Edixon, a 19-year-old Venezuelan, was “angry and stressed” in downtown El Paso around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. He had just crossed the border between Mexico and the United States illegally in Ciudad Juárez with his girlfriend Milena at dawn and was laughing euphorically at the feeling of having made it. With her pants torn by the accordions, she sheltered from the sun by sitting on the floor in the shade of one of those portable public urinals.
Edixon and Milena are the penultimate migrants from the Title 42 era, a health rule Donald Trump introduced in 2020 on the pretext of protection from the pandemic. More than 40 months later, that measure, which enabled 2.6 million hot returns, expires at the end of this Thursday, and that prospect has encouraged thousands of people to try before it’s too late. What will happen if it is already happening is difficult to predict at this point, even for National Security Minister Alejandro Mayorkas, who told a press conference that “the next few days and weeks could be very difficult”. He also recalled that the Biden administration had beefed up local authorities (a total of more than 24,000 agents along the 2,000-mile border) and sent two messages to migrants. First: “The border is not open.” Second: “Don’t risk your life or your life’s savings to come here.”
A group of migrants surrender to border patrols at the 20-foot wall that separates Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from El Paso, USA. PATRICK T FALLON (AFP)
Like so many others, Edixon and Milena ignored these warnings. They migrated for three months, crossing Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. Once at the border, they drove a little further to the Church of the Sacred Heart in downtown El Paso. He had “put all his hopes in this shelter,” the epicenter of the city’s recent migration crisis, where more than two thousand men, women and children have been found sleeping in the streets in recent days. When Edixon arrived there were only a few dozen left. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t know if turning us in is a good idea. They will run all over the world. They’re going to break our hearts,” he said.
The clearing of these streets, which were rebuilt in the light of the eternal border crisis, was a matter of 24 hours. At 5 p.m. Tuesday, some unidentified agents distributed leaflets urging those who were passing by illegally who had not yet reported to authorities to report urgently to the nearest office. The pamphlet also warned them of dire consequences if they chose to remain in Limbo.
Thus began what the bureaucrats, with their talent for euphemisms, had dubbed a “local law enforcement operation.” In the afternoon, around 20 gunmen insisted that the migrants run to “be processed,” a gesture condemned by local NGOs as intimidation. Hundreds of them, persuaded by members of the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service), queued until sunset to meet with immigration officials inside a white building surrounded by barbed wire.
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Fernando García, executive director of the NGO Red de la Frontera por los Derechos Humanos, holds up the paper they distributed to migrants on Tuesday, urging them to turn themselves in. PATRICK T FALLON (AFP)
Many left the country with a document, a handful of stapled papers called the Alien ID. There is a date and place in the United States when they must appear before an immigration judge. Some got an appointment at the end of the month. For others, as late as November 2026. As with so many other instances of the laborious and haphazard “processing” of paperwork, why the schedules differ so widely is a mystery.
Dozens of them still had not been released from the building nearly a day later, and their loved ones awaited their fate in the church in dismay. The rest, whose number cannot be quantified, were deported to Mexico, according to other migrants, relatives and friends of this newspaper. At midnight, several buses unloaded displaced migrants in Ciudad Juárez. Here, too, it could not be ruled out that the goals of one and the other were not accidental.
The immigration card allows migrants to move freely in the United States but not work: this permit has its own mysterious motives. Some took a plane to New York or Orlando, where those who had arrived in the US before them were waiting for them. Most seemed to have a common goal: Denver, a Colorado city about nine hours (and $90) away by bus whose authorities they’ve been told are willing to assist them, and that includes paying of tickets to other places with apparently more promising future prospects. .
Hundreds of migrants who had found a home on the sidewalks around Herz-Jesu-Kirche in the past few weeks immediately set off; At times it felt like one of those westerns where an outlaw is given until the end of the day to leave town. Local police urged those furthest behind to move to shelters operated in the city, where they do not accept undocumented immigrants. Unless it was a question of going to one of them, he wouldn’t allow them to go within a few blocks. A group of young Venezuelans told EL PAÍS that they had been threatened with tearing up their papers (and having to start over) if they tried to leave the papers. A few blocks away, a grim-faced man in uniform neither confirmed nor denied this information.
After clearing the sidewalks, which were still crowded with thousands of people the morning before, an army of cleaners appeared and cleared away everything that was left: blankets, leftover food, sandals, T-shirts … And in. Edison and Milena. They hoped to find “a community” of which only the remnants remained. They didn’t know how to get food, whether there was room for them in the shelters, whether or not it would be better to turn themselves in, or where to look for the $120 a thug asked them to bogus Promise to get them legal permission.
Oscar Leeser, Mayor of El Paso, on Wednesday at the presentation of a temporary shelter for migrants that was dedicated in a disused high school on the outskirts of the Texas city. PATRICK T. FALLON (AFP)
It got the impression that federal, local, and state agencies were discovering the rush to clean up the streets, like the teenager who must tidy up the house before his parents return. All eyes will be on El Paso this Thursday as Title 42 comes to a close. As of Friday, border arrests, which last rose to 8,000 people a day, are expected to rise to over 10,000. What leads to the fall of the sanitation measure is actually the re-enactment of Title 8, but with a novelty: migrants who show up at the border without having first asked for refuge through a mobile application called CPB One will be denied asylum from now on.
The mayor of El Paso this afternoon unveiled a brand-new migrant shelter that has been dedicated at a disused high school on the outskirts of town. It was his way of telling the press that the situation was under control. During the ceremony, he insisted that the eviction was the result of a program they had been working on for “months” and ignored the actions of ICE agents, while repeatedly repeating something similar to what the protagonist of that film said. French, Hate while storming into space: “Everything is going well so far.” What happens from Friday? He didn’t dare go beyond a sentence, which he also repeated like a mantra. “The border was closed yesterday. It’s closed today And on Saturday it will remain closed.
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