On the first day of his repeated term as president of the United States, Donald Trump gave well in his promises that life would make hell for asylum seekers. Proclaiming “National ambulance“To open the way to deport the million, Trump also immediately Canceled app CBP One This has previously enabled unfathomable people to be filed for legal entry into the US from Mexico.
The cancellation allegedly leaves about 270,000 people from a wide range of nationality stranded on Mexican territory, where many have been waiting for almost a year in the tortured recesses for CBP One Accest. This means nothing about the deadly Odysseus that the Refuge seekers were already forced to take over before submitting the request for these meetings – Odysseus that often meant the being continuous prey by clothing for organized crime and corrupt law enforcement officers as well as navigation of the notorious Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia.
Predictively, Trump’s “deportative Blitz”-like what they called some of the outlets-was a boon for the Mexican underground and security staff that is happy on the inside. When I arrived a week after Trump’s inauguration in Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican State of Chihuahu, located exactly across the border from El Pasa in Texas, told me a Venecuelan seeker for asylum that the price of smuggling is a short short distance in the US at once 10,000 dollars per person.
It was my first visit to Ciudada Juarez of April 2023, when I arrived shortly after a The fire killed 40 people in the detention center of the migrant Directing the border fence. There, Mexican immigration authorities obediently participated in The war for asylum seekers Former US President Joe Biden, who, contrary to Republican propaganda, deported more people than Trump during his first term.
In 2023, the presence of asylum seekers at Ciudad Juarez was visible, and many were camped in front of migrant detention. This time the streets were gaps, frigid temperatures and occasional fierce wind soaked with dust, forcing many to seek significant shelter.
Since the city is now facing an additional appearance of people on the opposite side of the border, local authorities have been undertaken to raise giant white tents to temporarily place the incoming deportis.
While I was doing the Ciudad Juarez Center circles in search of asylum seekers, I met Mexican man in 40 who had been deported more than a decade from Arizona, where he worked at McDonald’s and Burger King and had a cleaned house for additional income. He told me that he was detained while buying food and then closed in an underground cell, while the Arizona authorities started discussing why he had no fingerprints, refusing to believe his explanation that they were deleted by chemicals that were cleaning the houses.
After three months without seeing the light of day, he was released and deported to Mexico, he said, with special glasses to protect herself from blinding from the sun. Subsequently dealt with work in one of the US owners in the US Makiladora At Ciudad Juarez – the infamous factories that have long enabled US corporations to exploit the cheap workforce just outside the border fence, avoiding taxes and eviction of workers’ rights. He recently left the job of Maquilador because his employer was constantly spreading demands, he did not allow him to take care of his three daughters.
Indeed, Ciudad Juarez came to epochuisize the American decademics of Mexico through the so -called “free trade”. In his book Juarez: Laboratory of Our Future, published four years after signing in 1994 North American Free Trade (Nafta) Agreement, which is a desolate on Mexican agriculture and drove countless Campesin to the north to all fastened American border, American writer Charles Bowden Ogulo Between impoverishment and suffering from ordinary Mexicans and the extraordinary nature of economic relationships between the USA Mexico. He described us in the mahintions as “planting of doom about the world and calling it to his economic policy” – which is as Good explanation as well as all for the current “migration crisis”.
However, not only did the American “plant fail” in Ciudad Juarez, but also supported “seemingly”War against drugs“This was launched in 2006 and recorded an obscene amount of Mexican soldiers and police deployed to metropolis, which was quickly taken to the position of a distinguished world” The City of Murder “, the title of Bowden’s next book published in 2010.
As Bowden pointed out, a narrative of continuous wars between Mexican drug cartels provides appropriate alibi for continuous violence in Mexico, while ugly darkens the deep involvement of state safety in drug trade in a deadly brutality that characterized the ciudada Juarez. Precise murder statistics are impossible to come, partly because of the increasingly common phenomenon of forced disappearance, but most of the assessment puts the total killing of the city at more than 1,000 for 2024.
The next person I spoke to in Ciudad Juarez was a Mexican with gray hair and very little teeth planted on the road in front of the border crossing, collecting a cup of styrofoam for donations from the US from the USA. Speaking to me in Spain, she explained that her rent had come and that yesterday the Styropor Cup accumulated only $ 8.
She then moved to the fluent English English, and in the southern American accent told me that she had been deported from the United States despite having owned a green card, and that her 34-year-old daughter had been shot and stabbed to death nine years before Ciudad Juarez. The woman suggested that I could probably find some asylum seekers if I was just walking west on the border and useful to warn me to stay away from the door as I could grab me and rape me.
I added $ 5 to Stirofoam Cup and walked to the west as he was sent, asking the fence a permanent reminder of my own privileged international freedom of movement as an American citizen and passport owner. At the intersection, I found a young Guatemalac and her daughter who was selling sweets; They were in Ciudad Juarez for three months, my mother told me and have not yet determined the alternative plan of action after the cancellation of the CBP One. If I wanted a better chance to find “migrants”, she said, there were several shelters down the road.
These shelters were not marked, which consisted of small, neglected structures that practically lay in the shadow of the border wall, but at the very least provided a refuge from the superior dust and the wind. I gained access to one evangelical run shelter by caught talking with Venezuela’s young man who spent the last seven months in Mexico and at the last time a CBP was awarded a date for appointment for January 28, ie eight days after the program was abolished.
There were numerous Venecuela families inside the shelter, many barefoot children and in shorts, even while I was trembling in a winter coat and scarf. I talked to the Venecuela man at 30 who did his best to optimism, but admitted that the whole situation of the CBP was little to bear after the physical and psychological torment of the trip to Ciudad Juarez, noting: “It is like swimming over times of swimming the whole river just to drown on the other side. “According to his account, he avoided four attempts at Mexico only, which were organized by Mexican authorities and cartel operatives together.
Back outside, I came across two Venecuelan men, at the age of 24 and 31, who washed the windshields in the store before their windshield washing tool broke down and the police arrived to get involved in the usual extrasing activity. I offered them to buy them a replacement tool, and as we started down Avenid Juarez towards the market-pausation for the mandatory selfie in front of the border crossing-25-year-old, he discovered that he had already been deported from the USA twice, once from New York.
Showing me a photo on his phone smiling at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, he admitted that the American dream was not all that was cracked: “No one in the US -in the US; do not want to talk to you; they do not want you to get closer to them.”
The 31-year-old agreed that they may be overrated now and that life is not necessarily worth living if you are only in it for money. The two of them discussed whether they would return to Mexico City to try to get out of life or paste it to Ciudad Juarez, pouring eternal dust from the car windshield. Or, of course, they could cross the border once more. But regardless of the way they eventually turn, the “collapse” of American economic policy has already been planted.
Back in 1998, Bowden called Ciudad Juarez a “desire of the future.” And the future, unfortunately, is now.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeere.
