Stuck in a State of Limbo

On June 2, Carlos Javier made a critical error. It was the eve of what should have been the last day in a treacherous three-week journey from Venezuela to the United States, and he lost his nerve. Within view of the U.S.-Mexico border in Juárez, the stocky, 30-something migrant decided not to rush across the Rio Grande and its obstacle course of razor wire laid down by the Texas National Guard. Instead, he would rest up in a migrant shelter for a few days, regain his strength and then make the final push across the river and on to a designated gate where asylum seekers present themselves to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Two days later, on June 4, Javier was still in Juárez when the Biden administration issued an executive order drastically restricting the asylum process at ports-of-entry such as the one at El Paso-Juárez. As a result, Javier was stuck in a shelter with 80 other migrants who suddenly found themselves in a state of limbo. “When I learned I would have to stay here, it was like someone had thrown a jug of cold water on me,” Javier told me at the La Esperanza shelter in Juárez. “I cannot say how much I regret that decision. But I’m gathering strength. I want to continue.”

As recently as a year ago, crossing the geographical border that is the Rio Grande did not cause undue anxiety in asylum-seekers like Javier. After crossing the river, they simply walked to a gate in the adjacent border wall, sat down and waited for Border Patrol to pick them up. But in the summer of 2024, migrants have good reason to pause in Juárez before making the final push toward what they hope will be a new life in the United States. The border crossing areas are controlled by the Juárez mafia and other criminal groups, leaving migrants at high risk of kidnapping and extortion. Once this peril is navigated, crossing the river means contending with submerged razor wire as well as white drones that spray teargas on any detected movement. Once on the U.S. side, migrants — who are often carrying small children — must tunnel through yet more razor wire coiled into tall hedges. During the time it takes to find an appropriate spot to fashion a tunnel, Texas National Guard agents often pull up and begin shooting them with rubber bullets from inside their trucks. 

Though Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 on a platform of protecting the right to asylum, his administration is competing with Donald Trump to prove toughness in “securing” the border. Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee, has played a role in this switch in strategy. In 2021, she received backlash from human rights groups for saying “Do not come!” in a speech on migration in Guatemala. She has also called publicly for expanding the number of Border Patrol agents, whose ranks have grown fivefold over the past three decades. 

At the heart of the new law enacted by the Biden administration is a tangle of quotas. According to its terms, migrants are to be deported when an average of 2,500 migrants or more attempt to turn themselves in between points-of-entry per day within a one-week period. When the number of encounters falls below 1,500 for seven days, then designated ports will open again after two weeks. Several days after its proclamation, migrants, aid workers and shelter organizers at the border were still scratching their heads over how this convoluted system would work in practice. On the first day of reopening, if the number rises, is everyone who crossed deported, or are they allowed to stay? This question has never been tested, because the numbers have not dropped low enough to trigger a reopening. Human rights organizations, meanwhile, argue that the order violates both U.S. and international law by denying the right to complete a credible fear interview to those who have faced death threats in Mexico or in their home countries and would be in mortal danger upon returning. 

On June 5, the first cohort of migrants to cross the border under the new law were deported, the majority to different Mexican border cities than the ones they arrived from. The law caused an immediate 30% drop in migrant crossings, with tens of thousands of migrants like Javier stuck in Mexico for up to a year or longer.

To enter the asylum process under the new law, Javier will need to download CBP One, the smartphone app launched by Customs and Border Patrol in 2023. He will then have to spend each day refreshing the app in hope of winning the lottery for an appointment at a point-of-entry. Since January 2023, the app has seen 65 million requests for appointments and facilitated the entry of 400,000 migrants into the asylum system, where their cases often languish in the courts for up to a decade. Before the Biden order, the majority of asylum-seekers accessed their right to a credible fear interview by simply crossing the Rio Grande and meeting Border Patrol agents at a designated gate in the border wall. The mandatory app-based process makes asylum all but inaccessible for the majority of migrants. 

While he is waiting for his appointment in Juárez, Javier plans to work odd construction jobs. He is also contemplating risking deportation back to Mexico by crossing on foot with a smuggler. (Deportation flights to Venezuela are rare). 

“My family is left in [a state of] constant anxiety that will end only when I’m over there,” said Javier, dipping his head in the direction of the borderline. He wears a Claudia Sheinbaum political campaign shirt collected from the donation bin at the Juárez shelter. The new Mexican president was elected on the day he made his fateful decision to delay crossing, and the T-shirt serves as a bitter reminder of his mistake. 

The La Esperanza shelter in Juárez is an unassuming white house with a screen door in one of Juárez’s more difficult neighborhoods. On the day the Biden law went into effect, it was nearing its capacity of 85 people, as migrants who would customarily cycle through on their way across the river now had no option but to wait in Mexico, either for the number of crossers to drop, or for an appointment on the app. Since many migrants do not have phones, this means the appointment process begins with finding a job to pay for a smartphone. One of Javier’s friends in the shelter, a Guatemalan migrant named Henry Morales, suffered a common fate when thieves stole his smartphone on the migrant trail through Mexico. After fleeing Guatemala to avoid recruitment by a criminal gang in his hometown, Morales is considering crossing the traditional way if the border reopens to asylum-seekers, but worries he’ll be deported if the numbers are too high that day. 

Victor Lúz Sánchez, the pastor at the shelter, said he and his staff are still unsure how the new law will play out long term, but for now, they are planning for a disastrous outcome. “This will be hardest on those who are not informed,” he said. “Just today we had a group of 10 trying to decide whether they would go turn themselves in [to Border Patrol], and they’re going to make their own decision. I can only tell them what I know, tell them they may be deported to their countries, but it’s their decision.”

Shelter leaders assume the new rule will increase demand for other, more clandestine methods of crossing the border. Whenever more restrictions are placed on entry, Sánchez says, smuggling networks become more aggressive and raise their prices, knowing migrants will be left desperate and vulnerable. The new order keeps migrants stranded in areas where they are vulnerable to kidnapping for ransom and extortion from both criminal groups and Mexican officials. Just outside the shelter walls, says Sánchez, men often loiter in trucks, waiting to offer their smuggling services to any migrant who steps outside the door. Often, these are scams. Sánchez suspects several migrants who once stayed at the shelter have been kidnapped making their way from the shelter to the borderline in the past year. With thousands more migrants stuck in border cities and left with nowhere to go when shelters overflow, he fears organized crime groups will capitalize off the seemingly infinite supply of vulnerable people. 

“There’s no way to protect yourself from the kidnapping,” he said. “We’ve heard reports that even the authorities deliver them to criminal groups.” 

Over the past six months, the Mexican government has cracked down on those traveling through the country without the necessary paperwork, a shift the Biden administration requested in the lead-up to both countries’ elections. During this time, the Mexican government has increased arrests of migrants by 200%. 

The crackdown has also bled into existing structures of corruption in Northern Mexico. Agents of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), for example, are known to extort migrants, offering freedom to those who can pay a fee at various checkpoints. Fear of encountering INM agents is a dynamic that informs every decision on the migrant trail in Mexico, forcing migrants to hop a freight train, La Bestia, where many sustain gruesome injuries. Anything to avoid an agent’s gaze.

Despite the increasing dangers of migrating to the United States, the number of migrants crossing through Mexico remains high. This is because the circumstances causing populations to migrate have not changed. According to many analysts, the migration crisis has not been “solved” by the Biden rule, but simply exacerbated and pushed further south.  

It is not lost on immigration lawyers, shelter organizers and policymakers how much the new rule resembles Title 42, the Trump-era public health directive (known as “Remain in Mexico”) that allowed the Department of Homeland security to deport asylum-seekers to Mexico before giving them the opportunity to undergo a credible fear interview, the first step in the asylum process. In practice, Biden’s executive order works in much the same way, deporting nearly all asylum-seekers encountered at the border wall back into Mexico. In several aspects, it is even stricter, as it also deports a portion of Central American migrants to their home countries.

In 2020, Biden campaigned against Title 42. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers.”

People like Victor Lúz Sánchez, who have made the safety of migrants their life’s work, understand that imparting kindness to foreign strangers is not politically popular in the United States. Just this year, support for a full border wall between the United States and Mexico hit over 50% for the first time among voters in most major polls. Politicians that once supported leniency are now advocating for harsher policies in a futile attempt to deter migrants from making the journey to the border. 

Seeing Biden switch gears so swiftly and completely has been disheartening for Sánchez. Like many migrants, he believed his administration would end the Trump-era horrors of family separations and refugee-filled border cities. 

“Right now, [Biden] is saying one thing and doing another — the next day a complete turnaround.” 

And yet, though Biden has turned to severe asylum restrictions, Sánchez believes Trump would make them far worse if given the opportunity. In April, Trump did not rule out a rumor that his administration would seek to place asylum-seekers in work camps. He also defended his earlier stated intention to use the military to enforce mass deportations of asylum-seekers. “This is an invasion of our country,” he said. 

For now, migrants like Carlos Javier and Henry Morales are hoping they can make appointments on the CBP One app before Inauguration Day in January. Left with long stretches of boredom between work gigs in the shelter, their thoughts turn to their families. Morales had to leave behind his 5-year-old daughter without any real opportunity to say goodbye. Javier has only one sentimental object with him, a torn and water-stained photo of his grandmother that is ghostly and nearly faded to white.