Selma López, 31, has spent nearly a year holed up in a two-room house not far from Mexico’s border with the US, along with her 11-year-old son Darikson and another woman who also made the long journey from Honduras in search of a new life.
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They are among thousands of people stranded south of the frontier by a Trump administration policy known as migrant protection protocols (MPP), which obliges asylum seekers to await their court hearings in some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, instead of in the US.
Children and adults have been raped, kidnapped and murdered while awaiting their court date. In Piedras Negras, police routinely harass migrants, said López. Earlier this week, a mysterious white car followed her as she walked to the store. And as a Garifuna woman, she has suffered overt racism and anti-Black insults from locals.
But López’s mood brightens when conversation turned to the US presidential inauguration – and what it might mean for her and thousands of others.
“We’re encouraged and feeling a little hopeful,” said López, who fled northern Honduras after gangsters threatened to kill Darikson for not making protection payments. “It’s giving us a little hope that we can at least enter the US and fight our cases there.”
Joe Biden has promised to do away with MPP and restore the asylum process, raising hopes among MPP participants that their claims will be treated seriously – and that they won’t have to risk their lives while waiting.
Biden plans to restore asylum and refugee programs and officials from the incoming administration say MPP will be addressed in an executive order in the near future.
But they cautioned it could take months to address all the changes to the immigration system introduced by Trump.
Activists on the border have tried to temper migrants’ enthusiasm.
“They think things are going change immediately. I’m trying to make them understand it’s not that easy,“ said Israel Rodríguez, a Baptist pastor, who feeds migrants in Piedras Negras.
Piedras Negras, a city of factories opposite Eagle Pass, Texas, attracted asylum seekers because of safety perceptions, according to Rodrigúez. But MPP participants must attend hearings in Laredo, Texas, a journey of 125 miles through cartel territory.
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The threats do not just come from criminals: police in Piedras Negras regularly detain and extort migrants – and even destroy immigration documents. The local government has closed down migrant shelters under the pretext of the coronavirus and in December ordered them from providing hot meals for migrants left homeless.
“They’re making charity illegal,” said Dominican brother Obed Cuellar, director of a diocesan migrant shelter. “There’s a way of thinking here that migrants come to destroy the city or make it dirty … or they’re taking our jobs.”
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, came to office promising not to do the US’s “dirty work” on migration matters. But he immediately went along with the MPP scheme and promised to provide the participants and their children with access to health and education, employment opportunities and shelter.
Lawyers and activists say little of that help has materialized, but volunteers from Mexico and the US have provided MPP participants with everything from food and clothing to legal and medical advice.
Within Mexico, MPP largely went unnoticed as its participants were largely out of sight and out of mind. But a lawyer representing a number of MPP participants said the program served its purpose for the Trump administration, however.
“The cornerstone of MPP is xenophobia. And it worked because 68,000 people were kept out of the US,” said Charlene D’Cruz, a border fellow for Lawyers for Good Government’s Project Corazon.
“What MPP did was show people stuck at the border and that was enough for Trump’s base to say that he did what he set out to do: keep all the ‘Mexican rapists’ out.”
The pictures from Matamoros – tucked into the extreme north-east corner of Mexico – were at times shocking as MPP participants lived in the squalor of a tent camp along the Rio Grande.
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The camp has been flooded out, infested with snakes and insects and eventually infiltrated by criminal groups – which charge $500 for permission to cross the frontier and inflict severe beatings on those not paying.
“My son [age five] saw someone being beaten by the river. … He’s traumatized,” said Marlen, 24,a Salvadoran asylum seeker.
But people at the camp felt they had particular reason for optimism: in December 2019 Jill Biden came here and helped serve meals to the migrants.
“This is the only place along the border the now first lady visited. That’s why they’re so hopeful,” said Juan Sierra.
“We think Biden is going to push an immigration reform,” said José Luis Guerra, a skinny Cuban. “With Trump, there wasn’t any reason for hope.”
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