Visiting a tent city in Mexico created by Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocol
The children here are gaunt and listless. They are running out of time.
I am standing underneath the only shade tree in sight, the first one you get to once you cross the border, a stone’s throw from the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. Nobody in south Texas stands outside at three o’clock in the afternoon in August, not even under a shade tree. But here in Matamoros, this tree’s shade is home to a whole village: a tent city planted by the streams of concrete, hundreds of migrants who have fled violence and persecution only to wind up here, unable to cross the bridge and unable to return home, with only one good shade tree for protection.
My Spanish is limited, but through an interpreter, I hear their stories. One family has come from El Salvador, another from the Dominican Republic, another from Guatemala. None of them has come seeking fame and fortune—only safety. A mother watched her son die at the hands of a drug cartel; she came north with her remaining children. A father brought his family after refusing to pay protection fees to the local mob. I have been instructed not to post any photographs on social media that could aid any cartel hoping to track any of these folks down. All of them are in danger, and none of them can go home.
They can’t stay here either, at least not indefinitely. Cartels are also at the border, preying on anyone who shows up with cash or valuables and extorting extravagant fees for desperate trips across the river. Whatever money these families had when they left home has been fully depleted. Now they can’t even afford the pay toilet inside the Mexican border office. Instead, the river itself has become bath, toilet, and drinking fountain. As a result, many of the children show visible skin lesions and rashes, and none of the parents has access to medication or treatment.
