccompanied children, though recent reports have indicated that the Biden administration is actually expelling some Mexican children under Title 42 after consultation with the Mexican consulate. Nevertheless, the order largely remains in place. For those still in Matamoros, the border remains closed unless they have an open MPP case.
Immigration attorneys contend the order is illegal and have won an injunction against applying the rule to unaccompanied minors. As Lee Gelernt, lead counsel for the ACLU’s suit against the Trump administration, told the Los Angeles Times, “There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and Trump administration’s position.” The ACLU is continuing its lawsuit challenging the rule and is in talks with the Biden administration about it. As we went to press, those talks appear to have produced some incremental changes. On May 18, CBS News reported that as a result of those negotiations, the U.S. will admit 250 vulnerable asylum seekers per day but it has not ended its overall policy.
Some believe that Title 42 has contributed to the high numbers of unaccompanied children in government custody earlier this year. A recent CBS News report revealed that more than 2,100 unaccompanied children crossed the border between January 20 and April 5 after their families had been expelled under Title 42, indicating that some families had made the anguished choice to send their children over the border alone.
As of publication, Title 42 deportations have hardly declined. The Haitian Bridge Alliance has documented that a May 7 deportation flight to Haiti was the 33rd since February 1. Biden had earlier announced a 100-day moratorium on deportation flights, but the executive order was blocked by a Trump-appointed federal judge. As of April 30, Biden’s administration had deported more than 300,000 migrants, according to United We Dream, a youth-led immigrant rights organization.
Many wonder if the initial aims of Biden’s immigration policies have become a casualty of his broader agenda. According to such speculations, as the GOP searches for a weak spot in his popularity, Biden understands he could be vulnerable on the issue. The refugee cap controversy actually showed he could be attacked from both right and left. Biden had initially promised to raise the refugee cap to 62,500 for the remainder of the fiscal year. But on April 17, he announced he would keep the cap at 15,000. After coming under a storm of criticism from not just immigrant advocates but many Democratic members of Congress, the president reversed course and announced that he would keep to his promise of 62,500.
But the Tijuana camp was established in January, just as the Biden administration took over. And despite Biden’s changes to MPP, the camp remains a temporary home for hundreds of families seeking asylum. In Reynosa, 50 miles west of Matamoros, another new camp has also established itself. On April 19, asylum seekers there held a protest, chanting, “Biden, let us in!”
“It’s a legitimate tent city,” said Rangel-Samponaro, who runs the Sidewalk School, an organization that began in the Matamoros encampment to educate the children there. Her organization has since built a school in Reynosa. In early May, local volunteers estimated there may be as many as 170 families living just a block from the international bridge, The Monitor reported. The Sidewalk School has expanded to nine cities along the border, employing asylum seekers as teachers and building virtual classrooms, the school’s growth an illustration of how Title 42 forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico—just like MPP.
As more asylum seekers continue to arrive in Matamoros and Reynosa, volunteers said they fear the old border dynamics may be repeating themselves. Of the Reynosa encampment, Rangel-Samponaro said, “It’s like watching Matamoros all over again, except this time we have experience on how to run an encampment. We just now know how to run it more efficiently, which is very sad to say.”
Bertha Bermudéz contributed reporting and translation.
