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TIJUANA, Mexico – A post was created in a garment factory, another in a cleaning company. However, María Norma López hesitated. When she left Honduras six weeks ago with a caravan of migrants, she hoped to go through Mexico and not stay there.
"I want to go to the United States because I want to have a better life," said López, 39. "And in Mexico, I do not know."
In a first step towards the development of a long-term solution for the members of the caravan, the leaders of this city of quivering export factories got to work: they organized a job fair complete with a mobile migration office.
It was a practical response to the problem of housing and feeding migrants, an effort that overwhelms Tijuana's resources. But even as Ms. López and dozens of other migrants crowded around the basement room to fill in forms, it was clear that there was still a lot to be done.
The city government said it would take six months for all migrants who decide to seek asylum in the United States to be summoned for an initial interview with an asylum officer at the border. . After resorting to collective action to reach the California border, migrants must now take the next steps alone.
Tijuana officials prepared on Wednesday for the caravan to double more than 6,000 people, while migrants waiting in rudimentary shelters two and a half hours to the east gradually reached Tijuana on buses. and trailers.
The migrants, who insisted on staying together, were dropped off at a dilapidated community sports center where officials set up a makeshift shelter last week. If the final population reaches about 6,000, as expected, the shelter will be nearly twice as large as its estimated capacity.
The head of the Tijuana Social Development Agency, Mario Osuna, enthusiastically observed hundreds of migrants on Tuesday night, wearing rolled blankets and worn backpacks, lined up to give their names and receiving the orange bracelets that gave them access to the shelter.
"We are waiting for them because they are already on the way," Osuna said of migrants from the east. "But we can not have people on top of each other."
New arrivals will create tension in Tijuana, where the United States – following President Trump's portrayal of the caravan as an "invasion" – has shown the strengthening of the border.
An accordion wire passed over the US side of the border crossing from downtown Tijuana to San Ysidro, California. At the Otay Mesa border post in the east of the city, United States Customs and Border Protection officers arrived in riot gear during the afternoon. this week, stand guard on both sides of the traffic crossing the border.
US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen described the demonstration as a reaction force to intelligence suggesting that a large number of migrants were going to cross the border, although Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group of Binational actors accompanying the migrants, repeated that no such plan exists.
US officials also said, without providing evidence, to have identified 500 criminals in the caravan, but could not explain why the Mexican police had not arrested them.
For the migrants, who had wanted to believe themselves that Mr. Trump could be softened by their presence at the border, the message was clear.
"Once arrived here, we realized that they would not let us through," says Leticia Ramírez, 35, who said he had worked in banana plantations in Honduras. She came out of the shelter one morning of the week with two friends. . She was about to look for "any job" in Tijuana.
"The President of the United States treats us like garbage, like an animal," Ramirez said, her arms around the sleeping bag.
US attorneys have organized workshops to explain to migrants here the intricacies of an asylum claim in the United States – an almost unique way for most of them to qualify for lawful entry.
Chelsea Strautman, an Oregon lawyer, stood on a bucket in front of a crowd gathered in front of the baseball field of the sports center Tuesday night.
The approval rates for Central American candidates were grim, she told them; currently, less than 20% of asylum seekers are successful. "They put thousands of migrants in jail," she said. "If you are not eligible for asylum, you will be detained for months before being deported."
Some migrants refused to lose hope. "We are just a few steps away from seeing what God is going to say," said Emerson Martínez Amador, 19, of Honduras, who arrived in Tijuana on Tuesday with the second half of the caravan.
"It takes time to reach my destiny, I will wait," he said. "Even if it takes a month or two. We have to wait, do you understand?
The wait is just beginning and Tijuana feels the pressure. As the new Mexican federal government prepares to take office on December 1, the city has received minimal assistance and can not set up a new shelter, said César Palencia Chávez, head of migrant affairs for the city of Tijuana.
"We all would like them to have a dignified space for children, women and men, but the reality is that what has been humanly possible up to now, is that," he said. he said referring to the sports center. "There are no resources."
And since the migrants will not separate, he said, he can not place some of them in the city's shelter network, mainly run by churches.
Most of these shelters, he said, will only accept women and children as the caravan crossed the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala a month ago and the arrests of nearly 60 men in Tijuana over the past week – almost all of them for non-violent crimes – began to make noise to citizens.
At the sports center shelter, provisions were already saturated before the arrival of the second half of the migrant caravan, despite donations from volunteers and religious groups, said Delia Ávila Suárez, director of family services in Tijuana. Toilet paper, diapers, sanitary napkins and cough medicines were often missing before the arrival of a new delivery.
"In general, Tijuana is a land of immigrants," she added, to which the city has adapted, but we have never seen anything like it. "
In 2016 and 2017, thousands of Haitians arrived after traveling from Brazil. At one point, the city placed 6,000 Haitians in 32 different shelters, Palencia said.
Since then, some 3,500 Haitians have settled in Tijuana and migration officials have quickly cited their integration as a model for the caravan.
But some wonder how long it will take before the patience of the caravan's migrants is exhausted and that they try to cross the border illegally.
"Many people stayed here for a year and they adapted to the life of the community, but then they crossed the border," said José María García Lara, founder of the Juventud 2000 shelter. will eventually go because we are at the border. "
Mexico provides a humanitarian visa allowing foreigners to work and offering the opportunity to seek asylum in Mexico.
"We will stay here for a very long time," said Héctor Rodríguez, 40, who quit his job as a bus driver in San Pedro Sula, a city in Honduras, because of extortion threats. Waiting for his turn to talk to a Mexican immigration official at the job fair, he said he was considering making enough money to bring his wife and two children.
"It's a good option," he says, getting up. It was time to have his photo taken.
