A couple of hours after the Trump administration announced a new agreement with Mexico that will send asylum seekers back south after they ask the U.S. for protection, migrants and Mexican federal immigration officials in Tijuana were equally surprised by the news.

In El Chaparral plaza, David Enamorado, 32, stood with people signing up for a place in line among the backlog of asylum seekers that has ballooned under the Trump administration’s policies. He read aloud articles explaining the change to those under the tent from his phone.

“They can’t do that, can they?” a man seated under the tent asked.

Many in the group, which is in charge of a notebook that maintains the list of whose turn is next to begin asylum processing in the U.S., were anticipating getting the opportunity to enter sometime over the weekend.


Tijuana has the largest group of waiting asylum seekers and the longest wait anywhere along the border. About 4,500 are currently in line.

San Diego immigration attorneys said the announcement left them with more questions than answers. They wondered if the responsibility would fall to border courts, and the attorneys working in them, to represent all asylum seekers who try to cross.

Attorney Ginger Jacobs also worried about the safety of those waiting in Tijuana, pointing to Honduran teens who were staying in a shelter for unaccompanied children and were killed over the weekend.

“It feels like none of this was thought through at all,” said attorney Tammy Lin.


She wondered how asylum seekers in Mexico would get to the courts for hearings that can drag on over the course of the year.

A Mexican immigration official responsible for communicating between the group responsible for the notebook and U.S. officials at the port of entry said even he hadn’t heard about the change.

Enamorado, who fled his native Honduras with his wife and three young children well before the recent caravan, said it felt like Trump had gotten his wall.

“It’s not a physical wall, but it’s there,” he said. “It’s a sad day for us.”


He worried how Tijuana would handle that many people needing food, housing and work. The migrant shelters have been full already, he said.

José Maria García Lara, director of Movimiento Juventud 2000, a shelter in Tijuana’s Zona Norte, said he was already worried about funding under the new Mexican administration.

“This is going to cause problems for all the shelters in Baja, California,” García Lara said. “We’re going to have more problems than we already have.”

Eduardo Solorzano, 26, who came with the caravan, said the change would be good for someone like him. He’d heard that under the old process, he was likely to be locked up for months when he crossed into the U.S. to ask for asylum.


“For me, it’s good to have the opportunity to work and to be free,” Solorzano said.

He was waiting to receive his work permit and planned to stay in Mexico for some time to work before trying to cross into the U.S. He wanted things to “calm down” first.

Enamorado, on the other hand, worried about his family’s safety in Tijuana. There was a shooting outside the shelter they’re staying in, he said.

He said the U.S. government should work quickly to identify those who are true asylum seekers and let them in. He keeps documents, proof of the violence he fled, in a plastic bag tucked in his tent at the shelter. Several of his family members have already been killed, and he was kidnapped.


Two couples from Nicaragua listened to him read the news, their faces crestfallen.

“What are we going to do?” one man from Nicaragua said. “If they don’t want us in Nicaragua and they don’t want us in the United States, what do we do?”

They would wait, the other man from Nicaragua said, for as long as they had to. They didn’t have another option.


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