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.
Friends and all who care about the humanitarian crisis occurring along the U.S.-Mexico border. Do remember that people coming into our country have multiple and significant challenges in coming into a new culture, learning a language that's foreign to them, and dealing with trauma that emanates from the places they have left and oftentimes, from the journey itself.
Glad to see the Rolling Stone magazine giving this a lot of ink. They care. We should all care about Abbott's lethal, macabre, and necropolitical ambitions. It's a feeling for many of us here in Texas of having gotten taken over by a foreign, cruel, and atrocious political power. One wonders how our state officials sleep well at night. Only a heart of metal can walk away from this.
A dispatch from Eagle Pass, where the Texas governor has amped up the cruelty toward migrants to boost his profile
National Guard stands behind Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Feb. 4, 2024 in Eagle Pass.RAQUEL NATALICCHIO/HOUSTON CHRONICLE/GETTY IMAGES
EAGLE PASS, Texas — The video is 13 seconds long. In the foreground is an orderly green lawn, lit and safe. In the background, there are the lights of Mexico, Coahuila state. In the middle is the river. It’s a void, darker than the night sky.
Amid crickets, a woman’s voice echoes from the void, or maybe a child’s. Then a man’s. They’re crying out for help.
The lawn belongs to former state Rep. Poncho Nevárez (D), who represented Eagle Pass in the Texas Legislature for eight years. Some time back, the state of Texas installed rows of concertina wire, the razor-bladed coiled fencing first invented to control cattle and then to mangle soldiers in the First World War. The wire hadn’t stopped anyone from crossing. Sometimes migrants injured themselves trying to cross. Sometimes it trapped them in the river. It is more dangerous than it looks, especially if you’re hungry and tired, and even more so at night.
Nevárez does that night what anyone with a conscience would do: He tries to help. The wire means he can’t easily reach the river. With difficulty, he makes his way into the void, but he can’t locate the source echoing cries with his flashlight. He calls the Border Patrol, but he knows they don’t do water rescues. The cries die out. In the morning, there is no trace of them.
Trigger warning. This bone-chilling, macabre news account is like nothing I've read or listened to before. It only matches stories about the thousands of deaths of folks dying in the desert which is not a new phenomenon, but nevertheless a consistent horrific one.
Do go to the NBCNews.com website to listen, in these first responders' own words, what they are witnessing along the U.S.-Mexico border. We don't get much news like these in Texas about the very large numbers of bodies that are getting recovered along the Rio Grande River where people seeking a better life for themselves and families are experiencing.
How can we pride ourselves as a great country and allow for this to happen? We should not get numb to this. No, this is first and foremost a humanitarian crisis. These are people's loved ones, including tiny babies, who are drowning alongside their desperate mothers and fathers in their attempts to cross the river—even despite the inescapable visage of hideous barbed wire that screams the ugliness that our state and nation have become.
Those doing the traumatizing work of recovering these bodies will similarly be suffering for years to come. Thank God for their humanitarian work, yet no one should ever have a job like this. We need to bring a stop to Gov. Abbott's necropolitics, his politics of death.
EAGLE PASS, Texas — The crisis unfolding at the U.S.-Mexico border since last year has spilled over into the fire engines and ambulances of a small Texas town.
First responders in Eagle Pass say they are overwhelmed and increasingly traumatized by what they see: parents drowned or dying, their children barely holding onto life after attempting to cross the Rio Grande.
The emotional strain on firefighters and EMTs has grown so great that city officials have applied for a state grant that would bring in additional mental health resources for front-line workers.
“It’s an unprecedented crisis,” said Eagle Pass Fire Chief Manuel Mello. “It’s nothing close to what I experienced while I was on the line. It’s a whole different monster.”
Firefighters say the first calls for help usually blare through the three stations in Eagle Pass while crews are still sipping their morning coffee, bracing themselves for what the day will bring.
Parents with young children might be near drowning or trapped on islands somewhere between the United States and Mexico, surrounded by the fierce currents of the Rio Grande.
On some shifts, firefighters with the Eagle Pass Fire Department can spend three to five hours in the water, helping rescue migrants crossing the river or recovering their drowned bodies.
“It’s something we’ve never gone through,” said Eagle Pass native Marcos Kypuros, who has been a firefighter and EMT for two decades. “It’s been hard having to keep up with that on top of everything else we take care of.”
Eagle Pass has become ground zero in recent months for an unrelenting border crisis that is equal parts political and humanitarian.
With hundreds of thousands of people attempting to cross the border illegally each year near Eagle Pass, city emergency personnel have increasingly been called upon to perform difficult and often dangerous rescues or to retrieve dead bodies, they said. They do this while juggling other emergencies in the city of 28,000 and throughout sparsely populated Maverick County.
“They see decomposing bodies, they see children that have drowned. Babies 2-months-old, with their eyes half-open, their mouths full of mud,” Mello said. “I know that when I signed up, they told me that I would see all of that, but not in the number that these guys are seeing now.”
Call volumes to the fire department surged last summer after Title 42, which set limits on asylum-seekers hoping to enter the United States,was lifted. On a typical day, the department might receive 30 calls, but the number has doubled in recent months, Mello said.
The added strain prompted one of his firefighters, who was still working through the required probationary period, to turn in his gear and switch careers entirely, he added.
After a record-breaking number of illegal crossings in December, federal authorities say the figure dropped by half in January. The most significant decrease was in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass.
But the steady rise in crossings last year has taken a toll on first responders who did not sign up for this kind of work, Kypuros said.
“Those times where we recover four or five, six, up to seven bodies a day — it was just rough,” he said.
As the number of calls for emergencies on the border grew last fall, so did the number of sick days firefighters requested, according to the fire chief.
“I try and leave all this at work, not take it home with me, but it’s so hard,” Kypuros said. “Sometimes it’s hard to cope.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It was not immediately clear when the funds the city applied for would be awarded.
After the record-breaking number of attempted border crossings last year, Abbott ramped up the state’s immigration enforcement efforts. Last week, he announced the deployment of 1,800 members of the Texas National Guard to Eagle Pass in an effort to curb illegal crossings.
Abbott, a Republican, installed razor wire near the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass as part of the enforcement operation, and previously placed buoys in the river to prevent crossings.
Firefighters have treated lacerations and open wounds from people trying to crawl through the concertina wire, Kypuros said. At times, local hospitals get so overwhelmed with patients from the border that wait times for a bed can stretch to two hours, Garcia added.
As thousands of people without pathways to U.S. citizenship wait in squalid, makeshift camps on the Mexico side of the border, others attempt dangerous river crossings across the Rio Grande, endangering their own lives and those of their loved ones.
Harish Garcia, who has worked as a firefighter EMT in Eagle Pass for three years, still cannot shake the memory of a drowning mother and her young daughter. Garcia’s crew, including a firefighter with a daughter around the same age as the little girl, loaded the two into an ambulance, he said, but it was too late.
When crews returned to the station, some called their families. Others went quiet, Garcia said.
“Unfortunately, calls are going to keep coming in after that, so we can’t hang on to that for too long,” he said months later. “We have to just let it go and move on to the next call.”
Garcia and Kypuros say they’ve lost count of how many bodies they’ve recovered in recent months. The majority are found after failed attempts to cross the river, but other calls have led fire crews into the rough brush of South Texas, where dehydration and exposure can prove just as deadly.
David Black, a psychologist who has worked with the California law enforcement community for more than 20 years, said witnessing the death of a child is often the most traumatizing event a first responder can experience. Without a strong support system both in and out of the workplace, that stress can eat away at them.
“We outsource our worst-case scenarios to first responders,” he said. “If you have your own children, that can really impact how you look at your own family.”
As Eagle Pass waits for the state grant to be approved, agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal workers already have access to mental health resources internally.
The services, which include on-site clinicians and field psychologists, are part of a larger effort to “improve resiliency and encourage our colleagues to seek help when they need it,” said Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner.
Mello said that despite the uncertain nature of the border crisis and the political tensions between the White House and the governor’s office, he is optimistic that help will come.
Until then, he knows the calls for help will keep coming.
Morgan Chesky reported from Eagle Pass, Texas, and Alicia Victoria Lozano from Los Angeles.
While not resolving the matter entirely, the report addresses the undercounts of Latinos and other people of color killed while in police custody. Given high rates of intermarriage, Spanish surname is a poor proxy since many "Hispanics" have Anglo surnames and no standard reporting metric or process across locales is in place.
As addressed in prior blog posts, if we zoom out and widen the lens to include lives lost in the context of governmental policy surrounding immigration and border crossings, the number of Latina/o/x deaths grows astronomically.
All of this makes me shudder, as well as deeply concerned about the regular violence committed against poor and desperate people—poised to contribute positively and enormously to our country—that gets justified as "keeping our borders safe."
The point here is that these aren't idiosyncratic events but reflect patterned violence against our communities instead. Latinas/os must therefore commit to not solely addressing state and local police enforcement policies, but federal immigration ones, as well. Doing so stands to benefit all groups entering our country from other places besides Mexico like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, Brazil, and so on.
Clearly, the African American community has done a much better job than the Latino community in stepping up to the plate on police violence against their own community. Awareness is a good first step. Working in solidarity on such matters with the African American, Asian American, and Native American communities is essential, as well. Beginning with standard reporting processes, substantive policy remedies must follow.
I thank Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, himself a victim of police brutality, for bringing the LatinosUS report to my attention, and for sharing the La Raza Killings data base with much more information and resources on killings of people in our communities.
Maria Lowrie has watched videos of her son’s death in police custody over and over again.
Sometimes she watches the images from an officer’s body camera. Sometimes she watches a bystander’s recording. She has watched them so many times that she can pinpoint the moment when her son, Ernie Serrano, took his final breath, she says.
“I don’t wish this for any mother, for any human being, to go through that. Something has got to be done so it doesn’t happen as often as it’s happening,” the Los Angeles woman said.
She doesn’t believe that her son, if he had been White, would have died Dec. 15 when sheriff’s deputies were called to a Riverside County grocery store for a disturbance.
Serrano, a 33-year-old Mexican American, was at a Stater Bros. market picking up snacks that night when the sheriff’s office received a report about a man — later identified as Serrano — wandering in and out of the store. Another 911 call reported him tussling with a security guard. Video from a bystander shows sheriff’s deputies beating Serrano with batons and using a Taser on him before wrestling him facedown onto a checkout counter.
Serrano is heard pleading “Let me go, please” several times in a body camera video, at one point saying “I can’t breathe” and “You’re using excessive force” in between cries of pain. Several minutes later, an officer notices that the man is not breathing. The officers place him on the floor and try to resuscitate him. He is pronounced dead at a hospital.
According to Sheriff Chad Bianco, the preliminary autopsy report suggests that Serrano died of a methamphetamine overdose; attorneys for the family, which has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, say he died of asphyxiation.
Serrano’s death did not get much attention beyond the local news, but a review of databases that track police killings shows that while their cases have largely gone untold in the national discussion of police violence, Latinos are killed by police at nearly double the rate of White Americans. And while the national debate on police killings has focused on Black Americans, whose deaths at the hands of law enforcement have been high-profile and outnumber those of other people of color, some activists say the situation for the Latino community has become critical.
“It’s a crisis, in the same manner as it’s a crisis in the Black community. . . . Chances are, if anybody is going to be getting killed, they’re going to be Black or Brown,” said Roberto Rodriguez, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who researches police brutality and was a victim himself in the late 1970s.
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.
