Fabiola Yepes, a 20-year-old mother from Venezuela, was taking shelter under a bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico with her young son when she first learned of President Biden’s new executive order restricting asylum seekers.
She was scheduled to attempt to enter the US on Wednesday, just hours after the order took effect, despite having witnessed U.S. soldiers firing non-lethal bullets at migrants on the other side of the border the day before.
“Maybe what they say is not what they say and they won’t turn us away,” Yepes said. “I’m scared, especially because I have my child with me.”
The new order leaves migrants scattered along the U.S.-Mexico border trying to understand how they will be affected by the measure, Biden’s toughest border policy yet. The order allows the U.S. to temporarily close the border to asylum seekers if the seven-day average of daily illegal crossings reaches 2,500.
There appeared to be confusion in some places along the border on Wednesday about whether the order had technically gone into effect and whether Border Patrol should be enforcing it. Shelter operators and humanitarian workers in Mexico were also scrambling to make sense of what it meant.
Juan Fierro Garcia, director of El Buen Samaritano (The Good Samaritan), a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, said the new policy could put a huge strain on his operation and other local shelters if large numbers of migrants are turned away.
He noted that the number of migrants currently in the city is relatively low, reflecting a sharp decline since the beginning of the year, a result of Mexico stepping up enforcement efforts to transfer migrants from the border to other parts of the country.
Fierro Garcia said most of the shelter residents are families who have been waiting months to meet with US immigration authorities through CBP One, the app used to schedule asylum applications, but the shelter can only accommodate 55 people in a space designed for 280, and it is running low on food.
“At this point, we don’t have the supplies necessary to accommodate more people,” he said.
As of Wednesday morning, some people were still entering the US, reflecting limited exceptions to the new restrictions, such as minors crossing the border alone, victims of human trafficking and those using the CBP One app. It is also unclear in some areas whether the executive action will take effect immediately.
At the Mexicali, Calif., border crossing, more than a dozen migrants believed to be from Haiti and who had reservations at CBP One were allowed into the U.S. on Wednesday morning, but others were denied entry.
Georgina Esquivel, a 40-year-old food vendor from Morelos, Mexico, said she had not heard about Biden’s order. She said she had been seeking asylum in the United States without a CBP One appointment, but Customs and Border Protection agents had turned away her and her 10-year-old daughter, Maria.
“I plan to stay here,” Esquivel said. “I don’t know what to do yet. I don’t want to go back to Morelos, and I don’t want to stay in Mexicali.”
At an outdoor waiting area set up between two walls separating the U.S. and Mexico in San Diego’s Tijuana River Valley, dozens of migrants who had crossed the border gathered on Wednesday, waiting for Border Patrol agents to take them in for processing.
“It’s business as usual,” said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit that helps migrants and provides food and water. The only change, he said, is that fewer people appeared to be crossing the border Wednesday compared with the day before.
In El Paso, shelter operators said it may still be too early to see any concrete effects from the order.
“We have to give this order a chance to evolve,” said Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit shelter system. “It’s an order that has an implementation aspect to it, logistically, so we have to give them a chance to see how it actually plays out.”
Garcia also stressed that the number of migrants waiting to cross the border is extremely low compared to past years, making the order unlikely to have a major impact.
Mexican migration experts say Biden’s executive order is worrying and could put asylum seekers at risk.
“We are seeing echoes of mechanisms that have been tried in the past,” said Rafael Velásquez García, Mexico director for the International Rescue Committee, one of the world’s leading refugee aid organizations. He noted that past measures such as Title 42 have failed to reduce demand for asylum, improve Mexico’s capacity to receive migrants or allocate resources to increase opportunities within the country.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he added. “It simply doesn’t work.”
Either way, analysts say Mexico will bear the brunt of the measures, as migration authorities will likely respond by detaining people sent back across the border and busing them to faraway states where they can be exhausted, said Eunice Rendón, coordinator for the Mexican coalition of aid groups, Migrant Agenda.
“This is not a safe or orderly process,” Rendon said. “It’s the opposite of what we want for migration.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador denied on Wednesday that the order would cause problems for Mexican authorities and said his administration was helping the U.S. reach agreements with other countries to directly repatriate migrants. It was unclear which countries he was referring to or how that would be accomplished.
Some immigrants who recently successfully entered the United States were surprised at their good fortune.
Jose Luis Posada, 23, from El Salvador, said he scaled the border wall near Tijuana on Monday. He was released by Border Patrol agents at a public transit stop in San Diego on Wednesday.
“It’s a miracle,” Posada said of the timing, who only learned of Biden’s new executive order on Wednesday.
“God knows what he’s doing, and here we are,” he said.
Align Corpus He contributed from Mexicali, Mexico. Jonathan Wolf From San Diego Reyes Mata III From El Paso.
