EL PASO — Migrants poured across the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday and others gathered in makeshift camps, waiting for the midnight end of the U.S. pandemic era Title 42 restrictions that officials feared could trigger a major new wave of migration that could disrupt border facilities and pressuring cities across the country.
The desperate groups of people from countries around the world proliferated on both sides of the border, even as authorities in Washington prepared to impose tough new regulations when Title 42 would no longer be in effect.
Along the nearly 2,000-mile border, agents, soldiers and local officials struggled to maintain order as migrants waded across the Rio Grande, lined up at international bridges, filled federal immigration processing centers and huddled on the sidewalks of US border towns.
The latest wave is the result of global shifts in migration patterns, as economic and political forces displace millions around the world, sending many to the United States for refuge. It comes after two years in which a Democrat-led overhaul of the immigration system has stalled despite Republican opposition and the Biden administration leaning on some of former President Donald J. Trump’s tough border policies.
Mr Trump and then Mr Biden each used their emergency powers, under the guise of limiting disease transmission, to manage record-breaking flows of people at the border. Now that the three-year end of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the United States to once again live up to its international obligations to care for those in need.
It is a moment that certainly seems to ignite one of the country’s most politically charged and divisive issues, with criticism of Mr Biden pouring in from all quarters.
The images of desperate migrants and overburdened officials spanned across the border, from California to Texas.
In Piedras Negras, across the Mexican border at Eagle Pass in Texas, migrants and Border Patrol agents clashed across the Rio Grande. A makeshift village sprang up between two walls separating Tijuana and San Diego, with hundreds of people huddled under Mylar blankets. At Gate 40 of the border wall between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, officials allowed a group of migrants to cross after they tried to crawl through gaps in the harmonica mesh.
“All I want to do is work and raise my son somewhere where we are not afraid of violence,” said Francisco Ortiz, 32, who arrived in Piedras Negras from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with his wife and 1-year-old son. He said he hoped to work in construction in the United States, but he was worried.
“We want to follow the rules, but it’s difficult,” he said.
The El Paso City Council extended a state of emergency to accommodate the large number of arrivals and converted two vacant schools into shelters. In McAllen, Texas, the city set up additional tents in Anzalduas Park, next to a busy migration point.
The fear of newcomers spread far beyond the border. In New York City, immigration lawyers held up signs outside City Hall reading “Immigrants are New York,” a day after Mayor Eric Adams took action to relax the city’s right to shelter rules. Mr Adams has said the influx of migrants will cost the city more than $4 billion over the next two fiscal years.
“This is just wrong, what’s happening to New York City,” Adams said Wednesday.
In Washington, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said officials were best prepared for the legal and financial constraints of an immigration system that he said still operated on outdated assumptions from the early 1990s, when migration was very common. was different.
He said more patrol officers, troops and Department of Homeland Security employees had been sent to the border. But he agreed on Thursday with Mr Biden’s assessment two days earlier that the situation along the border would be “chaotic for a while”.
Mr Mayorkas said it would take time for the government’s harsh new policies – including restrictions on asylum condemned by human rights lawyers – to act as a deterrent to migrants considering fleeing their homes.
“Our plan will produce results,” Mr. Mayorkas confidently told reporters at the White House on Thursday.
Republicans seemed disinclined to be patient. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy mocked Mr Biden for “record transitions, record carelessness and record chaos” in a speech on the House floor, accusing Democrats of doing “nothing” to stem the migrant onslaught to hit.
“They treat the border the way President Biden does,” McCarthy said of his Democratic colleagues in Congress. “Ignore it and hope it goes away.”
House Republicans pushed through legislation on Thursday to crack down on illegal migration. But the bill seemed likely to die in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where lawmakers struggled to agree on another measure that would tie border security improvements to an expansion of opportunities for migrants to legally enter the United States.
“We all want an orderly system; the disorder is clearly borderline, but this bill will not fix that,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, California Democrat, said of the Republicans’ House efforts.
The increase in migration at the border with Mexico is far from unprecedented. Past increases have severely tested the response of federal and state authorities and non-profit organizations. Despite that history, people along the border said the current situation seemed extraordinary.
Even before the official end of Title 42, the Border Patrol’s capacity had already been exceeded with more than 28,000 migrants in custody. The agency has more than twice as many migrants as at the beginning of November, although it is becoming more efficient: the average time in detention has only risen about three hours.
In Brownsville, Texas alone, nearly 2,000 people have crossed over in recent days, a number that Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said he hadn’t seen in a decade.
“It strains our capacity,” said Eddie Treviño, the district judge for Cameron County, Texas, which includes Brownsville. Oscar Leeser, the mayor of El Paso, said of the sheer number of migrants, “We’ve never seen this before.”
Officials in Laredo, Texas, a major route for commercial traffic about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio, braced for an influx of migrants being transported from overwhelmed border processing centers in El Paso and Brownsville.
Michael Smith, a pastor at the Holding Institute in Laredo, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, said the center had received about 450 people, mostly Venezuelans. He expected that number to rise on Sunday and Monday as people were released from government custody.
“Eventually it’s just going to explode,” he said.
At Annunciation House, a large shelter in El Paso, migrants from South America and the Caribbean filled rooms with bunk beds. Among them was Erwin Gomez, 25, of Venezuela, who shattered his arm last week when he and three friends climbed over the border wall.
“I was hoping to work in construction, but with this arm I will have to do other work,” said Mr Gomez, who will undergo surgery on his wrist later this week. He hopes to join a sister and brother-in-law in Dallas.
Nearby in another bed lay Merejildo del Orbe, from the Dominican Republic, whose leg rested in a plastic boot, with pins protruding from his foot and shin. After paying $16,000 to a smuggler, 39-year-old Mr. del Orbe finally made it to the border. But as he climbed the 30-foot wall to reach El Paso, he slipped and fell to the ground on the American side. He prepared for surgery on his left leg before continuing his journey to the Bronx.
“I know this suffering was worth it,” he said.
A Venezuelan family on Wednesday dumped personal belongings they were carrying for their 2,000-mile journey to Matamoros, a Mexican town on the border with Brownsville.
The father had stripped down to his shorts, his bare chest panting with nervous breathing as he watched a group of migrants cross the shoulder-deep waters of the Rio Grande.
Relatives, who said they were fleeing poverty and violence in Venezuela, had endured dangerous jungle terrain, smugglers trying to kidnap them for ransom and corrupt policemen extorting them. Now they tried to calm down their petrified 4-year-old daughter.
“I don’t want to drown!” she screamed, sobbing as her mother, eyes welling up, tried to persuade her to climb the banks to the water below.
“Love, it’s okay, we just need to enter the water and it’s done,” the mother said to her child. The girl’s sobs pierced the sound of vendors selling their wares. An ice cream truck clinked in the background.
Francisco Ponce, a coordinator with the Red Cross, kept a close eye on the migrants — about 300 of them — as they paddled through the water to the bottom of Texas. The Red Cross had found three bodies of drowned migrants along this stretch of the river in the past week, he said, and the agency had an ambulance ready in case another emergency arose.
Mr. Ponce patted the girl’s head as she howled in fear.
“To give her a future, don’t go into the water,” he pleaded with the girl’s father. “She’s scared.”
The father took a few deep breaths. Minutes later, he grabbed his daughter’s hand as she cried again and led her into the water. They eventually scrambled up the riverbank to Texas, where border guards were waiting for them.
Even for those who make it to the United States, the future remains uncertain. Border officials said many would not have valid asylum applications and would be quickly returned to their home countries or Mexico.
Others are given the chance to stay while their cases are decided. Fifteen buses with migrants from Ghana, China, Uzbekistan and India were scheduled to depart from Yuma, Arizona, on Thursday, bound for the Phoenix airport and bus stations where the migrants would continue their journey into the country.
About three miles from the border’s main port of entry in Tijuana, Mexico, about 100 migrants stuck their hands through the border wall as aid workers handed out water bottles, tarps, apples, protein bars and diapers.
Further up the border in Texas, US authorities deployed a helicopter to monitor the Rio Grande as migrants attempted to cross the waters.
“Take me to the other side!” a Venezuelan migrant yelled at the helicopter as he looked to the sky. “I’m going crazy in Matamoros!”
Reporting contributed by Edgar Sandoval from Brownsville, Texas; Karen Zaick from Laredo, Texas; Eileen Sullivan from El Paso; J. David Goodman from Houston; Jack Healey from Yuma, Arizona; Natalie Kitroeff And Emiliano Rodriguez Mega from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Karun Demirjian from Washington; And Soumya Karlamangla And Sarah Kerr from Tijuana, Mexico.