El Paso, Texas
AP
When Luis López was lost in Panama’s Darien Gap last year with his wife, then seven months pregnant, their two young children and her grandmother, he often knelt in the mud to beg God not to abandon them.
“If I was bad, let me die here, but I came with my family,” the Venezuelan asylum seeker, 34, recalled on Friday of his prayers. Now in El Paso, the family has found shelter with the Catholic diocese.
Venezuelan asylum-seeker Luis Lopez speaks with The Associated Press, as his wife, Oriana Marcano, and daughter Amaloha Lopez listen in El Paso, Texas, on Friday, 12th May, 2023. When Lopez was lost in Panama’s Darien Gap last year with his pregnant wife, their two children and her grandmother, he often knelt in the mud to beg God not to abandon them. PICTURE: AP Photo/Andres Leighton.
But “la selva” – as many migrants call that particularly deadly stretch of their journey from South America to the United States – struck again two weeks ago. López’s sister called him in tears: She, too, had to flee and was now stuck in the jungle with their 68-year-old mother, who was badly injured from a fall trying to escape armed men.
MIGRANT CROSSINGS DROP AT US-MEXICO BORDER AFTER TITLE 42 EXPIRY
Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border have unexpectedly fallen, not risen, since Title 42 curbs expired and reinstating criminal penalties for illegal entry is likely the biggest reason, the Biden administration said on Sunday.
US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said border patrol agents have seen a 50 per cent drop in the number of migrants crossing the border since Thursday, when President Joe Biden’s administration shifted to a sweeping new asylum regulation meant to deter illegal crossings.
“The numbers we have experienced in the past two days are markedly down over what they were prior to the end of Title 42,” Mayorkas said on CNN’s State of the Union program. He said there were 6,300 border encounters on Friday and 4,200 on Saturday, but cautioned it was still early in the new regime.
Mayorkas credited the criminal penalties for migrants who illegally enter the country, which resumed under existing law after Title 42’s expiration, for the decrease in crossings. The COVID-era rule adopted under former President Donald Trump allowed officials to expel migrants quickly without an asylum process but did not impose penalties.
Biden, asked during a bike ride near his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, how he believed the border situation was going, responded: “Much better than you all expected.”
Biden said he did not have plans to visit the border in the near term.
The Biden administration plan requires migrants to schedule an immigration appointment through an app or seek protection from countries they passed through on their way to the US border. If they do not follow the process and are caught entering the US illegally, they are not allowed to try again, even through legal means, for five years. There are prison terms for other violations.
“There is a lawful, safe and orderly way to arrive in United States. That is through the pathways that President Biden has expanded in an unprecedented way, and then there’s a consequence if one does not use those lawful pathways,” Mayorkas said.
Officials from communities along the border agreed they had not seen the large numbers of migrants that many had feared would further strain US border facilities and towns.
“The amount of migrants we were expecting initially – the big flow – is not here yet,” Victor Trevino, mayor of Laredo, Texas, told CBS News’ Face the Nation.
But Republicans who control the US House of Representatives warned a surge could still be on the way.
“I do think there are caravans going up. I think they still want to get in,” Representative Michael McCaul said on ABC’s This Week program.
Representative Mark Green, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN: “What the secretary failed to say is, this week has seen more crossings than any time, any week, in our history.”
Mayorkas defended the Biden administration policy against a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that claims the restrictions violate US laws and international agreements.
“This is not an asylum ban. We have a humanitarian obligation, as well as a matter of security, to cut the ruthless smugglers out,” he told ABC.
With US immigration policy in disarray, holding facilities, hospitals and towns have been left to struggle after tens of thousands of migrants waded through rivers and climbed walls and embankments onto US territory last week in the days before Title 42 expired.
Trevino said hospitals were at or near capacity, with no pediatric intensive care unit available and an emergency declaration in effect.
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser told CBS that the Red Cross was helping private organizations and church groups provide food and other assistance for migrants.
“The immigration process is broken. There’s no ifs ands or buts about it. But we are getting the resources that we need,” Leeser said.
There has been little movement toward a bipartisan agreement to address immigration in Congress.
Just before Title 42 expired on Thursday, House Republicans approved legislation that would resume construction of a border wall, expand federal law enforcement efforst and require asylum seekers to apply for US protection outside the country.
The Republican bill is unlikely to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
– SARAH N LYNCH, TYLER CLIFFORD and JEFF MASON, Washington DC, US/Reuters
Rescued by Panama’s border police, the two women are now en route to Texas. They don’t know how they will cross into the US, though, as new restrictions on asylum went into effect last Thursday after pandemic-era immigration rules known as Title 42 were lifted.
While the Biden administration has touted the new policy as a way to stabilise the border region and discourage illegal migration, thousands of people continue migrating to flee poverty, violence and political persecution in their countries.
“The border and what happens at the border is not the cause of the problem associated with immigration, it’s a symptom of a system broken in many ways,” said El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who has assisted the López family since they arrived at the shelter on diocesan grounds last September.
Even when they were down to one last pouch of oatmeal mixed with river water in the jungle, López knew he couldn’t return to Venezuela, where he had received death threats after he quit working for government officials.
“They were telling me, ‘Death to the traitors,’” he recalled of the phone calls and visits from armed men that began last spring.
After the threats expanded to his sister, his ex-wife and their two children, López sold his truck company and set off through Colombia and then Central America. A smuggler who took their entire savings in exchange for ferrying them by boat to avoid the Darien Gap instead led them straight into it.
They encountered dead bodies and armed robbers, and tried to comfort four women they found crying near the path because they had just been raped, López said.
Lost on the path, they were redirected back by other migrants who were hidden by the cloak of thick vegetation but responded to their cries for help. López confronted the smuggler and went into shock, passing out by a stream.
“The children were screaming, ‘Mom, my dad!’” Oriana Marcano, 29, recalled. “My only solution was to get down on my knees – ‘My God, don’t take him from me.’”
Once they made it out, they still faced robberies, extortion and pushback across Central America and Mexico. “Unfortunately, the jungle is not all,” López said.
A group of Cubans later pushed them over the border barrier at Ciudad Juarez, just across from El Paso. They were apprehended, detained for a couple days and released to the shelter.
Two hours later, Marcano went into labor and was taken to the hospital. López was left behind, with no money and no certainty the family would be allowed to stay beyond the night. The man who had promised to sponsor them in the US – one facet of new migration rules – withdrew, telling López he had moved on to Canada.
“And I met this gentleman dressed in black, with white hair, who told me ‘Be calm, don’t worry,’ in his tentative Spanish,” López recalled.
Seitz decided to shelter them until the family got on their feet.
“They didn’t have sponsors, so we basically said, ‘I guess it’s on us,’” said Seitz, who wears a pin portraying Pope Francis that reads “Defending migrants cuz the Pope said so.” “We’re going to continue to try to be Christians.”
Awaiting a summer court date for asylum and a work permit, López and his wife have wasted no time. He refurbished a run-down van to start a house painting and remodeling business for which he’s already printed business cards. The couple volunteers at the diocesan shelter – Marcano when the two older children are in pre-kindergarten, López sometimes also overnight.
He likes to greet new arrivals in Spanish, telling them, “Now you’re free! I’m a migrant, I went through what you went through. You’re in the hands of God.”
El Paso shelter leaders are unsure how many people will arrive in the coming weeks: how many will be released by US authorities, how many will be deported, how many are still walking through Central America, desperate for a way into the US.
About a mile south from the diocesan shelter, at least half a dozen migrants had hung a makeshift tent on a gate in the border wall.
Hundreds had lined up there in previous days to be taken in by the Border Patrol for processing. But as the sun set Friday, only a handful of Texas National Guard kept watch on the dusty riverbank. By midday Saturday, the migrants’ tents were no longer visible.
