Until 2015, the small Mexican town of Sonoyta, Sonora, scarcely figured in the migration landscape of the US-Mexico border, but then migration from Central America and other parts of Latin America began to climb.
In March 2020, when former US president Donald Trump implemented the public health rule Title 42, citing the pandemic as reasoning for shutting down ports of entry to asylum requests at the border, more families began to arrive in the small agricultural town of 17,000 with nowhere to go.
“They had no money and nowhere to stay,” said Aaron Flores, who runs the city’s emergency services. “By the time they reached us, they were out of options.”
Sonoyta, which is halfway between the larger US crossing points of Nogales and Yuma, Arizona, has become a way station for asylum-seeking families, as they wait – and wait – for Title 42 restrictions to lift and for their chance to present themselves before US federal border agents.
Since it began in 2020, Title 42 has been used more than 2.5m times to expel asylum seekers from the US – many repeatedly. With the order by the US supreme court on Monday, at the request of several Republican-led states including Arizona and Texas, the 21 December deadline to end Title 42 has once again been extended.
It was a decision issued by supreme court chief justice John Roberts as a temporary ruling on Monday evening, which many who work with asylum seekers anticipated.
“I hate to be the Grinch,” Flores said. “People have a right under US asylum law to apply, but the US government will find a way to slow it down.”
Even when Title 42 does finally end, Flores said, he doesn’t believe that the growing pace of migration will stop any time soon, driven by growing wealth gaps, increasing political instability in some countries and a heating planet.
So the town joined forces with a US-based non-profit called Shelters for Hope to convert an abandoned motel into a migrant resource center called Centro de Esperanza, which opened in December 2021. The center provides meals, legal assistance, clothing and shoes to families who want to request asylum in the United States. Currently, they see anywhere from 150 to 200 people a day, Flores said.
In addition to being Sonoyta’s director of civil protections, Flores is also co-director of the Centro de Esperanza, which they’re now working on expanding into a 150-person shelter to try to handle the increasing need.
A week before Christmas, the center celebrated its first year with a feast of tamales and piñatas and toys for the children. Dozens of families, mostly from Mexico and Central America, sat at tables in the courtyard of the center eating cupcakes as the children played with toys they’d received from US and Mexican donors.
In the last year, with the aid of US immigration attorneys at a shelter in Nogales, the center helped 300 people apply for asylum, Flores said. But it’s a tough and long road, he said, especially when US immigration authorities are always changing the criteria on who can be exempted from Title 42 and file an asylum claim.
“The Cubans get better chances – the Hondurans too – but it’s the worst for Mexicans,” Flores said. “And we have to be brutally honest with the single men who come here because they have almost no chance.”
The center recently received nonprofit status in Mexico and relies chiefly on donations.
Not long ago, some of the asylum seekers from the center cleaned up a neglected local park. Sonoyta’s residents appreciated the gesture, Flores said.
On Saturday, at another shelter in Sonoyta for men only, called Casa del Migrante, a man from Venezuela and another from Honduras said they were also waiting for Title 42 to end. “Everyone is going to Yuma, Tijuana [at the border south of San Diego, California] or El Paso,” said the man from Honduras, who asked that his name not be used for fear of repercussions from the authorities, and who had been recently deported from the US after living there undocumented for more than 40 years.
“Because that’s where they have a chance to cross. We’re waiting to see what happens,” he said.
Legal deliberations over Title 42 could now take months, said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the Washington DC-based non-profit Washington Office on Latin America. Many believe that Title 42 has reduced migration when it hasn’t, Isacson said.
“All it’s done is create crazy distortions in which some nationalities get Title 42 applied to them and others don’t.”
It all depends on which nationalities Mexico will allow the US to expel back across the border or whether the US has diplomatic relations with a country, which can facilitate deportations there, he said.
“Biden recently gave Mexico 60,000 additional temporary work visas for its citizens in exchange for taking Venezuelans back,” he said.
The growing crisis of displacement and migration, exacerbated by Covid-19, is not just a problem for the United States to tackle, it’s hemisphere-wide, Isacson said: “Colombia has taken in 2.5 million Venezuelans; Costa Rica has 200,000 people in the asylum queue – mostly Nicaraguans – and Mexico is in its second year now of having 100,000 asylum applications.”
Last week, Isacson was in El Paso, where the mayor recently declared an emergency after the city began receiving thousands more asylum seekers than it could cope with all at once, often in frigid weather.
“There were people wrapped in Red Cross blankets in the freezing cold and on the streets,” Isacson said.
The US has had several years to invest in a “non-chaotic” processing system for asylum seekers, he said, but has chosen not to do so.
“The laws we have are pretty strong on the right to seek asylum,” he said. “What we don’t have is the appropriations [funding approved by Congress] for those laws to actually pay for processing in a dignified way at ports of entry.”
One example, he said, would be if the Biden administration tripled the number of asylum judges.
“If you’re turned down and you got your due process and you’re sent home, then that’s the message you’re going to send – ‘I didn’t get it [asylum],’ and the word spreads,” he said.
“Then the system can focus on saving the people who really are in danger.”
Eventually, the US will have to acknowledge that these levels of migration are the new normal, he said.
“There’s a lot that can be done without changing the law,” he said. “The question is, ‘why hasn’t it been done?’”
