“For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government is turning away thousands of asylum seekers regardless of their need for refuge.”
1 / 23Mexico Living in LimboIn this July 27, 2019, photo, an Ethiopian man reads his Bible in a shower stall as dawn breaks and others return their mattresses after sleeping outside at El Buen Pastor shelter for migrants in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Long after midnight, when the heat has finally relented and the walled courtyard is scattered with men sleeping in the open, someone begins to sob.
These are turbulent days for the migrants of El Buen Pastor. For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government is turning away thousands of asylum seekers regardless of their need for refuge. Story continuesBut occasionally, it's also a place of muchene enkoko and arroz a la Valenciano . It's a place of children's games, young romance and Scrabble matches that seem to stretch into eternity. Anything to make the time pass.This is how they spend their days. Not in the countries they fled. Not in the country where they want to be. But somewhere else, in between.The Ugandan bodybuilder wakes early, often before everyone else, and heads out into the streets of Juarez to run.
Alphat runs to escape the stifling closeness of the shelter, and to forget for a few minutes what happened back home. At first, he thought he'd find refuge in Mexico. But after being detained, released and then robbed, he took the advice of a Mexican he'd met and rode a bus to Juarez. Here, he'd been told, he could walk to a U.S. border post and ask for asylum.
But Alphat doesn't complain. Most people don't. It's pointless, and people here are careful not to use up too much energy.Mornings are the worst, when another heat-blasted day stretches out before them and the courtyard is scattered with half-asleep people blinking at the sun. His desk faces the shelter's entryway and on most mornings he sits behind it, hands resting on his generous belly, smiling quietly and keeping track of everything. The walls are speckled with framed letters of appreciation, diplomas from workshops and photographs of him with visitors. A monitor displays feeds from more than a dozen security cameras.
A few weeks later, a Central American teenager hurled racial slurs at the Africans and Fierro stepped in. He called all the Latinos together and said talk like that had to stop immediately. Then he took a group of Africans out for ice cream and a drive around town. Prejudices melt most quickly among the children, who play together in a tangle of languages and ethnicities and races. The 16-year-old Congolese girl watches the Honduran baby. Sometimes, the adults laugh as they try to learn a few words of someone else's language.The U.S. Department of Homeland Security insists the January policy returning migrants to Mexico is designed to bring order to the asylum process and"decrease the number of those taking advantage of the immigration system.
That order split the shelter into winners and losers, and punished many of those who had waited for their number to come up. Fierro, whose family has been on both sides of the border for generations, presumes the waiting list is designed to exhaust the migrants, to push them to the point where they simply give up and go home.
They headed north, through Guatemala. After she ran out of money, the family slept at a gas station in southern Mexico. A widower took them in for a week. Eventually her sister wired her a little money and she made it to Juarez. "That's when my tears begin to overflow, and I tell them to forgive me," she said."This wasn't my intention. To bring them here to suffer."In the evening, when the heat is fading and no one has to hide anymore from the sun, the shelter comes alive.
Scrabble has saved her. Every evening she takes out the game and plays for hours, sometimes until after midnight. The games go slowly. Players sometimes takes 15 minutes to spell out a word. Sometimes, you can walk away from a game for an hour, and when you come back it looks like nothing has happened. No one is in a rush.
Shelter life weighs heavily on him. He worries what it's doing to his children. He's known among the migrants for agonizing about what he should do.
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