A day with the men about to make it across the US border – at any cost

A day with the men about to make it across the US border – at any cost

At the age of 14, Jonathan Levit was given an order by the infamously brutal Mara Salvatrucha gang in the northern Honduran city of Tela: to kill a friend he had known throughout childhood – “like a brother, all my life”.

Jonathan had, like almost every child in Tela’s terrifying barrio of Colonia 15 de Septiembre, grown up in the gang’s shadow; there was no avoiding it, especially if you were partial to a smoke, as he was. And now the time had come for him to execute “a mission” for what is also called MS-13 – the gang which, Jonathan says, “doesn’t just run Colonia 15, they almost run Honduras”.

“But,” Jonathan recalls, “I’d rather have a friend than a peso in my pocket, and I refused. Whatever the price, that’s something I wouldn’t do.”

The MS-13 death sentence was accordingly switched: Jonathan would die instead.

Jonathan lived to tell his story this week in the courtyard of Casa del Migrante (Migrant House) at Ciudad Juárez in northernmost Mexico – cheek-by-jowl with El Paso, Texas. Having fled Honduras, he is determined to escape to the United States. Jonathan is one of 4,000 migrants since November last year, mostly from Central America, to pass through this center – operated by the Catholic diocese, run by two social workers, and volunteers.

Jonathan wears an orange jacket and shock of black hair; his eyes are obsidian-deep and quick with mischief and wit. He remembers his life back home unhappily, without sentiment: “I started smoking marijuana when I was eight – I can’t tell you I’m proud of my life, or that it’s a good place to be, even before that happened with the Mara. But even if I wanted to go back, I can’t – ever – they’d kill me in a heartbeat.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Casa del Migrante receives migrants from several countries who request political asylum in the United States. Photograph: Julian Cardona

Sitting at a concrete table are two boys from Guatemala City with whom Jonathan has teamed up, Osman and Rodrigo, themselves in flight from “poverty and violence” back home. By contrast, this place is sad but clean and organised; mothers and children sit beside a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe; boys play football – but it’s no more than a way station.

All three at our table want to work in construction in the US, but while the Guatemalans left recently, Jonathan’s nightmare is in his adolescent past: he’s now 19, become an artful dodger and survivor of the road, trying to cross the border into America. “I’ve been in Mexico five years now, working, saving, hiding – planning the moment. The Mexicans ordered me deported twice, but I slipped the net. The trains through this country” – La Bestia – “have been my home. They’re more dangerous for women than me; getting raped, kidnapped and killed. But now my time has come to cross.”

With lines for asylum lengthening, and Donald Trump entrenching his hostility to migration, Jonathan has not entered the system most families here have joined, registering for a plastic bracelet and numbered place in the so-called metering line for an asylum hearing. “They’ve made it too difficult, and it takes too long. I’ll go alone, my own way.”

Osman and Rodrigo are going illegally too; “Trump has made asylum impossible – too long, and you’ll likely get turned back,” says Osman, in English. “I miss it back there; my mother calls me every fucking day – it’s torture - but too dangerous to stay and there’s no future in Guatemala. I have to risk it.” Rodrigo, quieter, is more nervous: “I’ve a wife and son back home, that’s who I’m doing this for – but what if I get caught?”

Word is out that migrants arriving in Ciudad Juárez stand a statistically negligible chance of asylum through El Paso compared with ports of entry into California from Tijuana where lines are therefore longer, tempting more and more to try Jonathan’s way.

But El Paso’s courts are not the only menace. Juárez last year suffered a sudden surge in homicides: 1,247 – a rate of 96 per 100,000. By far the highest toll for any year since the city’s hyper-violence of 2008-2011, during which this was the most murderous metropolis in the world. Juárez now has Mexico’s second highest murder rate after Tijuana, attributed by city security and justice officials to turf wars between gangs for street-sale and cross-border smuggling of drugs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Contruction of the border wall in El Paso, in Rio Grande. Photograph: Julian Cardona

Casa del Migrante lies on the city outskirts towards the perilous Valle de Juárez, entrepôt for narco-traffic and likely route for migrants trying to cross illegally, including these boys.

So acute danger faces those heading north, as traffickers hover to prey on and profit from the increased pool of potential custom, and those deported in the opposite direction, as gangs recruit their foot soldiers. The worst massacre in Mexico’s carnage since 2006 was not drug-related, but that of 72 migrants at San Fernando, Tamaulipas, in 2010, who refused or were unable to pay “la cuota” – the levy. Traffickers are known in the parlance as “coyotes” or “polleros” – their quarry “pollos”, chickens.

Blanca Rivera is one of two social workers at Casa del Migrante; after eight years, she says, “I’ve seen all kinds come through – before mostly Mexicans, but no longer. It’s never been like this – these numbers and so desperate, people who just cannot go back.”

Ribera explains that a police presence outside the chain-link fence topped with razor wire is “because of incidents at the center and to keep away polleros. It’s forbidden for migrants go to the fence and talk to polleros. If they do, and seem honest, we’ll explain the risks; if they look to be doing business, they must leave. Those expelled, we do not see again.” Whether they make it or not; migrant disappearances are oft-reported along the border; sometimes people ask at the centre if a vanished person has been seen.

But there’s a twist, according to Jonathan and almost all those who plan crossing of their own device. “The police are part of the system. We all know that,” says Jonathan. How part of this? Jonathan laughs again and makes to slice his index finger in half, “Fifty-fifty, that’s how it works. We watch the polleros watching us on the bridges and in the town, and the police allow the polleros to work on their plaza – turf – for a 50-50 cut on the money paid. If you don’t believe that, you’re an idiot. That’s partly why I stay away from them – to be apart from that shit.”

Leticia Chavarría is a GP in one of Juárez’s many assembly plants who established a medical advocacy committee during the city’s most violent years and now works with the Bi-national Network for Solidarity with Migrants. “Everyone knows the crossings are managed by the polleros,” she says, “and it’s been understood that for years they’ve operated complicit with the authorities, under an accord never documented or proved. Polleros run stash houses across the city and do business openly, but are only arrested in very isolated cases.”

There was no response to a request through his office to interview the mayor of Ciudad Juárez, Armando Carbada, on the policing of migrant security.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Casa del Migrante workers hand out clothing donated by the binational community of Juárez, El Paso and Las Cruces. Photograph: Julian Cardona

The border hardens still: just east of downtown Juárez, late winter sun skates across a concrete slope down to the slow trickle of the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo on this side), and up the other bank, which is the USA, where Mexican-American workers operate a Volvo digger and trucks to build a brand new stretch of high steel fence. Wall or no wall, this new fortification – which started to the north, separating the satellite barrio of Anapra from New Mexico, under the Obama administration – began late last year under Trump, and continues.

And as another caravan forms this week in Honduras, Ribera draws attention to a further, crucial, matter: resources. Circumstances combine against the running of places like Casa del Migrante; not just the surge in numbers and entrenched US policy, but accession by Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to a demand from Trump that asylum seekers must wait in Mexico, not the US, for their cases to be heard.

Mexico’s borderland is not yet America’s migrant waiting room, “but as the number of migrants increases, government help is reduced”, says Ribera. At Christmas, the priest who oversees Casa del Migrante, Padre Javier Calvillo, gave a rare press conference during which he lambasted Mexican federal, state and municipal authorities for failing to provide sufficient funds or manpower to help centres like this cope.

“The municipality had taken 80 migrants from the bridge directly to Casa del Migrante, without any processing,” says Chavarría, “and Fr Calvillo said he could take no more. The city opened its own shelter, but it lasted a week.”

Ribera says the city has now “assigned six workers due to arrive, and six more to come”. She added: “But the reality is that we are dependent on the church, and private donations from Ciudad Juárez, El Paso and Las Cruces [New Mexico]. It’s ironic that while Donald Trump’s policies and wall divide our countries, the support is all binational, from good people on both sides of the border. It’s corazón contra hígado, as we say in Mexico – heart against liver.”

“The truth is,” says Chavarría, “that when most of those going across or being deported were Mexicans, there was more interest. The attitude is that these are Central Americans, not our problem. But it is. What will they do if they cannot enter the United States? Our work, either side of the border, is to educate both migrants and our own citizens on the rights they have.”

Back at Casa del Migrante, more people arrive at the heavy gates: families from Guatemala like Eder Ramírez and his daughter, Leti, aged eight; and two women travelling from Panajachel, with two children each, “running from the gangs”. Had they heard about two other children from their own country who died in US custody just across the river, over Christmas? No. A guard explains the rules: you must surrender your phone at reception and collect it when you leave. No weapons or drugs; no Viagra, only one smoking area.

Then they register, grateful for a wide smile on the volunteer’s face. Leti wants a soda from the vending machine, but there’s no cash, and they look in a storage closet for donated used clothes that might fit. Leti chooses a pink Loony Tunes hoodie.

I tell Jonathan I hope his friend is grateful for what he did – or didn’t do. “He is,” he replies. “He vanished from the Mara’s sight, and is still alive.” How long can you stay here? “Three days.”

How long have you been here?

“Three days. I cross tomorrow night.”