“We’re dying from the cold, I can’t take it anymore for the children,” says Venezuelan Omeira, while setting up a rickety tent that looks more like a fridge in the refugee camp set up on the banks of the Rio Grande, in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the Brownswille, Texas border.
In El Paso, adjacent to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, everything is white, and there are no more colors due to the thickness of the snow at minus 10 degrees.
US border patrol had no choice but to temporarily allow entry to 300 virtually frozen undocumented immigrants camped near the now-icy canal to protect them from the freezing weather.
On the Mexican side, city police officers took 57 foreigners to warm up at the Kiki Romero shelter, managed by the Juarez City Council. Most of them intended to cross the border to seek political asylum in the United States, the city’s human rights directorate said.
The same entity reports that hundreds of undocumented immigrants staying in Matamoros could not endure the temperature of minus two degrees Celsius (with a feeling of minus nine) measured in the early hours of Friday and they could not face any other Choice remained as to go there as an emergency shelter authorized by the municipal authorities.
Some were already being taken to Mexican hospitals for hypothermia and their companions were being taken to the ranch in several trucks, and by midday the camp was half-empty.
Gladys Cañas, from the Helping Them Succeed group, confirmed that a thousand migrants have already left the camp and are in the shelter set up in the Mundo Nuevo Auditorium on Avenida Pedro Cárdenas Sur.
Cañas said he witnessed the desperation of the migrants, to the point that some have dared to cross the frozen river at extreme risk to their lives and have fallen into the water, and we don’t know how many more will die from the weather is very bad and temperatures will continue to drop.
The sad thing, he said, is that those few who, after so much suffering, agony and struggle not to freeze to death, make it to the US shores will be brought back and have to repeat the odyssey to try and survive to the Mexicans return side.
Some are not returning, but there is no certainty as to their destination because there is no news on whether they were welcomed or perished along the way, he said.
A woman named Dayana said she was turned back because she was Mexican, but she lost contact with the group of foreigners she crossed the border with and she doesn’t know anything about them or what happened to them. He asked migrants to stop crossing with the cold storm as there was a high probability that he would get hypothermia and even die.
Soul