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The Guardian

‘They said, keep going’: migrants escorted back to Mexico without any explanation

In a chaotic situation at the southern border, agents are escorting migrants and expelling them from the US before they know what’s happening Joel Duarte Mendez, 25, and his son, Hector, traveled from Honduras to the US over 12 days to city of Reynosa, Texas. They were flown from the Rio Grande Valley to El Paso and later bussed and deported into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Photograph: Jorge Salgado/The Guardian They couldn’t work out quite where they were or where they were headed when the guards told them: “Keep going”. They walked forward, as instructed, across an unfamiliar bridge and then suddenly they were in Mexico. Or, more accurately, back in Mexico. But 800 miles from where they had arrived in America. In a chaotic situation at the southern border, US Customs and Border Protection agents are escorting migrants across the bridge that links downtown El Paso, Texas, with the adjacent city in Mexico, Ciudad Juárez, and expelling them from the US before they even know what’s happening. One young mother just sat directly down on the sidewalk on the Mexican side of the international bridge linking the two cities and clutched her breastfeeding child to her as they huddled in cold, late March weather. The child, no more than 18 months old, wearing a pink sweater and wrapped in a blanket first fed, then slept in her arms, unaware of the moments her bewildered mother would let a tear roll down her face. At one point the woman covered the little girl’s hands with socks to stop her from crying due to the cold wind, despite the fact that the mother didn’t have a jacket of her own. A group of migrants rapidly deported from the US under Trump’s Title 42 wait on the Mexican side of the Paso del Norte international bridge, between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on 10 March 2021. Photograph: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images The sight is all too familiar in Juárez where dozens of migrants are being unceremoniously ejected from the US daily via a health protocol put in place by the Trump administration, known as Title 42, where migrants can be expelled to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the US. Some undocumented people who cross the US-Mexico border are being admitted to the US to begin the asylum process, mainly unaccompanied minors and – theoretically – parents with very young children. But most adult migrants and families currently being apprehended in the US are being expelled, though often not before being taken on a confusing and winding journey by the authorities on the American side. “I came through Reynosa, I went to the wall and immigration picked us up,” 25-year-old Joel Duarte Mendez, who had originally traveled from Honduras, explained. Reynosa is at the eastern end of the Texas-Mexico border, 754 miles from the cities of Juárez and El Paso at the extreme western end. After crossing from Reynosa into Texas, Mendez and his two-year-old son, Hector, were briefly detained. “Then they had us on a plane, then from there they put us on a bus and they just threw us here,” he said, pointing at the international bridge linking El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. I said, ‘this is my opportunity to go’ and, well, that just simply wasn’t the case American border agents had lined up the group of people after they got off the bus, took them part way across the bridge and then “they told us to ‘keep going’,” Mendez said. He clung to Hector, the boy wrapped in a jacket obviously fit for his father, who was braving the cold weather in a T-shirt. “I came with my son to give him a better life,” Mendez said. Their trip from Honduras to the border took 12 days, he said. He owned a coffee farm and a home in Honduras, but both had been destroyed when massive hurricanes hit the country last November. With the climate crisis believed to be causing stronger hurricanes, Mendez and Hector have effectively become climate refugees. He used what was left of his money to pay for the trip, he said. “We thought they were letting people with children five years and younger enter [the US], so I said, ‘this is my opportunity to go’ and, well, that just simply wasn’t the case,” he told the Guardian, dejectedly. Families wait inside a processing center in Ciudad Juárez as they are interviewed near the Paso del Norte international bridge. Photograph: Jorge Salgado/The Guardian Title 42 was the last big piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda that all but closed the US-Mexico border to the undocumented in the pandemic. Joe Biden’s administration has rescinded Trump’s so-called Remain in Mexico policy, where migrants were forced to wait in often-dangerous border towns in Mexico while their claims for asylum from violent countries were processed in the US, sometimes taking years. But for those without legal cases already underway in the US, Biden is continuing to use…