Donald Trump has not been able to fulfill the great promise of the campaign that brought him to the White House in 2016. He has not built the wall along the entire southern border, that catchy slogan (
We're going to build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it [We are going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay it
] that he repeated tirelessly in electoral events four years ago to appeal to his most nationalist base, and that experts warned impossible due to an orography of more than 3,100 kilometers of mountains, rivers, and private ranches that divide the United States and Mexico.
During the Trump administration, at least 597 kilometers of border barriers have been erected, 90% of them to replace old fences, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP, for its acronym in English) told EL COUNTRY.
The Agency assures that the construction "has helped to curb the behaviors and activities of traffickers" and the crossings of undocumented immigrants.
However, the wall, which before Trump reached the White House already stretched for a third of the border, does not seem the most efficient technique to prevent migration: during the first half of his term there were a record number of arrivals , mainly from Central American families who crossed Mexico fleeing a cocktail of poverty, violence and lack of opportunities in their countries of origin.
And with the dream that in the north, with work, they could give their children a future.
But that does not mean that the president has not achieved his goal.
Through a series of decrees, regulatory changes, brutal policies such as separating children from their parents at the border, and agreements with third countries, Trump has created a series of barriers to legal and illegal migration and, with unexpected help of the coronavirus, has managed to virtually close the southern border to those who came seeking refuge.
THE COUNTRY traveled to the remote areas of the border where the fence is built against the clock, causing severe damage to the environment and ancestral territories and of cultural value for indigenous peoples.
Meanwhile, the meticulously constructed virtual walls from the White House offices have shifted the persecution of migration to southern countries, have left tens of thousands of immigrants in limbo and have dealt a blow to the right of asylum in the United States. States that experts say could take years to reverse.
What separates the wall
They were there before Mexico and the United States.
And, of course, they were there long before the first fence was erected, a rudimentary barrier that was built between Tijuana and San Diego in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Tohono O'odham and the Kumiai are two binational First Nations that live divided by imaginary lines that the countries called borders and that over time became physical barriers, those that separate California from Baja California and Arizona from Sonora.
Now, with the expansion of the wall promoted by Donald Trump, these indigenous groups and environmental organizations have denounced destruction in areas that they consider sacred and alterations in the environment that can have profound consequences for the migration of fauna and even lead to the disappearance of species .
Workers build the new border wall in the Baja California desert.
On video: The wall and its implications along the California-Arizona border.
(Hector Guerrero | Teresa de Miguel)
When Trump arrived at the White House, there were about 1,100 kilometers of border wall between Mexico and the United States: from high fences to curb the passage of undocumented immigrants in areas near urban centers to bollards that prevented the transfer of cars in the most remote places .
In his 2016 campaign, the mogul promised to build a wall 1,600 kilometers from the border.
Over time it lowered its objectives to just over 800. So far, the Government has built 597 kilometers and, by the end of the year, they intend to reach 724. But Mexico has not paid a dollar for it, despite the fact that the president keeps repeating it in his campaign events.
In fact, his struggle to obtain funding for his flagship work led to the government's longest shutdown in its history to pressure Congress to provide the necessary resources and also declared a national emergency at the border to divert funds from other departments.
Additionally, a recent investigation by Propublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that infrastructure is costing American taxpayers billions of dollars more than the initial contracts anticipated.
The virtual walls
The indigenous villages of Guatemala that for decades have sent their young people north in search of the 'American dream', almost as a ritual of passage to adulthood, began receiving calls in 2018 informing them of the death of children and adolescents under custody of US agencies, cases of minors who became ill after crossing illegally and did not receive the necessary assistance.
A family, that of Claudia Patricia Gómez, a 20-year-old girl from San Juan Ostuncalco, in Quetzaltenango, had to bury their daughter's body after she was shot in the head by a Border Patrol agent.
Since Trump's arrival at the White House, the news about "inhumane treatment" in detention centers has been on the rise, recalls Pedro Pablo Solares, a Guatemalan lawyer who has spent years studying the migratory patterns of his countrymen in the United States. terror to deter migration was one of the government's first strategies to erect virtual walls, but not the most effective.
The most efficient wall that Donald Trump has built is not made of concrete or steel, nor is it several meters high.
It is a gruesome tangle of executive actions, administrative orders and agreements with third countries that the administration of the 45th president of the United States reached through threats and that has managed to stop legal and illegal immigration.
"The Trump Administration has managed to redefine the US immigration system dramatically since coming to power in January 2017, both through far-reaching changes, which have had great public repercussions, and technical adjustments that have gone more unnoticed," Read a report by the Migration Policy Institute published last July that compiles more than 400 executive actions on immigration carried out by the Government.
In addition to changes in the system for receiving asylum seekers at the southern border, reductions in the number of refugees hosted by the United States, entry bans for citizens of certain countries, restrictions on visas, obstacles to obtaining residency and even orders to dismiss asylum cases for those fleeing gender-based or gang violence;
the Trump administration disempowered immigration judges, filled the appeals courts with magistrates appointed by its attorney general, and tried to remove protection from undocumented immigrants rooted in the country such as the 'dreamers', thousands of young people whose parents brought into the country as children and to whom Barack Obama offered immigration relief.
Many of these measures have been challenged in the Courts of Justice, which have reversed some of them, while others remain in dispute.
The arrival of the anti-immigrant discourse in the White House sowed fear in the country's undocumented communities.
Advised by Stephen Miller, a 35-year-old Californian who has been linked to white supremacism and is considered the main architect of tougher policies on the border, Trump also tried to use fear as a deterrent to migration.
"But these actions, which added to a climate of cruelty, had no effect on reducing the migratory flow," says Solares, the Guatemalan lawyer.
In fact, during the Trump presidency, records of arrests of undocumented immigrants have been reached, especially after the rumor spread in Central America that if they came to the United States with a child, the Border Patrol would let them pass.
Between mid-2018 and 2019, thousands of parents who had traveled through Mexico with children by the hand and even with babies carried in their arms began to arrive at the southern border of the United States.
Contrary to what had happened before, these migrants no longer went to remote places to go unnoticed.
They would just cross over and look for Border Patrol agents to turn themselves in.
Once in the United States, the authorities processed them and released them with a summons to see a judge.
But, with immigration courts saturated, that process could take months and even years, a time when migrants started working and sending money home to their families, while children studied in American schools.
That was possible, in part, thanks to two child protection laws that prevented migrant minors from being incarcerated.
The caravans were added to this trend: the groups of Central Americans that crossed Mexico together to reach the United States more safely and without going into debt to pay the coyotes and traffickers, who could charge up to $ 10,000 for that journey.
The images of the Central American exoduses enraged Trump.
For him, those migrants who entered his country with children were taking advantage of the "loopholes" in the US system.
His response was the policy of 'zero tolerance': a plan that, among other things, contemplated the separation of undocumented parents from their children "no matter how young they were" or the trauma that this could generate.
The president wanted to send a clear message to Central Americans: if you come with a minor, we are going to take him away.
But the stories and audios of some of those children crying desperate to see their parents shocked the country and forced it to back down.
By then, thousands of families had already been separated and, more than three years later, there are more than 540 children who are still far from their parents because the government deported them to their countries of origin and now it cannot find them.
The southern walls
A few months after that setback for the Government, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced its new strategy to curb migration on the southern border: those who tried to enter without papers could be returned to Mexico while they awaited the resolution of their cases in US cuts The MPP program began in January 2019 in Tijuana and gradually spread to other points along the border.
But the decline in migratory flows did not occur until June of that year, after Andrés Manuel López Obrador's cabinet promised to apply a tougher hand to Central Americans who crossed its territory.
The agreement, reached after Trump threatened Mexico with imposing tariffs on its products if it did not do more to curb migration, contemplated the deployment of the newly created Mexican National Guard at the borders and increasing the number of returnees under MPP.
"They threatened with tariffs that were going to affect the country's economy in a terrible way, and Mexico decided to become the wall, outsourcing the US border to our southern border," says Soraya Vázquez, deputy director of the binational organization Al Otro Lado, that assists asylum seekers in Tijuana.
"Trump says mockingly and sarcastically: 'They already have 25,000 guards guarding the border, they are paying for the wall.'
And it is certainly not a construction, but it is a wall made up of agents from the National Guard, the army and various corporations, thus preventing the new caravans that have formed from reaching their destination, ”he adds.
The images of the National Guard repressing the caravans surprised in Mexico, where President López Obrador had come to the presidency promoting a humanitarian discourse with the Central Americans, which was transformed as pressure came from Washington.
But he was not the only one to commit with Trump to stop the transit of migrants heading north: the presidents of Guatemala, first, and El Salvador and Honduras, later, also accepted, after negotiations not without threats, that the United States send migrants from other countries who came to their territory to seek refuge.
In practice, the Central American country where the effects of these agreements have been most seen has been Guatemala, which received hundreds of Hondurans and Salvadorans returned from the United States before the pandemic and which played an important role in the dissolution of the last caravan. of migrants formed in early October in Honduras.
However, Guatemalan lawyer Pedro Pablo Solares believes that “mass deportation” was not the main objective of the agreement, but rather the message it could send to “migrant populations that going to the United States to request asylum was no longer going to be a option".
In addition, Solares suspects that the annexes to the agreement reached between the two countries, which have not been made public, could have the bases that allow Washington to carry out illegal operations such as those recently revealed by a US Senate report, according to which agents of the border guard of that country (CBP) participated in the deportation of Honduran migrants in Guatemalan territory without having authorization to do so.
Locked from the outside
Every time he walks through the door of a business, Josué [asks not to reveal his last name for safety reasons] says that he feels that he has a life again.
For a year and three months, this 29-year-old Honduran has lived surrounded by hundreds of migrants in a tent that he shares with his partner and their three children, ages 7, 10 and 14, in the border city of Matamoros, in Mexico.
Being within four walls again, even for a few minutes, makes you dream of a bit of normality.
"In the time that I have been here, I have seen many things: people who have gone crazy, women giving birth with the help of other migrants, criminals, cartels beating people, and nobody does anything," he says.
This is how he describes his experience living in a refugee camp located on the bank of the Rio Grande, a place that is simultaneously only a few meters and light years from the United States.
“I have seen children with a different mind, not like a normal child, because they are here without being able to be distracted and without studying, and deep down we are living in a tent that is small, that is not like a house and we have no light.
I have not gone to a toilet that is not shared for more than a year ”.
Josué left the López Arellano neighborhood, in the Honduran department of Cortés, on May 17, 2019, two days after the Barrio 18 gang killed one of his aunts and her husband.
His family believes that the murder was in retaliation for his father's work in an evangelical church rehabilitating young gang members.
They decided to migrate because they felt that if they stayed, their life was also in danger.
But, he says, his intention was never to get to the US In fact, he applied for a humanitarian visa in Tapachula, in southern Mexico, but one day he found two gang members from the group that killed his uncles and uncles. he had to flee again with his wife and three children, this time heading north.
After several weeks in transit, hitchhiking and looking for any temporary job to survive, on July 29 the five crossed the Rio Grande from Reynosa (Tamaulipas) and arrived in Hidalgo (Texas), to request asylum.
“I said to the officers, 'Help, please.
We can't go back because we're afraid, '”Josué recalls.
"And they told me I was in a program called MPP and that I was going back to Mexico."
Matamoros migrant camp, Tamaulipas (Photo | Video: César Rodríguez)
The acronym with which the Honduran family collided, MPP, is the acronym in English that defines the Migrant Protection Protocols, another of the virtual walls with which the Trump Administration has managed to stop the arrival of immigrants and applicants for asylum.
Since the program was implemented in January 2019, the US has returned more than 67,000 people, most of them Central Americans, to dangerous Mexican border cities while they wait for a US court to hear their asylum cases.
Once in Mexico, those affected cannot do much more than worry about survival.
For most, getting an attorney to help defend and translate their cases is nearly impossible.
“They are called Migrant Protection Protocols but it has nothing to do with protecting them.
In fact, it puts them in great danger and makes it much more difficult for them to get protection and asylum in the US, "says Kennji Kizuka, a researcher specializing in refugee rights at the non-governmental organization Human Rights First.
As of May of this year, that group had registered at least 1,114 cases of murders, rapes, kidnappings, torture and other types of violent attacks of which the migrants of that program were victims, and it is likely that the number is much higher, since that many do not dare to denounce.
Furthermore, according to an analysis of immigration court cases by the Transactional Records Access and Information Center (TRAC) at Syracuse University of New York, only 7.3% of asylum seekers arrive at their court hearings with legal representation, while only 585 of the more than 43,250 closed cases (1.3%) have obtained refuge or some type of immigration relief.
“The US Government is putting up all the obstacles it can and is making people suffer in an inhumane way so that they no longer come.
It's a way to close the border, ”says Jodi Goodwill, a veteran immigration attorney from Harlingen, Texas.
She is one of the few who dares to cross the border bridge to Matamoros to legally assist those affected by the program in Tamaulipas, where the US Government recommends that its citizens not travel due to the increase in criminal activity, violence and risk of kidnapping.
The pandemic, an unexpected ally of Trump
Regardless, no action taken by the Trump presidency so far appears to have been as potent as the coronavirus, which has effectively closed the southern border to new asylum seekers.
To combat the pandemic, on March 21, the United States agreed with Mexico and Canada to prohibit non-essential travel by land between their borders.
Invoking Title 42 of the US immigration law, the Border Patrol has immediately expelled more than 197,000 migrants, under the pretext of preserving public health.
In addition, thousands of asylum seekers who had been sent to Mexico in the last year while awaiting their hearings in the US have seen their appointments postponed numerous times and live with the uncertainty of when they will receive them again.
That is the case of Josué.
He and his family had already gone twice to the makeshift tents at the border where migrants returned to Mexico appear before a judge via video call.
“The first time was one of the ugliest days of my life.
They said, 'Why did you come here?
Who gave them permission? '
They treated us like terrorists, a very exaggerated humiliation, ”he recalls.
The third hearing, in which they had to defend their asylum case, was scheduled for March, but when they reached the bridge they found the border closed.
After postponing their appointments several times, they have been summoned on January 19, 2021, although the courts will not take up the cases until the infections in both countries drop considerably.
With the border closed and a pandemic that paralyzed the world, uncertainty increased for migrants.
Limbo got even a little deeper.
Desperation prompted some to return to their countries or seek safer places to live within Mexico, while others chose to borrow thousands of dollars from family and friends in the United States in order to pay coyotes and cross the river illegally or through more remote and dangerous areas of the desert.
THE COUNTRY was able to verify how a human smuggler had about 50 migrants dressed in camouflage and waiting to cross in a safe house about three kilometers from the border between Naco (Arizona) and Naco (Sonora).
In the Matamoros camp, where Josué and his family are, it went from more than 2,000 people to about 500, according to the estimate of several migrants and organizations that assist them.
And for those who are still there, the situation is getting worse.
In June, the first cases of coronavirus were detected in the camp;
In July, the migrants were affected by Hurricane Hanna, which flooded part of the settlement and forced the displacement of some tents and even the field hospital that an organization set up to deal with the health crisis.
With the floods came an invasion of rodents and snakes and, in August, the leader of the Guatemalan migrants, Rodrigo Castro de la Parra, 20, was found drowned in the Rio Grande.
In addition, with the arrival of the pandemic, Mexican authorities restricted access to volunteers who brought food and other types of aid, such as programs for children who live there without access to formal education.
“The pandemic has exacerbated the precarious conditions in which they live.
There is also a very delicate situation in terms of mental health: there is a generalized crisis of great anxiety, depression, uncertainty ... This generalized state of emotional health does not help them make good decisions, ”says Soraya Vázquez, from Al Otro Lado.
Kennji Kizuka of Human Rights First says the situation in places like Matamoros is turning more violent.
“We are hearing that migrants are increasingly becoming targets of the cartels,” he says.
“A few months ago, a man under MPP was kidnapped and had his finger cut off because the family could not pay the ransom.
When they released him, he went to the port of entry to ask to be removed from the program because of what had happened to him and the border agents did not even want to give him an interview because they told him that the border was closed due to COVID.
Human rights groups and immigration lawyers have warned that the Trump administration is using the health crisis to deliver a final blow to asylum laws.
"The president is trying to exploit the current global crisis to try to carry out his anti-immigrant agenda by using the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) for ideological purposes," Melissa Crow, an attorney for the immigration justice project of the United States, wrote in a statement. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
But the reasons why migrants flee are difficult to curb and, although fear of the disease led to a drop in the flow at the border in the two months after its closure, in June the number of apprehensions returned to the levels prior to the pandemic and has not stopped growing since then.
And migrants continue to be expelled from their countries, now pushed by economies hit hard by the pandemic in Mexico and Central America.
“If recent history has taught us anything, it is that, regardless of the coercion measures established by governments, the migratory flow answers two big questions: how many people need to leave the sending countries and how many workers does the US economy need to be able to support itself. afloat ”, reflects the Guatemalan lawyer Pedro Pablo Solares.
"I think that regardless of who wins the November 3 election, it will be the answer to those two questions that will determine how much the migratory flow will increase or decrease."
Migration and the wall, the issues that made headlines in his presidential run and to which Trump has often appealed during his administration, have been virtually absent from this year's campaign, marked by the health crisis and economic debacle. .
In the last debate, when asked about the more than 500 children separated from their parents at the border that his government had not yet managed to reunite, the president said that they were working on it and defended their immigration policies: according to him, the practice The previous release of immigrants on US soil while they awaited the resolution of their cases was “a disaster” that allowed murderers, rapists and bad people to enter the country, a speech reminiscent of his campaign in 2016.
Joe Biden accused Trump of being "the first president in US history" to send asylum seekers to another country to "wait in the dirt on the other side of the river."
The Democratic candidate, who has promised to end MPP on the first day of his term if he wins, knows the situation in which migrants live under that program after his wife Jill visited the Matamoros camp last December.
For experts in immigration and asylum law, even if Biden wins, some of the changes implemented by Trump could take a long time to reverse and have long-term effects on the American system.
“Some things can be changed very quickly because it has been through executive orders or internal regulations.
Others will take longer, such as those related to the judges who were hired, and there will be some longer-term changes, such as adjusting the immigration and asylum statutes to clarify what the law says and avoid repeating this in the future, ”says Kennji Kizuka.
Although he believes that, with the pressing coronavirus crisis, many things will likely never be changed.
A recent editorial in The New York Times entitled 'Trump's immigration reform is worse than you think' urges to “reject, with laws and actions, the racism, cruelty and xenophobia of the Trump Administration, which will reaffirm that the United States is a nation of immigrants ”.
When Jill Biden visited Matamoros, Josué was able to speak with her.
She told her that if her husband won, they would help the migrants from the camp.
"Let's hope in God that the words he told me are fulfilled," says the Honduran migrant.
Josué says that he does not hold a grudge against Trump, but that he prays every day that he "change his heart" and that the next US president "end the suffering" they live.
“What I want is to see my children studying, working for them, seeing them sleeping in a bed.
That is what I ask, that they let us in to fight for our family.
The United States is a country in which the laws are respected and that is the most important thing, ”he says in a message that Central American migrants often repeat with one word or another.
Therefore, no matter how many obstacles they put on them, they keep waiting for an opportunity.
They continue to believe in the famous 'American dream', that idea that anyone, with work and effort, can progress regardless of their origin;
a dream that, in the part of America where they were born, in the poorest, most unequal and violent margins of the most punished countries, becomes unattainable.
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