Hundreds of migrants, filled with hope and fear, wait on the northern border of Mexico for the United States to open the doors to them on Friday to study their asylum claims under President Joe Biden’s new migration policy .
A Cuban, a Salvadoran and a Honduran tell AFP their long journey and the wait for more than a year to be able to continue their legal proceedings.
“Tragicomedy”
Cuban lawyer Joel Fernandez traveled eleven countries for 271 days before reaching the city of Matamoros in northeastern Mexico in January 2020.
“It’s a tragicomedy. There are sad moments, then moments of joy, ”said the 52-year-old man among the 500 migrants of various nationalities accommodated in a refugee camp to which Washington will give priority.
But the atmosphere has become tense in recent days. On Thursday noon, the camp was closed in anticipation of the border crossing. “Now it’s a sad time because nobody knows anything. Stress builds up, ”he says.
He knows he will have to be tested for COVID-19 and that there is an order to dismantle the camp, but does not know when.
In the United States, a cousin is waiting for him and will offer him a job in a restaurant. His family remained in Cuba. “I withstood all the trials that God put me through on this difficult journey, and I came out alive. I now hope to be rewarded: obtain a residence permit, work, and bring my wife and children ”.
“Helping migrants”
Victim of domestic violence, this 37-year-old Salvadoran left her country in August 2019 with her four children. Arriving in Ciudad Juárez (in the Mexican state of Chihuahua) and crossing the Rio Grande illegally cost her “a large sum of money” but “after three days they sent us away”, she says, eager to maintain anonymity.
She was able to find refuge in the border town and obtained a hearing in December 2019 in an American court where she exposed the threats she says she suffered in El Salvador. “But with COVID and the policies of the other president (Donald Trump), it has been very slow,” she said with regret of the program requiring asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their application was completed. educated in the United States.
Joe Biden’s decision to drop the “stay in Mexico” program is “very encouraging”, she said.
“I ask God to give wisdom to President Biden to help migrants,” she said, revealing her dream of being able to educate her children and saying she was worn out by the ordeal she is going through: “it is difficult to be strong in front of your children and to support them that everything is going to be fine when you have the impression that the world is collapsing around you ”.
” I trust ”
José Madrid, a 40-year-old Honduran carpenter, already tasted the “American dream” in 2014. “I arrived by plane, had a work visa, but I was exploited and I resigned. I worked in several places in an irregular situation and then I fell ill, ”he says.
After undergoing heart surgery in 2017 through the Medicaid program, he found a job. But following a road accident, he was handed over to immigration services and then deported in August 2018. “In Honduras, I knocked on doors but no one helped me, the only way out was to leave. “.
Without money he took over the management of Mexico in April 2019. “God accompanied me and I arrived safely.”
In his asylum application, he intends to assert his medical needs, which he was denied in Honduras, but no lawyer specializing in immigration matters wants to defend him. “Some people tell me that I am wasting my time, but I trust that this new immigration program will have something for me”, he wants to believe.