Migrants camped out in Mexico say want Joe Biden to win the November election – because Donald Trump will never let them into the United States if he gets back into the White House.
Hundreds of migrants are enduring the muddy, smelly encampment in Matamoros while they wait, for how long they don’t know, for appointments with Customs and Border Protection.
But they all have one big worry totally out of their control. If they don’t make it over the border by election day, they need Biden to prevail over Donald Trump.
During Trump’s first term in office, he slashed immigration by cutting down on visas and green cards, and the migrants fear he will shut down their only hope of legal entry.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of migrants are enduring the muddy, smelly encampment in Matamoros while they wait for appointments with Customs and Border Protection
The tents are slick with mildew, stink from the portable toilets wafts through the air, mixing with the scent of chicken cooking on outdoor fires
Just over the Rio Grande is Brownsville, Texas , one of the biggest crossings, both controlled and irregular, along the southern border
‘I want Biden to win,’ Daniel Cortez, 45, a mechanic from Honduras told The Free Press.
His friend Richard Betancourt, 46, a pipe fitter who fled Venezuela, agreed as they sat under a tarp out of the drizzling rain.
‘If it’s Trump, it doesn’t matter how much I work or want to work. They won’t let me in,’ he said.
Another migrant, Alejandra Falcon, 26, added: ‘If he doesn’t win, I can’t imagine what will happen.’
Until they receive the email with their appointment time, they wait, in the vague hope their time will come and their months-long journey won’t have been in vain.
The tents are slick with mildew, stink from the portable toilets wafts through the air, mixing with the scent of chicken cooking on outdoor fires, with shoes ruined by the journey, discarded dolls, and assorted trash piled on the fringes.
Just over the Rio Grande is Brownsville, Texas, one of the biggest crossings, both controlled and irregular, along the southern border that is an ongoing flashpoint in the immigration crisis.
Unlike the up to 10,000 migrants swimming the river, scaling walls and clambering through razor wire to cross the border every day, the asylum-seekers in this camp applied through the CBP One app.
The app allows them to claim asylum and wait for an interview at the border, after which they are released into the US pending a hearing to determine the validity of their claim.
Tanya Guadalupe, of Honduras, is alone in the mass encampment with her 3 children, Kenny,6, and Brian, 2, pictured, in Matamoros, Mexico. Guadalupe is also pregnant with a fourth child
A woman from Honduras holds her three-year old daughter as she sits with a group who returned to Mexico to await their US asylum hearing, as they block the Puerta Mexico international border crossing bridge to demand quickness in their asylum
A massive migrant encampment, mostly comprised of Venezuelans, is set up along the Rio Grande in Matamoros
Trump in his four years in the White House talked about building a wall to keep migrants out, but failed to stop the flow of people over the border and deported fewer people than Barack Obama.
Instead, he slashed legal immigration by making visas and greens cards harder to get.
Soon after he was turfed out of office by Biden, millions of desperate migrants were looking for a way north as the Venezuelan economy went into freefall and the country descended into lawlessness.
The vast majority of the migrants biding their time at the border, or skipping the wait by sneaking over it, are Venezuelans fleeing the all-consuming chaos of their country.
The include Alejandra and her brother Lionel, 23, who started the arduous 1,400-mile journey from Caracas eight months ago, meeting compatriot Christian Mohammed, 24, at a bus station in Panama.
The six-week journey involved four buses, 20 vans, and the extremely dangerous hike across the Darién Gap from Colombia to Panama – risking death fording rivers, hacking through jungle, and climbing mountains.
A church showed up to offer migrants bibles, dry rice and dry beans, which will be difficult for them to cook
That Alejandra wasn’t raped and her companions weren’t robbed, and no one was bitten by a venomous snake was more than a minor miracle.
‘We’re like a family here. We know everyone. We take care of each other,’ she said of the camp, despite its hardships.
None of the trio were worried so many Americans don’t want them in their country, because the alternative was so bleak.
‘No matter what, it’s going to be roses, because it’ll be better than where we came from,’ said Lionel, who wants to join a friend working at a nightclub in Louisville, Kentucky.
The migrants are caught in clash between the two major American political parties that is making the border issue looks increasingly unsolvable.
As two million people a year streamed over the border, Biden tried to address the issue with a bipartisan bill cooked up after months of negotiation in the Senate.
Not only did he have to navigate the usual party-political haggling, the fringe left of the Democratic Party was determined to keep the border completely open.
Many other more moderate Democrats did little to stop them, for fear of appearing racist.
Just when it seemed like a solution was at hand, Trump bullied House Republicans into killing the bill so he could use the immigration crisis to bludgeon Biden in the election campaign.
The asylum-seekers in this camp applied through the CBP One app to enter the US legally
The migrants all have one big worry – if they don’t make it over the border by election day, they need Joe Biden to prevail over Donald Trump, fearing he will cut off their path to legal entry
The bill would have tried to fix a huge problem with the immigration system that the CBP One app tried to address, but could only do a partial job.
Asylum-seekers claiming sanctuary in the US have to show they were persecuted or otherwise in fear of violence in their home country and had little choice but to flee.
Whether they apply through the app or sneak over the border and surrender to authorities, they are given a ‘notice to appear’ in an immigration court to plead their case.
Migrants merely have to say they have a ‘credible fear’ of returning and they are let in – the proof comes in court later.
This, of course, leads to many migrants who want to come to the US for a better life than poverty, gang violence, or entrenched corruption saying they fear for their lives.
Such people would be denied asylum and deported, but the system has for decades been so over stretched that it takes five to nine years to get a court date.
Until that time, migrants are cut loose, with or without work permits, to roam around the US either voluntarily, or after being packed on to a bus by Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and sent to a city like New York or Chicago.
By the time the court date comes, many of the migrant are difficult – if not impossible – to find.
Biden’s immigration bill would have, he claimed in the State of the Union, slashed the waiting time to six months or even six weeks.
Instead, public services are stretched beyond their limits from Texas to NYC, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles as more migrants arrive destitute and needing help to get on their feet.
