‘Breaking point’ at US border as thousands of migrants gather (2024)

Fourteen miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, the steel border fence separating the United States and Mexico breaks for the first time. On the hill overlooking crowded Tijuana, US border patrol agents scan the landscape for people trying to cross.

Once, migrants crossing the border would try to evade the agents, slipping past to lead a life working undocumented in the US. Now most actively seek them out, surrendering in order to lodge a claim for asylum.

“They are exploiting and overwhelming the system,” said Agent Ramirez, whose parents immigrated from Dominica. His partner sighed. “This has become so polarised you can’t even talk about it any more,” he said. “It’s become our Brexit.”

America’s top border official warned this week that the immigration system along the southern border was at “breaking point” amid an unprecedented surge in families claiming asylum having fled violence-racked Central America.

A four-fold increase in claims since 2014 has pushed the asylum backlog to an all-time high of 750,000, prompting President Trump to threaten once again to close the entire border. His declaration of a national emergency to obtain funds for a border wall has intensified the bitter political fight, while the migration shows no signs of ebbing.

In Tijuana, by some measures now the world’s most dangerous city, Mexico is struggling to deal with the thousands of Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadorean migrants either waiting for their chance to lodge an asylum claim or for it to be heard across the border in San Diego under the new US procedures. “Metering” limits the number of people allowed to lodge their asylum claims on any one day; “Remain in Mexico” sends them back to await the court process, which could take years.

The Trump administration hopes to replicate these experiments in San Diego across the entire border, despite protests from immigration lawyers who denounce it as illegal. More and more migrant families are now seeking other points of entry where the policies are not yet in place, such as El Paso, Texas, the centre of what border officials say is the current crisis.

In Tijuana, Felix’s most prized possessions are pieces of paper: one bears the number 2,505, his turn in the queue to file his asylum claim at the border; the others document the supporting evidence of extortion and death threats from a criminal gang in El Salvador controlling the lucrative drug trade to the US.

His hands shake as he holds out the phone bearing a message from the gang, the P-18 Revolucionarios, threatening to rape his daughters, aged seven and nine, and “feed you their organs” unless he paid thousands in protection money from the furniture business he built himself.

He sold the business to repay his debts to the bank before fleeing with his family to another city in El Salvador, only to be ordered to leave there by a rival gang, MS-13. The Revolucionarios, meanwhile, continued to send messages, telling him they had tracked him down. When he went to the police, they dutifully filed a report but then shrugged. “Our advice is you leave the country,” they said.

Al Otro Lado, a legal charity working on both sides of the border, described Felix’s asylum claim as “incredibly strong”. Yet last year the US attorney general overruled the courts to say that persecution by gangs could not be grounds for asylum. Only persecution by the state qualified.

Some question the distinction. Juan Ramon, a Honduran opposition leader, fled after his government rivals sent gangs to kidnap him. Many police and military in Central American countries have links with the gangs and show little ability to protect civilians from them.

“The military and the gangs will make pacts — we won’t fight you if you don’t fight us,” said Juan Enamorado, who works with barrio youth in Honduras. The brother of President Hernandez of Honduras is currently awaiting trial in Miami on charges of trafficking cocaine from Colombia to the US via Honduras.

“These are life-or-death situations,” said Erika Pineiro of Al Otro Lado, which is challenging the US administration’s new policies in court. “These people are coming from countries that have been destabilised by US foreign policy and some of them will die if they return. You don’t lock people in a burning building when you’ve lit the fire.”

The numbers coming to the US are a fraction of those at the peak of illegal immigration: 367,000 in 2018 against 1.6 million in 2000. But the issue has become ever more politically divisive since Mr Trump’s election promise to build a wall. At a rally in Michigan on Thursday night he mocked asylum seekers who claimed that they were in fear for their lives. The president mimicked them, saying: “‘I am very afraid for my life, I’m afraid for my life’ — It’s a big fat con job.”

Both Republicans and Democrats condemned the White House’s proposed cuts to the diplomatic and foreign aid budgets announced this week as a danger to national security even as Mr Trump seeks billions to build the remaining border wall.

The wall is popular with US border agents, even though they call it “just one tool in the box we need” to handle the influx. “We need more manpower,” said Vincent Pirro, of the San Diego border patrol.

Paulo, 17, has been in Tijuana since he was turned away from the San Ysidro border crossing in November; he was told that as a minor he was not eligible to file his asylum claim. After sleeping in a park, he was directed to a children’s shelter by a policeman, where he is still waiting to file a claim. He worked as a bus conductor in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where he was threatened by gangs if he did not work for them as a drug mule.

Felix and his family, meanwhile, wait in the family shelter where they fled after armed men swarmed the cheap Tijuana hotel where they first lodged. The hotel turned out to be a front for drugs and human trafficking.

He calculates that it will be two months before his number is called from the list kept at the border. Relatives in Massachusetts are too afraid to help them because the Revolucionarios have a presence there, as they do in Tijuana and across Mexico. In the room in the shelter, shared with two other families, they draw the curtains and hide.

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