5/12/23
By Lee Goodman
Standing on the Mexican side of the border, I hear a recorded voice. It comes from the American side, across the river that separates the two countries. Again and again, it says the same thing over a loudspeaker, in Spanish. My companion translates for me. The voice is saying, “Stay in Mexico. Do not cross the river.” It is the same message that Vice President Kamala Harris voiced two years ago. “Do not come,” she said, speaking from a podium during a visit to Guatemala, standing next to the President of that country. Vice President Mike Pence delivered the same message three years before that, also in Guatemala. This time, the message is being broadcast directly to the people who want to be here. Reinforcing the message are three rows of razor wire, and at the top of the riverbank, behind the wire, are Texas National Guard troops carrying rifles.
Yesterday, we saw migrants wading across the river. Today, now that Title 42 has lapsed, we don't see anyone cross, but we see small groups walking up and down the riverbank looking for places where they might cross. No one has to translate the warning message for most of them, who speak Spanish. They know they are not wanted.
Many Americans do not want the migrants to come. A man struck up a conversation with me as we both waited for our tacos at a tiny carryout joint in Brownsville, Texas. He asks where I am from, and when I say “Chicago,” he says that as a child he lived there for a few years but has spent the past 65 years living along the border. His parents were immigrants, and he appears to be Hispanic. He disagrees with my support for the immigrants, and he thinks we should not let them in. “They are not all good people,” he tells me. “Most of them are,” I reply, adding, “Not everyone here is good, either.” He nods. The conversation is friendly. He seems like a nice man.
The predictions that masses of people would try to storm the border last night at midnight when Title 42 expired were wrong. It didn't happen anywhere, either along the river or at the border crossings. The migrants knew better than to advance on heavily armed government forces. Some have seen in the countries they come from what happens to people who do.
Last night, while reporters waited at the borders for a surge that never came, the migrants were asleep in their makeshift shelters. Today, they checked their cellphones to see if they had been given appointments to apply for asylum, as they had been instructed to do. Some of them showed up at the ports of entry without appointments, hoping that they would be allowed to enter. A few were. Most were not. The rules are so new that no one really knows why some people were shown leniency and others were not.
It is no longer possible to walk along the river on the American side. The National Guard and federal border guards have made it off limits. As I walk along the Mexican side, the wood smoke from cooking fires smells nice, but it makes breathing uncomfortable. The smoke from the burn piles is much worse. There, shredded clothing, plastic tarps, and whatever else people have discarded is occasionally swept up into piles and burned. It is an unhealthy method of disposal, but there are no city services here.
As we walk along the riverbank, we have to be careful where we step, because the half-dozen or so portable toilets have not been adequate for the many hundreds of people there. The voices from across the river telling people to stay in Mexico mean they should stay where we walked cautiously and struggled to breathe. The people the voice is broadcasting to have nowhere else to go in Mexico. Few of them are from Mexico. They are just trapped there, along a river that will swell when the forecasted rains come tomorrow. The current will make attempting to cross the river a life-threatening risk. The riverbank will become slippery. The makeshift shelters will collapse and melt away. People's meager belongings will be ruined.
Reporters keep repeating that this is a humanitarian crisis. They are wrong. It is an in-humanitarian crisis.