As the sun set over the Rio Grande, some 120 Cubans, Colombians and Venezuelans who had waded hip-deep in the river boarded Border Patrol vehicles shortly before being released into the United States to process their immigration cases. .
On the other side of the border, in the Mexican town of Piedras Negras, Honduran families stayed together in a central area with cracked sidewalks, narrow streets and few people, not knowing where to spend the night because the only shelter in the city was full. .
That disparate fortune reflects the dual nature of U.S. border surveillance with a pandemic rule known as Title 42, which takes its name from a 1944 public health law. President Joe Biden wanted to end those rules on Monday. , but a federal judge in Louisiana issued a nationwide order that kept them intact.
The United States government has carried out more than 1.9 million expulsions under Title 42, which denies the opportunity to request asylum, contemplated by US law and international treaties, with the aim of avoiding COVID-19 infections.
But Title 42 does not apply equally to all nationalities. For example, Mexico agrees to receive migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. But for other nationalities, high cost, poor diplomatic relations, and other considerations make it difficult for the United States to send them back to their home countries under Title 42. Instead, they are typically released into the United States to ask for asylum or resort to other legal formulas.
Hondurans in Piedras Negras ask Cubans arriving at the bus station for money, knowing that Cubans won’t be served pesos because they go directly across the border. Although Mexico agreed in April to receive some Cubans and Nicaraguans expelled under Title 42, the vast majority are released in the United States.
“It was in and out,” Javier Fuentes, 20, said of his overnight stay at a rented house in Piedras Negras. On Sunday morning, he and two other Cuban men crossed the Rio Grande and walked down a highway for an hour until they found a Border Patrol vehicle in Eagle Pass, a Texas town of about 25,000 people where migrants they cross the river at the edge of a public golf course.
The overnight rain raised the water level up to the neck for most of the adults, a possible explanation for the absence of large groups of dozens or even a hundred people, as are often seen in the area.
“The morning has started slowly,” a Border Patrol agent said as he greeted other officers who were keeping an eye on four Peruvians, including a 7-year-old boy who crossed with his parents after several days crammed into a rented room in Piedras Negras with 17 migrants.
When the water dropped to hip height again, some 30 migrants gathered on the shore of a public park that also draws residents of Piedras Negras, considered the birthplace of nachos. There were infants and young children in the crossing group, most of them Honduran migrants. A Honduran woman, eight months pregnant, showed clear signs of pain.
Eagle Pass, a sprawling town of dilapidated warehouses and homes that most of the big chain stores have ignored, is one of the busiest transit points for Border Patrol in the Del Rio sector, which includes some 250 miles ( 250 miles) of sparsely populated shoreline. In nearby Del Rio, which is not much larger than Eagle Pass, some 15,000 migrants, most of them Haitians, congregated last year. All that separates the towns from San Antonio, about three hours away by road, are grain fields.
The relative ease of the crossing — migrants traverse the river on foot in a few minutes, often without paying a smuggler — and the perception that the Mexican side is relatively safe has turned the remote region into a major migration route.
Texas’ Rio Grande Valley has long been the busiest of the nine Border Patrol sectors on the Mexican border, but this year Del Rio has become a close second. Yuma, Arizona, another area known for its relative safety and ease of crossing, has rapidly gained foot traffic and is now the third busiest.
Del Rio and Yuma ranked sixth and seventh in number of agents among the nine sectors, reflecting how the distribution of Border Patrol personnel has long lagged behind migration flows.
Other stretches of the border have fewer patrols than Del Rio, an advantage for migrants trying to evade capture, but are more rugged and remote, said Jon Anfinsen, president of the National Border Patrol Council in the Del Rio sector.
Anfinsen describes the region as “sort of a nice middle ground” for migrants seeking a balance between remoteness and safety.
Cristian Salgado, sleeping on the streets of Piedras Negras with his wife and 5-year-old son after fleeing Honduras, called the Mexican border town “one of the few places where one can live more or less in peace.”
But his enthusiasm for the Biden administration’s plans to lift Title 42 on Monday evaporated with the court ruling. “Now there is no hope,” he said.
His pessimism could be a bit exaggerated. In April, Honduran citizens were stopped 16,000 times at the border, with slightly more than half expelled due to Title 42. The rest were able to seek asylum in the United States if they expressed fear of returning to their country.
But the Cubans fared much better. They were stopped more than 35,000 times in April and just 451, or just 1%, were prosecuted under Title 42.
“The Cubans come in automatically,” said Joel Gonzalez, a 34-year-old Honduran who tried to elude agents for three days in Eagle Pass before being located and expelled. The agents told him that it was no longer possible to apply for asylum in the United States.
Isis Peña, 45, turned down an offer from another Honduran woman to cross the river. The woman called from San Antonio and said that she had been released without even asking if she wanted to apply for asylum. She now lives in New York.
Peña tried to cross the next day, an experience he does not want to repeat for fear of drowning. After about four hours in detention, an agent told her that there was no asylum for Hondurans.