This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This piece should alarm anyone who cares about freedom, truth, or higher education. When Plato is treated as a political threat and factual texts are recast as “ideology,” something has gone profoundly awry. This is not policy oversight—it is the raw politicization of knowledge itself.
This is not just embarrassing, but shameful. Moreover, it is a cancer that threatens to impact institutions nationwide. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has a petition that I just signed for the freedom to teach and learn.
Professor Beck is not just right. She's righteous. A university that must ask permission to teach the truth has already forfeited its democratic purpose.
Personally, I was pleased to learn from Dr. Beck in this opinion-editorial published yesterday in the San Antonio Express-News about Aristophanes' human origin story where the "gods created three types of people that eventually gave rise to male homosexuals, female homosexuals and heterosexuals."
Geez, why on earth wouldn’t this be taught? Let’s stop infantilizing our students—they’re already grappling with these questions in their own lives. And anyway, aren’t Plato and Socrates supposed to be foundational to our so-called Western heritage? Such hypocrisy.
Our students, donors, community, and the nation at large are watching, and it is difficult to imagine who truly benefits from this—apart from a small minority intent on anesthetizing knowledge itself, weakening critical thought, eroding moral discernment, and depriving current and future generations of the civic consciousness—that is, the knowledge, skills and dispositions—essential to a democratic society.
When leaders want to control what people think, they first strive to control knowledge. We're seeing that in Texas.
By Deborah Beck,For the Express-News
In recent months, political pressure has been reshaping Texas’ public universities. Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
In recent months, political pressure has been reshaping Texas’ public universities.Teaching and research, the drivers of university excellence, increasingly answer to politicians rather than the knowledge of experts. Anyone who cares about freedom should be concerned about these developments. When leaders want to control what people think, they first strive to control knowledge: what is discovered, what is learned, what is taught. Such control is antithetical to what America stands for. We must reject attempts by politicians to constrain what we think.
Courses on genderatpublic institutions in Texasare being audited. Texas recently madenational news after Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, was told that he could not teach Plato because it would violate a policy that imposesrestrictions on coursesthat “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”
One way to think for ourselves is to know the facts. In “Symposium,” the text Peterson was told he could not include in his syllabus, what does Plato say?
The “Symposium” describes a dinner party of ancient Athenians, including Socrates, the teacher of Plato, and Aristophanes, a prize-winning writer of comic plays. Each guest gives a speech about love.
In the passage at issue in Peterson’s syllabus, Aristophanes tells a human origin story in which the gods created three types of people that eventually gave rise to male homosexuals, female homosexuals and heterosexuals. The upshot of Aristophanes’ story is that human beings and human love come in different varieties, and that all derive from the gods.
This is what Plato said. It is not “ideology” or “advocacy.” It is a fact.
In libel suits, truth is an absolute defense. Apparently, this is not so when writing a college syllabus in Texas.
For millenia, Plato has been part of an education that equips people for the freedom to govern themselves. The “liberal arts” got its name not from a left-leaning political stance but from the Latin word “liber,” or “free.” The subjects taught in the liberal arts befit us to exercise the responsibilities and to enjoy the privileges of freedom.
We need Plato more than he needs us. Long after this political moment has come and gone, Plato and Socrates will be thriving.
Socrates would have some questions for the University of Texas at Austin as well. News recently broke that departments facilitating community engagement, teaching effectiveness, student advising and undergraduate research will soon be closed. These programs have fostered the central missions of the university for decades. Yet the university has not explained why they were canceled or what will take their place.
For Socrates, a good and just life entails asking thoughtful questions, talking them over with lots of different people, and listening to the answers. If we don’t even know what questions led to the cancellation of these programs, let alone what the answers to those questions were, how do we know that the closure of these departments will foster the educational excellence of which Texans are justly proud?
Shuttering effective university services with no plan for what comes next does not lead to innovation or to excellence. It leads to chaos.
Socrates would have recognized this moment all too well. In 399 B.C., he was charged, convicted and put to death on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. He kept asking questions his entire life, even as the fatal hemlock with which he was executed gradually took effect. He refused to go into exile to avoid punishment, because that would disrespect the laws of Athens and his own principles.
Needless to say, university employees today are not being executed by the state. But faculty and staff are losing their livelihoods. Many educators are trying to leave Texas rather than submit their subject area expertise to the oversight of politicians.
Socrates lives on as one of the founding voices of European philosophy. His refusal to forswear what he believed makes him a beacon to anyone who is targeted because of their ideas.
Universities governed by political considerations are antithetical to freedom. Free people accept facts as true. They choose what to learn and they choose what to think.
Just ask Socrates.
Deborah Beck
Deborah Beck is the Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is expressing her views as a private citizen.
This is a very important piece on the vitality of the Spanish language in Texas. The rate of alleged "Spanish-language loss" is held up to scrutiny with not all agreeing whether this is reality or a measurement error. Another interpretation is compositional, meaning that it's not so much that Spanish is on the decline, but rather that places like San Antonio and perhaps Austin are increasingly comprised of third-generation Latinas/os that are less likely to speak Spanish. This maps on to the fact of growing cities that bring in increased numbers of non-Spanish speaking individuals.
Still, others don't believe the numbers, saying that they're sensing a high demand, for instance, in San Antonio ISD, for dual language programs. I sense the same here in Austin, as well. Of clear concern for all is the real possibility of any decline in the aggregate, especially considering the importance of Spanish as a state and world language.
Regardless of data and interpretation, this is a historic problem that connects not just to prior legal prohibitions toward the Speaking of Spanish in our state, but also to existing structural dynamics with education policy itself—outside of dual language programs—not sufficiently supportive of fully-vested bilingualism and biliteracy. In my own work (Valenzuela, 1999), I term this "subtractive schooling," where schools are more about taking away one's fluency and culture than they are about adding and expanding upon these from an asset-based perspective.
These concerns are felt personally, often accompanied with a great deal of anguish. It is a significant loss for children not to be able to communicate with their grandparents. It's also frequently humiliating when people expect you to speak Spanish simply because you're brown despite a long history of language oppression in our state and nation that continues into the present.
These concerns are what motivated us to start our Saturday school, Academia Cuauhtli here in Texas back in 2013. We are entering our tenth year of existence and know that we are making a dent in Austin, Texas, by encouraging a love of Spanish, beginning with a pedagogy anchored in children loving themselves and the multiple identities that they possess.
As a Mexican American/Latinx/o civil rights community, we have fought long and hard for our right to our bilingualism, and biculturalism. From our perspective, it's less about economic gain, and more about the wealth of our identities and pushing back against the self that so many of our schools reject. It's our God-given right.
In fact, we should be expanding this agenda to include, as well, Indigenous tongues, especially considering the more recent waves of immigration from the Americas comprised of individuals that speak their natal tongues, many of whom are trilingual but reduced to being "Mexican," "Central American," or "South American" in society with little to no sensitivity to the cultural and linguistic wealth that they bring. Incidentally, this is not just a Texas or U.S. problem, but a hemispheric and global one, as well.
While our work is far from over, the possibilities are plentiful. At least we all cohere on the idea that language and culture are what make us interesting and strong. Indeed, bilingualism, multilingualism, and multiculturalism are our superpowers!
Students at Washington Irving Dual Language Academy cheer for Principal Mayra Gutierrez-Ibarra on Dec. 14, thanking her for implementing a "pajamas day" for students. The school is part of San Antonio Independent School District, which is seeing increased demand for dual language programs that teach students core subjects like math and reading in both English and Spanish. Josie Norris, San Antonio Express-News
“One of the priorities in raising our children has been for them to also be fully bilingual and bicultural,” she said.
But it hasn’t been an easy journey for the political science professor and her husband, who speaks some Spanish but isn’t as fluent. When she speaks to her 10-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son in Spanish, they can understand her, but they have more trouble speaking it themselves, she said.
“I imagined that my children would be completely fluent by now,” she said. “They’re not, which is disheartening.”
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that as the San Antonio metro area grows, the percentage of residents who speak Spanish is going down.
It’s a troubling trend for many in San Antonio, a place where Spanish language and Hispanic culture run deep, tracing back to the city’s roots as part of the Spanish empire, then part of Mexico, as well as its proximity to Latin America. Community leaders and academic experts say the shift raises questions about the region’s culture and future, and also has the potential to be a drag on the region’s economy.
“Not teaching Spanish is always a loss,” said Alfredo Avalos, coordinator for community and culture at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico’s San Antonio branch. “Opportunities can be lost, along with culture.”
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Spanish speakers in the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area is gradually falling, though it remains the highest among similar-sized cities.
Between 2018 and 2022, 30.8% of people in the metro area over the age of 5 spoke Spanish at home. That was down from just over 33% between 2013 and 2017. That’s according to the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the Census Bureau in five-year intervals. The data show the continuation of a decline that’s been observed for the past decade: in 2012, more than 35% of metro area residents spoke Spanish.
About 13% of people in the United States speak Spanish, while about 29% of Texans speak the language, according to the most recent Census Bureau data.
San Antonio’s 2.45 percentage pointdrop in the share of Spanish speakers was the largest among U.S. metro areas with 2.25 million to 2.85 million residents. The next-largest drop was Austin, which saw a 1.59 percentage point decline.
In the San Antonio area, the largest decline was among residents age 18 to 64, where the percentage of Spanish speakers fell from 35.6% in 2017 to 32.8% in 2022. Among children ages 5 to 17, the share that speaks Spanish fell from 23.3% in 2017 to 20.7% in 2022. In the 65 and older age group, the share of Spanish speakers fell by1.2 percentage points.
Not everyone trusts the data: Graciela Sánchez, executive director of San Antonio nonprofit Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, questions the census numbers. Spanish speakers might not have wanted to respond or identify themselves, she said, and she said she thinks the coronavirus pandemic had an effect on responses. The Hispanic or Latino population was undercounted by 4.99%, according to the Census Bureau.
“I’ve never spoken more Spanish in the community,” Sánchez said, especially compared with 20 years ago, when it seemed like fewer people, and young people in particular, were speaking it. She said she’s also seeing more people demand access to Spanish translators in places like San Antonio City Hall and hospitals, so they can communicate in the language they’re most comfortable in, she said.
The census data show the size of the decline has varied around the region. Within San Antonio city limits, the percentage of Spanish speakers fell by about 2.2 percentage points, and in New Braunfels, it declined by about 1.4 percentage points. In some parts of the metro area, however, the percentage increased: in Schertz, for example, the percentage of the population that speaks Spanish at home increased from about 11% in 2017 to more than 17% in 2022, and in Helotes, it increased from about 10% to about 14%.
As you can read from this powerful photo-journalism by Dudley Althaus in yesterday's San Antonio Express News, the situation for immigrants is dire along the vast, parched, and remote Presidio-Ojinaga Big Bend area of the Texas-Mexico border. This region is arguably the most dangerous, unforgiving stretch of the border.
In Brooks County alone, where the small town of Falfurrias is located, an estimated three to six hundred immigrants die every year from exhaustion and dehydration. Such staggering numbers! And so little public or media attention to this human rights issue.
Do read the story and take action. Support the South Texas Human Rights Center directed by Eddie Canales, a dear friend of mine and hero to countless immigrants whose lives that he and his staff have saved. He is one of my heroes, too. May his kind multiply.
Eddie and his staff regularly set up water stations and re-fill them with water throughout the secluded borderlands that the immigrants traverse. They conduct search and rescue; call families about the fate of their kin, an all-too frequent and lamentable situation; and in partnership with various universities, they engage in forensic recovery and identification.
I just spoke with him. He could barely talk to me as he was in the middle of "saving"—his words—a 48 year old man who had slipped from them yesterday as he had "changed coordinates" yesterday, making it difficult to find him.
In the few minutes that we spoke, he said that they need funds to build capacity in the Presidio-Ojinaga Big Bend area where he is actually already working and located at this very moment—all under the brutally hot Texas sun.
Please make a contribution at this link. No donation is too small.
CANDELARIA — Here in the unforgiving parched lands of West Texas, the first half of the year has been marked by a surge of undocumented migrants equipped, guided and all too often abandoned to their fate by Mexico’s smuggling gangs.
Local police and Border Patrol agents have detained thousands of migrants found crammed into cars, trucks, horse trailers, train cars and recreational vehicles. They’ve caught others who trekked for days through the desert in smuggler-led columns.
High-speed police chases of smugglers’ vehicles have become common. Desperate migrants beg for rescue at isolated homes and on rural roads. Ranchers tending livestock on the far reaches of their land also have encountered migrants.
And dozens have been found dead from heat and dehydration.
Lucio Lopez, a migrant from the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, looks at photos of his family.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
The numbers passing through the Big Bend region remain a small fraction of the nearly 900,000 people detained along the entire 2,000-mile border since October. But they are much higher than have ever been seen in these parts, residents and officials say.
Nerves have become more than a bit jangled.
“Human trafficking has just exploded,” said Sheriff Ronny Dodson of Brewster County, which envelops Big Bend National Park. “President Biden wasn’t even in office when they started coming our way. He has got to get control of this.”
The increase in illegal crossings has fueled criticism from Republicans about Biden’s border policies. It’s a main talking point for Gov. Greg Abbott, who has set aside $250 million in state money to build more border walls and said he will direct state troopers to arrest immigrants for trespassing, a tactic that previously was blocked in Arizona by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Maribel Aguilar, 27, passes her days at the only shelter for Central American migrants returned to Mexico in the border city of Ojinaga. Aguilar tried crossing the border with her 13-year-old daughter and a friend. The other two made it across and now Aguliar waits in hopes of getting more money to make the journey again.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-News
Visiting the border Friday for the first time as vice president, Kamala Harris touted the “extreme progress” the Biden administration has made in addressing the migration surge.
Noting much of the issue is about “families, children and suffering,” Harris said the administration’s approach “has to be thoughtful and effective.”
“This isn’t politics,” she said. “This is cartel. This is human trafficking.”
With an eye on the 2022 midterm congressional elections, former President Donald Trump is expected to visit the Texas border with Abbott on Wednesday, where he is expected to repeat claims that Biden policies have spurred the current migration increases.
Migrant crossings in the Big Bend are just a blip compared with the lower Rio Grande Valley. But here is where many suffer and die in the desert.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
‘Occupied territory’
For all the local angst it has stirred, this year’s migration through the Big Bend doesn’t amount to much on a national scale.
The little more than 25,000 migrants detained by U.S. border agents in the Big Bend sector amount to just under 3 percent of the nearly 900,000 arrested along the entire border from last October through May.
Nine in 10 migrants detained in the Big Bend Sector, which includes 570 miles of the Rio Grande, were traveling as single adults. By comparison, more than half the migrants detained in the lower Rio Grande Valley, which includes the McAllen and Brownsville areas, were unaccompanied minors or parents traveling with small children.
No one can be certain just how many people slip through the net.
Maribel Aguilar, 27, passes her days at the only shelter for Central American migrants returned to Mexico in the border city of Ojinaga. Aguilar tried crossing the border with her 13-year-old daughter and a friend. The other two made it across and now Aguliar waits in hopes of getting more money to make the journey again.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
More people are migrating with the intention of avoiding capture — driven by poverty and violence in many places or pulled by the promise of jobs. Many migrants say they’ve been encouraged by the rebounding U.S. economy and by the toning down of the last administration’s harsh rhetoric.
But U.S. detection and prevention efforts have also improved.
The vast desert here is seeded with motion detectors and cameras. An aerostat radar surveillance balloon hovers high overhead. Border Patrol agents have been backed up by National Guard soldiers, state troopers, local officers and sheriff’s deputies. Coordination between the agencies has been greatly enhanced in recent years.
“When I was in school, I was not happy about Big Brother,” Sheriff Dodson said. “Now I live for it.
“We call ourselves occupied territory because we have everyone here,” he joked of the law enforcement crush. “It’s not quite a police state, but it’s getting that way.”
Migrants have been crossing in large numbers near the border town of Presidio.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Misled by smugglers
With once favored routes more heavily monitored, hiking migrants and drug packing smugglers have plied more remote desert. In recent months, smugglers have clad many of the migrants — and others packing illicit drugs in backpacks — in cheap new boots and camouflage outfits.
The goal is to reach either U.S. 90 or Interstate 10. On both thoroughfares, relatives or smuggler vehicles spirit the migrants west toward California or east into the U.S. heartland. More than 50 miles of desert separate the border from the towns of Marfa or Alpine, both prime destinations.
STAFF Graphic
The hike is less than half that farther northwest near Valentine, but the terrain can be even more challenging.
“The smugglers will tell them it’s four or five hours walking to get to the highway. It’s four or five days,” said Dianne Burbach, manager of the Chinati Hot Springs, near the famed local peak of that name, 7 miles from the border.
“It’s a very big problem,” she said. “How many more kids will be abandoned out there? If it’s this bad now, just imagine what this winter is going to be like.”
So far this year, federal agents have recovered more than two dozen bodies in the region. County officials have recovered still more. Officials say any tally is all but certainly an undercount.
In sparsely populated Hudspeth County east of El Paso, anchored by the the town of Sierra Blanca, officials have recovered the bodies of nine migrants since January, meeting the annual average toll even before the summer scorch begins in earnest.
The sun rises over the desert near Candelaria where migrants have been crossing in large numbers. Migrants can spend days walking through the mountains and desert terrain under the dangerous sun in hopes of a better life.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-News
Responders recovered four bodies in the past week alone, said Joanna MacKenzie, the Hudspeth emergency management coordinator.
“This is all dehydration and exhaustion,” MacKenzie said. “We are an extremely vast county. We know there are bodies out there that may never be found.”
Severe drought has emptied many livestock tanks that migrant guides rely on for water. Emergency responders recently recovered the body of a man next to one of those tanks, MacKenzie said. He had an empty water bottle in his hand.
Despite their worries about the rising numbers — fueled by a drumbeat of news reports about the police pursuits, columns of migrants and large-scale detentions — many area residents express sympathy for the migrants.
Lucio Lopez washes his hands on a hot afternoon at the threadbare shelter in Ojinaga.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Ranchers here depended upon undocumented Mexican workers for decades. And many residents have family ties or friends in Mexico. The desert’s scorching heat, prickly brush and ankle-twisting terrain is a shared human challenge.
Ranchers and other residents carry extra water and food when driving on rural roads, at times giving rides or calling in help when they encounter migrants in distress.
“Historically, we are part of the problem,” said Albert Miller, 71, a fourth-generation rancher who serves as the senior elected official in the farming hamlet of Valentine. “We have employed these people for cheap labor for years, for generations.
“They are coming because there is opportunity,” Miller said, echoing the suggestion of many on the border that some sort of solution involving legal work permits is the answer. “And I can’t say I blame them.”
The long-deserted house where Miller and his siblings spent their early years was burned down earlier this year by a migrant apparently signaling for help after being abandoned by smugglers.
The incident provoked outrage among some in the area. But Miller seems more saddened by the building’s loss than angered by the migrant’s action.
“I guess his group went off and left him, and he was terrified,” Miller said.
In the small town of Candelaria, which sits on the border with Mexico, the Rio Grande is dry.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-News
Dried-up Rio Grande
Travelers jumping into the West Texas badlands from Mexico through Candelaria, a flyspeck village 50 miles up two-lane blacktop northwest of Presidio, might be deceived by the prevailing verdant quiet.
They also might be forgiven for not noticing the international line.
The Rio Grande, upstream from where it’s replenished by Mexico’s Conchos River, is little more than a tree-shrouded creek bed, no wider than a mobile home. The river channel is completely dry now, as it is much of the year unless it rains. A decade of severe drought and upstream irrigation has taken its toll.
Many of Candelaria’s 100 or so residents were born in the neighboring Mexican community, San Antonio del Bravo, or live in both places at once. Officials say the Mexican villages farther along the border are prime staging areas for human smugglers.
On a recent day, three SUVs and two pickup trucks sat unattended in a grassy clearing on the Mexican side. Large canisters of liquid, perhaps for drinking, filled the pickup beds. A sign implores visitors not to throw trash; only a single plastic bottle and a cup litter the clearing.
In a clearing on the Mexican side of the dry Rio Grande,
Dried-up Rio Grande
Travelers jumping into the West Texas badlands from Mexico through Candelaria, a flyspeck village 50 miles up two-lane blacktop northwest of Presidio, might be deceived by the prevailing verdant quiet.
They also might be forgiven for not noticing the international line.
The Rio Grande, upstream from where it’s replenished by Mexico’s Conchos River, is little more than a tree-shrouded creek bed, no wider than a mobile home. The river channel is completely dry now, as it is much of the year unless it rains. A decade of severe drought and upstream irrigation has taken its toll.
Many of Candelaria’s 100 or so residents were born in the neighboring Mexican community, San Antonio del Bravo, or live in both places at once. Officials say the Mexican villages farther along the border are prime staging areas for human smugglers.
On a recent day, three SUVs and two pickup trucks sat unattended in a grassy clearing on the Mexican side. Large canisters of liquid, perhaps for drinking, filled the pickup beds. A sign implores visitors not to throw trash; only a single plastic bottle and a cup litter the clearing.
A simple gate sits at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The river here is completely dry, making crossings into the desert land easier.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Marooned in Mexico
Most of the detained migrants are quickly returned to Mexico under regulations put in place by the last administration that suspended normal due process.
Those returned to Ojinaga, a raw city of about 30,000 that is the largest Mexican community in the region, have met a widely indifferent, sometimes openly hostile, reception. Unlike those in other Mexican border cities, outgoing Mayor Martin Sanchez has refused to allow non-Mexican returnees to stay at the city’s charity shelter.
“We don’t have the budget to handle this kind of situation,” Sanchez said recently, explaining his policy. “It’s not just food. They arrive here barefoot, without clothing. We have to give them everything.”
While praising the few Cuban nationals who have been marooned in Ojinaga in recent months, Sanchez dismissed the far more numerous Central Americans in the city as “undisciplined, rude and ignorant.”
“It’s worse where they are from than is this whole journey,” Sanchez said of the migrants. “Because it’s not easy to get here. They don’t want to go home. They want to try to cross again.”
Maribel Aguilar, 27, passes her days at the only shelter for Central American migrants returned to Mexico in the border city of Ojinaga. Aguilar tried crossing the border with her 13-year-old daughter
and a friend. The other two made it across and now Aguliar waits in hopes of
getting more money to make the journey again.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-News
With few other options, humanitarian officials with Mexico’s immigration agency drop the most destitute of the returnees, most of them Central Americans, at a threadbare shelter set up several years ago by an evangelical preacher and his wife on the hardpan outskirts of Ojinaga.
During the high migration season last winter, Pastor Jose Medrano and his wife, Reyna Madrid, tended to dozens of migrants at a time, with little financial help.
Men bedded down on donated cots or sleeping mats in the concrete and tin-roofed chapel attached to the family’s home. The far fewer women and children slept in two small rooms flanking a simple kitchen.
“The Bible speaks of the pilgrim,” Madrid, 60, said. “We have to help these people. They have no support, no guardian angels. We are their protectors, sent by God.”
Most the men in the shelter said they planned to return home after several failed attempts to slip into the U.S. A few were waiting for family and friends to send more money to pay for another try.
Lucio Lopez, a migrant from the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, looks at photos of his family inside the stuffy room at the Ojinaga shelter.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Many of the men said smugglers had told them that crossing in the Big Bend area was both faster and more assured than through Arizona or California. Some crossed in groups of about a dozen people, others with columns of up to 60. All were caught either quickly or after days of hiking toward U.S. 90 or Interstate 10, as much as 55 miles distant.
“We heard the desert is a shorter route,” said Anselmo Arzate, 44, a Guatemalan father of two daughters. “But everything here is difficult. ”
Arzate said he was captured on a first attempt after walking four days and on a second after a weeklong trek in which his group stumbled upon the bodies of four other migrants.
“It’s just not worth the effort,” Arzate said. “At least we tried.”
The sun rises over the desert near Candelaria.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Last week, only a few Central Americans were staying at the shelter.
Lucio Lopez, 30, a father of two from Guatemala’s Maya highlands, had tried four times to slip into El Paso. U.S. officials sent him to Ojinaga after the final attempt, hoping the desert would discourage him more than the border fence of the city.
Honduran Maribel Aguilar, 27, said she had tried several months ago to ask for asylum at El Paso with her 13-year-old daughter and a friend.
U.S. officials admitted the other two, and they are now living in Florida. Aguilar was returned to Ojinaga, where she has been stuck at the shelter plotting her next move, awaiting funds that may never come. Whatever happens, she said, returning to Honduras isn’t an option.
“I have faith in God that I am going to get in,” she said in a whisper.
The moon rises over the desert near Candelaria where migrants have been crossing in large numbers.
