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AGUA PRIETA, Sonora — At shortly before 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, four migrants stepped off a U.S. Border Patrol van in Douglas, took a few steps south, and were back in Mexico.
They had just been deported — “voluntarily repatriated” in Border Patrol vernacular — after an unsuccessful attempt to cross into the United States illegally.
And though they had been exposed to the elements for only about two hours after jumping the fence that separates Agua Prieta from Douglas, 30-degree temperatures and steady snow showers had left them cold, wet and shivering.
 Volunteer staffer Miriam Maldonado runs the desk at the Migrant Resource Center in Agua Prieta on Thursday night. (By Jonathan Clark |
So when Mark Adams stepped out of a brightly painted shopfront and invited them in for hot coffee, free burritos and a warm blanket, they eagerly accepted.
“How are you? How’s your health?” Adams asked the migrants, three men and a young woman.
“Mas o menos,” said the woman, forcing a smile. More or less.
Adams and his wife, Miriam Maldonado, are volunteers at the Centro de Recursos para Migrantes, or Migrant Resource Center, in Agua Prieta. It’s a project that started almost six years ago when a group of Americans and Mexicans calling themselves the Coalition Without Borders began handing out blankets, hot food and drinks to repatriated migrants on the coldest nights of the year.
At first, coalition members gathered on the U.S. side of the Douglas-Agua Prieta ports of entry. But when they heard complaints that their activities were encouraging the migrants to stay in the United States, they shifted south of the border.
This past spring, when a shopfront opened up next to the offices of the Mexican Immigration Institute in Agua Prieta, the coalition took out a lease on the property, painted it inside and out with cheerful shades of yellow, green and orange, and, in July, opened the Migrant Resource Center.
Literally the first doorway visitors pass after clearing customs, the location provides a perfect permanent base for the project.
At a June 30 inauguration ceremony, organizers spoke of the hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants repatriated to Sonoran border towns each year. The deportees, the speakers said, often find themselves in an unknown city at any time of the day, tired and hungry, and carrying only the clothes on their backs. The Migrant Resource Center sought to provide people repatriated to Agua Prieta with a quick meal, new clothing, basic medical attention and directions to the town’s migrant shelters.
During its first three months of operation, the center provided services to 4,600 migrants, Adams says. Consistent with other indicators of a reduced migrant flow, such as recent Border Patrol apprehension statistics, he expects the numbers to be lower for the final quarter of 2006 — perhaps half the previous tally.
However, Adams and Maldonado say that recent visitors, though fewer in number, have been just as needy — perhaps more so in the increasingly cold weather.
Adams recalled a chilly overnight shift last Thanksgiving when a group of about 16 people arrived early in the morning. Among their numbers were a mother and her three children, aged 9 months, 3 and 5.
The 5-year-old was being carried by a man wearing only a short-sleeved shirt — he and several other adults had given their heavier clothes to the children.
“I asked him if the girl was his daughter,” Adams recalled. “He said no, she just couldn’t walk anymore.”
The girl’s father, Adams learned, was already in the U.S. The mother was trying to bring her children across the border to reunite the family in Minneapolis.
Stocking up
The four migrants who arrived at the center Thursday also were underdressed for the wintry weather.
Their jackets lacked insulating liners, and none wore hats or gloves. Only one was wearing shoes suitable for walking in snowy conditions. The other three were in sneakers. Almost as soon as they sat down, Maldonado had them changing into dry socks.
Adams started handing out cups of coffee and burritos, which the visitors devoured hungrily. Julio, a messy-haired 23-year-old, said he had wrenched his back on the journey, while Lorenzo, 46, complained of a sore leg. They were given a fistful of pain relievers and the phone number of a local physician who volunteers for the resource center.
Donations, both in services and materials, are what make the center go, Adams said. For example, the coffee is provided by local roaster Just Coffee, while the burritos come from another Agua Prieta donor. Clothing is given largely by people in the U.S., and a Presbyterian disaster assistance organization contributes most of the medical supplies.
With new socks on his feet and food in his belly, Julio stood up and began examining the items posted on the center’s walls.
Several homemade announcements near the entryway asked for help in locating missing loved ones. One poster featured photos of seven men ranging in age from 18 to 51, all from the same community in the southern state of Oaxaca. They had been missing since coming to Agua Prieta earlier this year to cross the border.
Another flier showed a photograph of 22-year-old Alejandro Castro of Guerrero state. Its headline read: “Your aunt Eloina is looking for you.”
Farther down the wall was a hand-drawn map ringed with photographs of six shelters around Agua Prieta that offer accommodation to migrants.
Did the group need a place to stay? Adams asked Julio as he surveyed the map. No, he said, they had met a man in town who was providing them with lodging.
Migrants who come to the resource center rarely need a place to stay, Adams said. Because illegal border crossings have become so highly organized, repatriated migrants often find guides waiting at the border to whisk them back to a designated “casa de huespedes,” or boarding house, for another rendezvous with their hired smuggler.
In fact, just prior to the arrival of the four migrants, another group of 12 repatriated border-crossers had passed by the resource center without pausing to consider Adams’ offer of food and coffee. Instead, they went straight to a nearby street corner where a line of taxis and several cellphone-toting young men awaited.
Within a minute, the group was gone.
Three tries
Lorenzo, Julio and their two companions had tried crossing the border the previous night with a hired smuggler, but were caught and returned to Mexico. The guide had been caught as well, but not repatriated. After all, human smuggling is a felony offense under both Arizona and federal law.
Tonight, with their smuggler in custody, the group had tried to cross on their own. The result had been the same.
“One more time tomorrow,” Lorenzo said. “If we don’t make it, that’s it.”
Lorenzo was from the Gulf state of Veracruz, he said, where he made a decent living as an industrial mechanic. His wife and 17-year-old son, however, had gone to New Jersey and found better opportunities there. Now they didn’t want to leave, and so he was going to join them.
“You need to be with your family,” he said.
The young woman, Judith, 20, said she was on her way to a job in North Carolina, while the fourth member of the group, 42-year-old Juan, was headed for Miami.
Julio’s family owns a small farm, he said, but the animals have been getting sick and the business is failing. He had friends in New York who had told him of readily available construction and restaurant work, and he felt frustrated that increased border security was preventing him from getting there.
“It’s the terrorists who have made it so hard for the rest of us,” he complained.
Adams asked them if they wanted blankets, and they eagerly accepted.
“We’ll need these when we try again tomorrow,” Lorenzo said.
Then he leaned over to Julio: “They said they had clothes. See if you can get some new pants.” Julio, whose thin cotton pants were soaked and falling apart, shyly asked Maldonado if she had a pair of jeans that might fit him. Soon, all four had been outfitted with clean, dry legwear.
“It makes you feel good to know that there are people who are helping others, not just doing bad,” Lorenzo said.
Some suggest, however, that people who assist would-be illegal crossers in Mexico are undermining U.S. border enforcement. The Coalition Without Borders has heard the criticism before: By helping repatriated migrants to regroup, they are simply setting them up to cross again.
Border Patrol Tucson Sector spokesman Gustavo Soto declined to say if he thought the Migrant Resource Center’s activities might be subverting his agency’s efforts. The Border Patrol doesn’t like to comment on what goes on in Mexico, Soto said.
But the Border Patrol also is concerned with the well-being of migrants, he added. Agents try to repatriate detainees in better condition than when they are found, Soto said, which means providing them with food, water and even blankets.
Other-than-Mexicans
Julio, like Lorenzo, said he was from the state of Veracruz. Juan was from Pachuca, capital of the central state of Hidalgo, while Judith claimed to be from Agua Prieta.
But Maldonado, a native of Chiapas state, was skeptical. Their accents, she thought, didn’t sound Mexican. She guessed they were Hondurans.
As Maldonado was helping her pick out a pair of jeans, Judith became sentimental over a set of children’s clothes on a nearby shelf. When Judith said she had a child, Maldonado decided to test her theory.
“Did you leave him back in Honduras?” she asked.
Judith avoided the question.
The men also showed signs that they might be hiding their true origins. Juan seemed unfamiliar with “pastes,” the famous meat pies of his purported hometown of Pachuca, while Lorenzo spoke in knowing detail of the shelters that serve Central American migrants back in Veracruz.
If they were indeed Hondurans, they had reason to hide it, both in the U.S. and Mexico.
Had the U.S. Border Patrol identified them as “Other Than Mexicans,” they would have been deported to their country of origin, not to Mexico. And it’s much easier to attempt another border crossing from Mexico than from Central America.
But as Central Americans in Mexico without legal documentation, they would be considered felons, susceptible to deportation or exploitation by Mexican officials.
Perhaps that’s why they came to the border by hopping a freight train in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, and riding the rails for nine days.
“No one stops you on the train, not immigration, nobody,” Lorenzo said. “But they’re always stopping the bus.”
Now several minutes after midnight, the group gathered themselves to leave. But first, Adams, who serves as pastor of the Presbyterian border ministry Frontera de Cristo, asked if they would join him and Maldonado in a prayer.
As they joined hands, heads bowed, Adams thanked God for bringing the four friends to the resource center and asked him to watch over and protect them during their travels.
When they broke hands, Lorenzo, Julio, Juan and Judith had tears in their eyes.
Then, after a quick flurry of goodbyes and thank-yous, they grabbed their new blankets, their bundled-up wet pants and socks, and headed out the door.
HERALD/REVIEW reporter Jonathan Clark can be reached at 515-4693 or by e-mail at jonathan.clark@bisbeereview.net.
TheSilverRose wrote on Jun 27, 2009 10:22 PM:
Thank You! "