MEXICO CITY (AP) – “That’s it, dude! Done!” exclaimed Eliezer López, jumping up and down, throwing his arms to the sky and making the sign of the cross on his chest. His joy was so contagious that his friends started getting up from nearby tents to celebrate with him.
A 20-year-old Venezuelan immigrant in Mexico City, López had reason to rejoice: after several frustrating attempts, he managed to get an appointment to apply for asylum in the United States.
He is one of thousands of immigrants whose journey to the United States has ended in Mexico’s capital, the southernmost point where, until recently, migrants could register for an appointment to seek asylum through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One mobile app. .
Since June, when the Biden administration announced significant restrictions on migrants seeking asylum, the application became one of the only ways to seek asylum at the southwest border.
This US asylum policy and its geographic restrictions are the driving force behind the emergence of migrant camps across the Mexican capital, where thousands of migrants wait weeks – even months – in the dark, living in overcrowded, makeshift camps with poor sanitation and harsh living conditions.
From transit point to temporary destination
Historically, Mexico City has not been a stopover for migrants heading north. They try to cross the country quickly to reach the northern border. But the delay in securing the meeting, combined with the danger plaguing the cartel-controlled northern Mexican border towns, and the increased crackdown by Mexican authorities against migrants, have combined to turn Mexico City from a transit point into a temporary destination for thousands of people.
Immigration authorities have dismantled or abandoned some of the migrant camps over time. Others, like the one where López has lived for the past few months, will remain.
Like López, many migrants have chosen to wait to be reunited in the slightly safer capital, but Mexico City has its own challenges.
Shelters have limited capacity, and unlike major U.S. cities like Chicago and New York, which scrambled last winter to find housing for arriving migrants, in Mexico City they are largely left to fend for themselves.
Andrew Bahena, coordinator of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA), said that until the end of 2023, many migrants were detained in southern Mexican cities such as Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border. Many tried to disguise their location to beat CBP One’s geographic limits, but when U.S. officials found out, more migrants began targeting Mexico City to make their appointments there, he said.
As a result, the migrant population living in Mexico City’s camps has grown.
“We talk about this as border outsourcing, and it’s something that the United States and Mexico have been doing together for years,” Bahena said. “The CBP One application is probably one of the best examples of that today.”
“These people are asylum seekers, they are not homeless people living in Mexico,” he added.
A maze of tents and tarps
When López first arrived in Mexico City at the end of April, he thought about renting a room only to realize that wasn’t an option.
He earned 450 pesos ($23) a day working three times a week at the market. The rent was 3,000 pesos a week ($157) per person for sharing a room with strangers, an arrangement that has become common in Mexican cities with migrant populations.
“The camp is like a refuge,” López said. Immigrants can share space with people they know, avoid curfews and the strict rules of shelters, and possibly stay longer if necessary.
The camps are a maze of tents and tarps. Some call their space a “ranchito,” or small ranch, assembled from wood, cardboard, plastic sheets, blankets, and whatever else they can find to protect them from the cold mountain air and heavy summer rains that pound the city.
At another camp in the La Merced area, hundreds of blue, yellow and red tents fill the square in front of the church. It is one of the largest camps in the capital and only a 20-minute walk from the city center.
“This is a place where up to 2,000 migrants have lived in the last year,” Bahena said. “About 40% are children.”
Migrants in La Merced have organized and built a makeshift pump that transfers water from the public system and distributes it on a fixed schedule, giving each tent four buckets of water each day.
“In the beginning, there were a lot of problems, a lot of trash, and people in Mexico didn’t like it,” said Venezuelan immigrant Héctor Javier Magallanes, who has been waiting nine months for a CBP One appointment. “We made sure to fix these issues little by little.”
As more migrants kept arriving at the camp, he established a 15-person task force to oversee security and infrastructure.
Despite the efforts to keep the camp clean and orderly, the residents have not been able to avoid diseases aggravated by drastic weather changes.
Keilin Mendoza, a 27-year-old Honduran immigrant, said her children, especially her 1-year-old daughter, keep getting colds.
“He’s the one that worries me the most because he’s taking the longest to recover,” she said. Mendoza has tried to get free medical help from humanitarian organizations in the camp, but resources are limited.
Israel Resendiz, coordinator of the mobile team of Doctors Without Borders, said that the insecurity of life in the camps weighs heavily on the migrants’ mental health. “It’s not the same when a person waiting for an appointment (…) can get a hotel, rent a room or get money for food. Most people don’t have these resources.”
The minister of inclusion and social affairs and Mexico City’s interior minister did not respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment on the camps. The press representatives of Clara Brugada, the incoming mayor of México City, said that the matter must first be discussed at the federal level.
At the same time, tensions between camp residents and neighbors have increased, which has sometimes led to mass riots in the camps.
In late April, neighbors in the trendy and central Juárez neighborhood blocked some of the city’s busiest streets, chanting, “The street is no shelter!”
Eduardo Ramírez, one of the organizers of the protests, said the government’s role is “to help these poor people who come from their countries to look for something better and have the bad luck to travel through Mexico.”
“They are sleeping on the streets because the government has abandoned them,” he said.
In the camp hosting about 200 families in the northern part of Vallejo, tensions – and fear – are running high.
“One day they threw chlorine water on one child and hot water on another,” recalled 50-year-old Salvadoran Sonia Rodríguez, a resident of the camp.
Despite the fact that he has made the “ranchito” as precious as possible – he has a grill for cooking, bunk beds and a television – his gaze turns dark when he remembers that he lived for 10 months in a makeshift camp that is not his home, without his belongings. away from his normal life. ___
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