Tijuana, the last frontier of the Ukraine refugee crisis

In Nikita Sokolov's head, the war in Ukraine ends in California.

The beginning of that dream and the end of that nightmare are found in Tijuana, on the border between Mexico and the United States, the last stop before reaching the promised land.

After the outbreak of the armed conflict, the Joe Biden government announced at the end of March that his country was going to receive 100,000 refugees.

And thousands have already embarked on the journey to start a new life in America.

"I have lost my house, my business, family and friends," says Sokolov, 35, "We lost everything, but today we have another chance."

Sokolov knew virtually nothing about Tijuana before he landed just a few hours ago.

Mexico is an inhospitable terrain for the more than 2,000 Ukrainians who have arrived in recent days, according to authorities' calculations.

Most do not speak Spanish or English.

But in the Benito Juárez Sports Unit, where a shelter was set up behind the border wall, it is not necessary.

It is a miniature kyiv.

All the signs are in Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainian flags sway in the Pacific Ocean breeze, and

and home-made recipes are served daily.

The gym's basketball court is overflowing with bunk beds and mats, with exhausted adults sprawling on the floor and kids running around doing puzzles to kill boredom.

There is no room for anyone else inside and the camp grows every day.

In a few hours, several awnings and more beds had to be installed on the courts that are not covered and the planters were filled with tents.

Those who are outside cling to the cool of the shade and to their bottles of water: they traded the snowfall at home for the sun in Tijuana, where the thermometer shows more than 30 degrees.

Soon the space will have to be expanded towards the soccer and baseball fields.

The ten daily flights from Mexico City and Cancun are overcrowded: about 400 refugees arrive every day.

A Ukrainian woman travels on a bus to the shelter installed in the Benito Juárez sports unit, in Tijuana, on April 7. Omar Martínez

The Benito Juárez sports car became little kyiv last weekend.

Before, the first Ukrainians settled in a small camp near the San Ysidro port of entry, the largest crossing point on the busiest border in the world.

A bus station and flowerbed housed between 300 and 400 people each night.

All that became a ghost town in a matter of hours, after being closed last Wednesday.

That tiny space had a dining room, a children's area with toys and coloring books, a first aid clinic, a psychological care office and even a de-stressing massage area.

"All this has been thanks to the efforts of many volunteers, organizations and churches that have worked together," says Inna Levien, a Belarusian woman who has lived in California for nine years and who crossed to Mexico to help.

The Ukrainian and Slavic community in the United States has turned out to support those who arrive.

The deployment starts from the Tijuana airport, where a welcome group gives briefings in Ukrainian to those who arrive and transfer them to the shelter.

The reception committee has even developed its own application to monitor each refugee in real time and organize a shift system so that they can be processed by the immigration authorities.

“I am impressed and moved by everything they have done for us,” says Daniela Kerr, a young woman from Dnipro who has shift 2,270 and hopes to meet her husband, an American teacher, in Florida.

Tijuana thought she had seen it all when it came to immigration, until she ran into the Ukrainians.

Never has a group of migrants been so organized.

Enrique Lucero, the municipal head of Migratory Affairs, reports that the arrival of people from Eastern Europe to Mexico began to increase since the middle of last year.

More than 28,000 people from Ukraine and 75,000 from Russia entered the country in 2021, triple compared to 2020, according to official statistics.

In January and February alone, more than 9,000 people with Ukrainian passports and almost 30,000 Russians have entered.

None of them need a visa and they all enter as tourists, but many have changed the beaches for the asylum and refuge procedures at the northern border.

"It was an invisible migration until the war came," says Lucero.

A refugee from Ukraine and her son in the camp set up outside the Benito Juárez shelter, in Tijuana, this Thursday. Omar Martínez

The routes that the refugees have taken to Tijuana are bizarre.

After leaving Ukraine, Roman Biloskalenko, a Nikopol employee, passed through the airports of Warsaw, Zurich, Madrid and Bogotá before making two stops in Mexico, in Cancún and Guadalajara.

He paid more than $3,000 in tickets.

Simion Filipov, a sailor from Mariupol, traveled through Istanbul, Paris, Madrid and Panama.

"He's been crazy," sums up Filipov, wearing a NASA sweatshirt given to him by his sister, who lives in Seattle, to match his latest obsession: chasing the American dream.

Why go to America and not stay in Europe?

"I was in Poland for more than a month and I couldn't get a job, nobody supported me and everything is saturated," says Biloskalenko.

Many have relatives and acquaintances in the United States.

“A bomb destroyed the building where we were staying, it fell two floors above our apartment,” says Viktoria Ivanova, a 27-year-old girl from Mariupol who is traveling with her boyfriend.

"Some friends convinced us to go to Idaho, we joined a Telegram group where they gave information and now we are here," she adds.

"My aunt lives in Chicago, I want to go away for a while and come back to rebuild the country," explains 25-year-old Dmitro Pushchal.

"My sister and my father stayed in the Ukraine, I have not had any communication with them and they do not know that I am here, I do not know what I am going to tell them," he confesses.

Anya Rebrova says that her fiancé fled to Los Angeles during the 2014 war and that she hopes to see him again to get married, after speaking on the phone every day for eight years.

[permanent residence], but well, finally because of the war I am here”, he says smiling.

It is the largest exodus of people since World War II, with more than 4.2 million people leaving Ukraine, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The vast majority of those fleeing the war are women, children and the elderly due to martial law that prevents men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving.

In Tijuana, however, many of the refugees are in that age range.

In many cases they were outside the country when the Russian invasion began, they were discharged from the Army for health reasons or they had another passport.

It is a sensitive issue where the patriotic struggle and the need to save life collide.

"It was a difficult decision," admits Sokolov.

Nikita Sokolov, a Ukrainian refugee in Tijuana, Mexico, on April 7. Omar Martínez

Tijuana authorities speak of a “sophisticated migration”, very different from what is customary: without the intention of staying in Mexico, with greater purchasing power and the possibility of staying in hotels.

Mexico's flexibility in the face of migration and the pandemic explains in part what has been seen in recent days.

The welcome announcement of the Biden Administration ended up triggering arrivals.

What began as a political promise became a migratory phenomenon more than 10,000 kilometers from where the war is taking place.

While the media talk about the little Ukraine, the fear of the municipal government was to become a "little Poland" due to the massive arrival of people fleeing the war.

"The situation was overflowing," admits Lucero.

Added to this is the application of Title 42, a measure by the Donald Trump government that expels and forces all asylum seekers to wait in Mexico under the pretext of containing the pandemic.

The US decision to paralyze the reception system in the last two years has had a huge impact on the border: tens of thousands of people have been stranded for months and last year all records of detentions of undocumented migrants were broken. : 1.6 million people were arrested.

In this context, the preferential treatment of the United States to the Ukrainians has been surrounded by controversy.

The immigration patrol (CBP) opened the El Chaparral checkpoint, which has been closed for almost two years, just to serve them.

It is admitting about 25 refugees into the country every hour.

And the people of Ukraine have achieved in a couple of days what people of other nationalities have not achieved in months or years.

"It's unfair, we all deserve an opportunity," claims Carmen Rivera, a 26-year-old Honduran, who has been waiting with her two children in Tijuana for ten months.

Rivera lives in the Albergue Embajadores de Jesús, in an area known as

.

The refuge is at the end of an unpaved and littered road, at the bottom of a canyon, which is practically cut off when it rains.

Those contrasts have become more evident than ever.

Deportivo Benito Juárez itself housed the caravan of Central American migrants in 2018, but it was like being in another dimension: the overcrowding was much worse then, as were the minimum health conditions.

A woman walks in the area known as Little Haiti, in Tijuana, this Thursday. Omar Martínez

It is an open debate, crossed by Washington's political response to the war, insufficient support for Central Americans and accusations of discrimination: the dichotomy between whites and browns, the rich and the poor, the privileged and the rejected.

The Russians, escaping from their own government, are relegated like the rest and are forced to wait in Mexico or cross illegally into the United States to turn themselves in and force their asylum requests to be granted.

Esmeralda Siu Márquez, of the Coalition for the Defense of Migrants, claims that treatment must be equal, but urges not to hold Ukrainian refugees responsible for these differences.

"Those responsible, in reality, are the authorities of the United States, not even those of Mexico," she says.

Siu Márquez points out that the arrival of the Ukrainians also collides with the image in Mexico of how migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are seen.

"This breaks the scheme we were used to, but you have to understand the context, they are people fleeing a war," she says.

"As long as there is no change in the trend of the war in Ukraine and other routes that allow regular transit are not opened, it is possible that we will continue to see a significant number of people crossing through Tijuana," says Joseph Herreros, assistant representative of Protection of UNHCR.

Given the latent possibility of a pull effect, Tijuana trusts that the transit of Ukrainians to the United States will be rapid so that the reception system does not collapse and that by the end of the month the backlog that makes hundreds of people have to wait in Mexican soil.

The biggest challenge will come on May 23, when title 42 is scheduled to be lifted, which will most likely trigger flows from Central America again, much larger and without immediate relief in the US system.

“Tijuana is already a bottleneck”,

While that happens, in the small kyiv of Tijuana the mariachi sounds and tacos are distributed.

Families full of children wait to spend the night on the other side of the wall.

And the suitcases are loaded with suffering and longing for distant lands.

“I am so close to fulfilling this dream that I can already smell the United States,” says Sokolov, looking forward to meeting his son again in the coming days.

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