Momentary border reprieve rests on a fragile base, as US immigration policies are put to the test

Nowhere has the change been as brutal as in El Paso. Last week, the number of migrants detained by the US Border Patrol dropped to 300, up from nearly 5,300 in May. At another border post where emergency tents were set up in May with a capacity of 500 people, there were 45 in detention last week.

[Border arrests drop as Mexico’s migration crackdown appears to cut crossings]

"We are a long way from what we were a few months ago," said Chris Clem, deputy chief of the Border Patrol, taking a group of journalists to parking lots reserved for squalid campers a few months earlier. He was visibly relieved. "We will take deep breaths and take advantage of almelia to evaluate what we can improve."

But the decline has been uneven. In the state of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the most frequented area of ​​the border, the level of crisis remains. Last week, hundreds of men were packed in a flamboyant garage at McAllen Station (Texas) and the nearby converted warehouse, where families are being held in chain pens, remains overcrowded.

Vice President Pence visited the Valley Friday with Republican Senators in a new spacious tent where families told him that they were well treated. He also fired in a pestilent garage where 384 men were packed in a sweaty and fenced enclosure, several telling reporters that they could not shower and that they had been stranded for weeks.

"These are difficult things," said Pence. "This is the overwhelming structure of the system that, according to some members of Congress, was a fabricated crisis."

The visit of Pence at the border shows how the momentary respite from border crossings rests on dark foundations.

The underlying structural forces that led more than 144,000 migrants across the border in May – poverty, drought and danger in Central America – remain unchanged. In the United States, the "pull factors" are also the same: a robust economy, widespread opportunities and the desire to join parents here.

The entanglements and loopholes in the country's immigration and asylum system, which domestic security officials blame for the crisis, also remain. Their calls to Congress seem more futile as the 2020 campaign gets stronger and exacerbates the cracks of immigration in the country.

Border crossings tend to drop during the summer months, but here and on the other side of the river, in Ciudad Juarez, there is no doubt that the numbers have so greatly reduced the numbers. The Mexican government has deployed thousands of National Guard forces to control travelers along highways. He positioned troops along the banks of the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from trying to cross.

It remains to be seen whether the Government of Mexico can continue or not. Mexico has never done it before, let alone maintained it.

In its June 7 agreement with Trump, the administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of left, also agreed to the extension to the border of the program "Rest in Mexico", officially called "Protocols of Protection migrants ", which obliges asylum seekers to wait outside the US territory while their claims are judged.

The MP's program was challenged in a federal court, and even the country's asylum officers objected, saying it was an attack on American values ​​and endangering those who sought refuge in the United States. United States.

The program was aggressively implemented in El Paso, where the number of asylum seekers returned to Juarez doubled after the conclusion of the agreement. But the Department of Homeland Security has yet to implement the "Stay in Mexico" program in the lower Rio Grande Valley. One of the reasons why migrants seem to cross their country in large numbers is to avoid other areas of the border where they risk being sent back to Mexico, where they would have to wait for asylum hearings in notoriously dangerous border towns. .

The Trump administration is trying to make the trip to the United States a dangerous and unsuccessful endeavor, using politics and law enforcement to create many deterrents.

[Trump says ICE raids to start Sunday, emphasizing purge of criminal immigrants]

Single migrants, especially men, have been subjected to some of the worst conditions of detention. This is the lowest priority for treatment, and the United States Customs and Border Protection is determined not to release people who may be deported.

In Ciudad Juarez, in front of El Paso, some give up waiting and decide not to stay in Mexico anymore.

Juanita Acosta, 53, said last week that she could no longer stand the hot days of the Juarez Refuge, where she has been waiting for three months for her asylum application to be handled by the courts of the country. 39, United States immigration. She crossed the border illegally to go to El Paso at the end of March with her three granddaughters.

The girls are now with their mother in Houston, but Acosta has been separated from them and sent back to Mexico, where she lives behind high walls surrounded by barbed wire in the shelter of Good Samaritan, on an unpaved street. About 125 people from Central America, Cuba and Africans were on site last night, sleeping a lot, too scared to go out.

Days with temperatures of 100 degrees and nights in a stuffy dorm are too much, said Acosta.

"I can not stand this heat anymore," she said. "My heart can not take it."

She is one of only five Hondurans in the center who recently signed up for voluntary repatriation, said host house pastor Juan Fierro.

At state migration offices in Juarez, where newcomers can sign up on a waiting list to be able to contact US authorities and apply for asylum, fewer than 20 people go to present today, said Enrique Valenzuela, director of Centro de Atención a Migrantes. Earlier this year, 200 to 300 a day arrived, he said.

People on this list must wait two to three months before they can be summoned and meet twice a day in a small square next to the US border bridge in the hope of increasing their numbers. Most are now Cuban and are waiting for a turn to ask for asylum. US authorities call the system "queue management", but this policy is known informally as a measurement system. Although migratory pressures have subsided at the border, CBP has not increased the number of asylum seekers taken care of, according to Mexican officials.

Some days he does not take anyone at all. And more and more people whose numbers are reached are again returned and made to wait in Mexico.

Katiuska Cardero, 42, was one of 15 whose numbers were called last week. "I am excited but worried because I do not know if they will send us back," she said.

Many have given up, said Valenzuela. According to a small survey conducted by the federal immigration authorities, at least 30% of the migrants wanted to return home, and a new program run by the International Organization for Migration UK started sending buses to the south with voluntary returnees.

"We are trying to deal with a situation that we have not caused," Valenzuela said.

The "express buses" used by smugglers to bring large groups of Guatemalan families to the El Paso area have been banned by Mexico's crackdown. In May, border authorities met with 28 groups of more than 100 migrants crossing the border to travel to US agents, including the largest group ever recorded: 1,036 people on May 30.

The sudden influx of hundreds of parents and children in need of care has put a strain on US agents and border posts that have never been designed for families. But the border patrol has not had a single group of more than 100 over the past month, officials said. Mexico stops them.

The Mexican government has launched "the application of steroids," said Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit organization in El Paso that houses released migrants under the care of United States.

In April, Garcia opened "Casa del Refugiado", a facility that can accommodate 500 people in a warehouse on the industrial periphery of the city. He then occupied 1,000 people a day. Now he's 100 to 150, he says.

Food is stored at the Casa del Refugiado shelter in El Paso. (Carolyn Van Houten / The Washington Post)

The warehouse is teeming with food and medical supplies, its walls are adorned with bright murals of local painters. Hundreds of Red Cross beds are stacked, unused, in empty, cavernous rooms.

Garcia is preparing anyway to renew the four-month lease of the warehouse. "I can not run the risk," he said. "And if all the dynamics change again?"

He now wants to open a reception center in Ciudad Juarez to accommodate migrants who would be kept waiting by "Staying in Mexico".

[U.S. opening 2,500-bed migrant facility in Tornillo, Tex., site of controversial child shelter]

Clem, the deputy chief of the Border Patrol in El Paso, said that agents had arrested over 155,000 migrants in the first nine months of the government's 2019 fiscal year, a record since 1986. Among them , 117,000 arrived, "An increase of 1.759 percent over the same period last year.

The number of minor migrants arriving with a parent jumped 267%. At Clint station, which is at the center of much of the public outrage at the conditions of juvenile detention, 700 unaccompanied children were detained in early June and were sleeping in garages and on concrete floors. These rooms are empty now, as are most cells in the interior.

Asked why officials did not transfer children out of the radio station when overcrowding reached a critical level, Interior Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said that minors can not, in accordance with the law, be given to the Department of Health and Social Services, which was also overwhelmed.

"We looked at all the legal options available," McAleenan said.

Border authorities at the station said children were offered showers every 48 to 72 hours, but officers could not force them to wash if they refused. It is only in recent weeks that external contractors have arrived to take over childcare tasks for which border officers have never been trained – and often dismissed.

As in other places, the rise in resources was late. "Finding Dory" was playing in an empty room in one of Clint's cells, and outside, in the corridor, two women entrepreneurs were comforting a young girl, the only child in pre-trial detention.

While reporters were visiting the premises with McAleenan, hundreds of hot spaghetti dinners had arrived in ordered foam containers from a new catering service. But there were only 20 children inside to eat them.

Miroff reported on El Paso and McAllen, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Josh Dawsey, Texas, contributed to this report.