All articles filed in U.S./Mexico Border

Aid workers who opted to remain in the camp of asylum seekers past the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros say that buses packed with deportees and newly-arrived migrants seeking asylum have been departing to southern Mexico multiple times a day since the border closed on March 20.

Volunteers with local aid organizations have been keeping distance from the camp in an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19 into the population of an estimated 2,500 asylum seekers living in tents without the ability to quarantine.

A 60-year-old woman seeking asylum had an asthma attack at the international line on the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville, Texas on Thursday. Photographs posted by the woman’s attorney on Facebook showed her collapsed on the ground as officers on the U.S. side filmed the incident on a cell phone.

Fran Schindler, 81, is a former psychiatric nurse from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is attempting to sponsor two brothers from Guatemala who sought asylum at the border after Melvin, 21, was shot six times by gang members. Melvin and his brother Enrique, 23, fled North and arrived at the border late last summer. On Friday, they were denied asylum and returned to Mexico. They are appealing the decision with the Board of Immigration Appeals and do not currently have an attorney.

Each child qualifies as disabled under the Rehab Act and should be excepted from the policy, according to D’Cruz, who noted that disabled asylum seekers should not be returned to Mexico by the agency according to MPP’s own “Guiding Principles”.

As the sun rose over the Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport on Valentine’s Day, a group of men and women bundled up against the cold surrounded what looked like several out of service city buses parked in front of the Hunt Pan Am terminal.

It was just past 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 3 as Matamoros-based attorney Charlene D’Cruz made her way across the Gateway International Bridge towards the United States. She was accompanied by a volunteer, who held the hand of an asylum seeker, guiding the woman across the river past a line of people winding well into Mexico.

A collection of photographs from Dec. 31, 2019.

The coalition, consisting of various members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, saw a version of the camp filled with Mexican military and federal police standing by, armed with rifles. The staircase leading up to a levee along the Rio Grande had been cleared of caked, dried mud.

On Sunday, activists from over 30 states joined the Texas branches of the ACLU and the Children’s Defense Fund to demand an end to the U.S. Department of Justice’s tent court system, as well as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP, ‘Remain in Mexico’ program).