Across the street from the park, George Rodriguez, a 72-year-old Eagle Pass native, prepares to beat the afternoon heat and close his stand at a flea market, where he sells pink typing keyboards, a vacuum cleaner and a television mount. He says blocking Border Patrol from part of the border is senseless.
“Once in a while, the governor and his cronies come over here and make a big deal,” Rodriguez said over music crackling on the radio, furniture scraping pavement and clothes hangers pattering in the wind. “It’s just a political stunt.”
Roughly a mile up the Rio Grande, two workers at the city water treatment plant come across a bag filled with socks. There are no fresh footprints on the sand road. A few months ago, they would have found piles of clothing and garbage that could gum up the pumps.
Stories of why migrants come have changed little in recent years, often a mix of wanting to improve their lives economically and fear of violence in their home countries. What has changed is the numbers – and perhaps nowhere more than in Rio Grande Valley.
The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, the nation’s busiest from 2013 to 2022, saw arrests plunge to an average of 133 a day in June from more than 2,600 in July 2021. Many are released with orders to appear in immigration court, where a backlog of 3.7 million cases means it takes several years to decide asylum claims.
In Brownsville, Jose Castro Lopez, 32, sat inside the main bus station more than four hours before an 8 p.m. ride to Florida. His partner and their children arrived following a two-month journey from Honduras that took him to Mexico City, where he applied for entry on the CBP One app.
He said construction work in Honduras didn’t pay enough to support a family.
“I’m sleep deprived and stressed,” he said. “But, thank God, we’re fine now. God allowed us the privilege to be here.”
Another passenger at the bus station, Lilibeth Garcia, 32, said she graduated in 2016 from medical school in Venezuela, where she studied to be a surgeon, but the country’s economic tailspin made it difficult to earn a living wage there.
Garcia arrived at the station with her year-old daughter and a cousin, Robert Granado, after a two-month journey from the city of Guarico through the Darién Gap, a 60-mile jungle trek that straddles the Colombia-Panama border. Garcia said she felt guilty about putting her daughter, Cataleya, through the dangerous journey but the toddler remained calm and in good spirits, despite a bout with fever.
“I’m happy,” Granado said as they waited for a bus to New York City. “The journey is over.”
At the other end of the Texas-Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez, a journey that has stretched for five months still isn’t over for Gloria Lobos of Guatemala. Lobos said she fled her physically abusive husband and settled in Chiapas in southern Mexico, where she worked on a farm and cleaned rooms at a hotel. In March, as the family walked to a grocery store, she said two men on a motorcycle attempted to kidnap her daughter.
After she reported the attempt to police, Lobos said the men returned days later with a gun and fired a shot at her daughter — the bullet missed. She said she raced to the bus station with her children and other relatives. Ciudad Juárez was the first ticket available.
Now she and her daughter live at a local shelter run by a Methodist church led by pastor Juan Fierro García, 65, while they wait for a CBP One appointment. The shelter has 63 migrants who will spend the night, down from 180 recently.
Sitting in a metal chair in the church, she said, “I never imagined God would want us to face this type of violence.”
In Glendale, Arizona, Kamala Harris — making her first visit to a border state since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee — touches on immigration 20 minutes into a 30-minute speech. It’s her fourth day of campaigning in swing states with running mate Gov. Tim Walz. She references her work as attorney general of another border state, California, and then repeats a line that Democrats have been espousing for many years.
“We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it: Comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship,” she says, sparking applause.
Harris jabs her Republican rival for the White House, former President Donald Trump, noting that he opposed a bill this year that would have, among other things, imposed asylum limits, added Border Patrol agents and changed asylum procedures to speed up decisions.
A short time later at a rally in Bozeman, Montana, Trump wastes no time getting to immigration, his signature issue. He uses “border” more than 30 times during his 100-minute speech.
Harris, he tells the crowd, “wants to allow millions of people to pour into our border through an invasion! … Four more years of crazy Kamala Harris means 50, probably it means 50 million illegal aliens pouring into our country.” (The Border Patrol has made about 7.1 million apprehensions from February 2021 through July 2024 — often the same person more than once — while an unknown number have eluded capture.)
Trump, who has promised mass deportations during his campaign, talks for several minutes about “illegal aliens” being sent to the U.S. from other countries’ prisons, a claim that lacks evidence. He connects migration with rising crime and speaks of migrants stampeding, overrunning, destroying, ruining, ravaging, preying.
After 11 p.m., he mentions the border for the last time: “Next year, America’s borders will be strong, sealed and secure. Promise.”
___
This story is part of a collaboration among The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to promoting civic engagement; FRONTLINE, through the PBS series’ Local Journalism Initiative funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and The Associated Press. Berenice Garcia, Uriel J. Garcia, Maurer and Serrano are with the Tribune; Lozano and Spagat are with the AP.
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Publish date : 2024-09-24 23:20:00
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