The immigration detention center known as “Ursula” occupies the corner of West Ursula Avenue and South 37th Street in McAllen, Texas, just south of the highway. The center, it is apparent, was not built to house people. It shares a nondescript street with ex-urban warehouse structures; its façade is composed of 30-foot walls of windowless beige-gray corrugated metal, extending roughly 200 feet across and 100 feet deep, making it a perfect place to store paper towels or de-icing salt. Ursula is surrounded by a chain-link fence with plastic inserts to conceal the view inside; barbed wire runs along the top. A trailer of mobile showers is parked outside. Several times a day, busses roll in empty and roll out full, headed downtown.
McAllen, which lies in the southern part of the Rio Grande Valley, has the distinction of being the 22nd largest city in Texas. It is about 350 miles southwest of Houston and 240 south of San Antonio, but its proximity to the Mexican border, across from Reynosa, has made it a center of the American immigration crisis. Since 2014, Central American asylum seekers have been crossing the border daily, by the hundreds, often turning McAllen into both a bureaucratic checkpoint, where immigrants are processed and detained, at least temporarily, and a terminal from which they head to points north, east, and west to meet family, reunite with loved ones, or try to make it on their own. Last month, in response to reports of a caravan of several thousand Central American asylum seekers headed north through Mexico, Donald Trump first raged at the migrants, then threatened their home countries, then campaigned on it, then announced he was sending about 5,000 military troops to the border to fend off the inundation.
Trump may have deployed the National Guard as a form of pre-midterm, narrative-rattling show of force, but those expecting a modern-day Green Zone in McAllen would be disappointed. When I visited in late October, the troops were undetectable—hidden, even. According to reports and local word of mouth, the guards would stay in rental apartments, because there were no barracks; they would wear civilian clothes, because residents didn’t want a war-zone vibe; and they would have no direct contact with migrants, because that would be legally fraught. So, what were they doing in McAllen, exactly? Chris Cabrera, a spokesman for a Border Patrol agents union, told me that the National Guard members have so far been doing things like helping to mind the cameras from which border agents direct colleagues in the field. But here, too, was a snag. “The National Guard guy doesn’t know what’s what or how to direct people there, because he’s never been here,” Cabrera said. “So the agent is sitting next to the National Guard guy watching the same camera.”
Almost independent of Washington, McAllen has transformed itself into a humming administrative machine for what critics call catch-and-release policy, a term for letting border crossers go shortly after being detained. Four years ago, immigration authorities didn’t know what to do with people getting out of detention, and simply dropped them at the city’s central bus station to figure it out. Then a nun named Norma Pimentel, or Sister Norma, the executive director of Catholic Charities’ regional operation, asked to help and found first one space, and then another, to shelter people temporarily while they figured out where they were going. Soon, Sister Norma was taking in hundreds of people a day. She is still taking in hundreds of people a day. Brenda Riojas, the group’s media intermediary, estimated the number to be around 500 a day. Others estimated 200 a day. Now, when a bus of released asylum seekers rolls out from Ursula to McAllen’s central station, volunteers from Sister Norma’s operation are on hand to greet them, sort them, and advise them. Border Patrol relies on them.
Most of the people from the buses held a plastic bag and a paper from Homeland Security, and many had masks. The adults generally wore T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers without laces, because Border Patrol agents require them to be removed. The children wore a variety of things, including pajamas and Crocs. Wet coughs were common.
A volunteer from the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley Humanitarian Respite Center asked everyone to hold up a white form that each adult was carrying. These were orders of release upon recognizance. Those who had a place to go immediately could catch a bus at the station. Inside the station, volunteers were on hand to help people get tickets. Those who needed more time to get money and help from family could walk to the respite center, where they could also get a meal, a shower, and a place to rest. An orderly line followed the volunteer down the street on a 900-foot walk to the center, over on Beaumont Avenue.
The Humanitarian Respite Center is small. While there are back offices, it is a essentially a large room, of about 2,500 square feet, and an outdoor back lot with a trailer for a few showers and toilets. That lot is also where the distribution of warm meals takes place, if weather permits. In the morning, when I stopped by, there were about 150 men, women, and children inside. In the back of the room, children played with blocks or rolled about on mats. Some were still toddlers. Toward the front of the room were five rows of 15 blue stackable chairs, where people were sitting and waiting to get help from two volunteers who sat facing them behind a table in front of the room. Stacked tall off to the side were scores of blue gym mats. Each family had been given a red reusable bag from H-E-B, a Texas supermarket chain, in which there were supplies for travel, including an orange blanket.
At the front of the room, two volunteers were calling people to the front to help them with various practicalities. At 11 A.M., about 30 people—men, women, and children—gathered outside and stood in line. Most of the adults held an H-E-B bag and a manila envelope. On one side, in magic marker or ballpoint pen, were departure and destination times and cities. Houston was stop one. Stop two was all over the country: Atlanta, Lake City, Durham, Shreveport, and Omaha were some of the places. On the other side of the envelope was a photocopied sheet that read:
Volunteers then handed everyone in the line plastic bags with sandwiches, drinks, chips, and granola bars. Those in line now had to walk back to the central bus station, where the company Omnibus Express was waiting to transport them to Houston at 11:45 A.M. As they left, a volunteer stood and gave those continuing their journeys a good-luck handshake.
McAllen is almost disorienting in its flatness. Border Patrol agents have a commanding view of the terrain simply by ascending up to the levy roads, which rise about 20 feet above the plain below. Mobile watchtowers, which they call skyboxes, are ubiquitous, as are Border Patrol cars, white with a thick diagonal green stripe. I drove slowly along one levy road, which seemed to be neither quite open or quite closed to the public, and at that elevation found myself wondering simultaneously how anyone could escape the eyes of Border Patrol agents and how any Border Patrol agent could escape the eyes of the migrants trying to sneak around him.
A trip to the Rio Grande puts a lot in perspective. You can go to a place like Anzalduas Park, where locals like to launch boats into the water, and across the bank, no farther than a base hit away, is a park in Reynosa. You can see families on the opposite side splashing in the water and hear their voices. The water is calm as a pond, but the river runs in minute hairpins that twist for hundreds of miles, and only short swaths of it are visible from a single vantage point.
People with property on the Rio Grande appreciate the water and the swimming, or boating or jet-skiing. But many are starting to see the beginning of the end. While water treaties with Mexico prevent the construction of a wall at the edge of the water, to say nothing of an edifice in it, the U.S. government has long planned to build barriers inland. That means land owners must either live south of the barrier, tolerate being cut off from the river, or give up their land altogether, and the fight has already raged for over a decade. With characteristic competence, Washington has tended to overpay the rich landowners, rip off the poor ones, and mistakenly pay random people who didn’t own anything at all.
For now, boats and rafts going illicitly across the river are a regular sight. According to most reports, drug cartels control nearly all of this traffic, and any migrant who arrives illegally in the United States must pay them. The bank is studded with mobile sky towers from which Border Patrol agents monitor river activity. A smuggler on a raft that’s about to be apprehended might capsize the vessel and everyone in it, leaving their fates in the hands of U.S. Border Patrol agents, who do their best to save everyone. The catch is that all the border towers in the world don’t prevent a Central American border crosser from claiming asylum. All it takes is a foot on the American side of the line.
Adults who arrive on their own are likeliest to end up facing a misdemeanor prosecution, and must endure an appearance in federal court, located on the eighth floor of the 11-story Bentsen Tower in downtown McAllen. Signing in, I saw that the previous dozen or so visits in the guest book had been from the A.C.L.U., but the last (as far as I could tell) had been on October 15. But perhaps even the A.C.L.U. decided that, as criminal courts go, this one is gentle.
On the day I visited, about 30 men and women sat close together, 14 to a row, with two overflowing to a third, and each wore a gray plastic headset for simultaneous translation. Peter Ormsby, a federal magistrate judge, presided. No recording devices were allowed, but each plea took about a minute and followed an identical script. The defendant was called by name and asked to rise.
By the time you’ve heard your 15th word-for-word question about whether someone “entered the United States illegally by rafting across the Rio Grande river in Hidalgo, Texas,” you get surprised to hear someone asked if he rafted across the Rio Grande in Cameron County, Texas.
“That’s everyone,” the judge finally said, moving on to sentencing. He noted that guilty pleas had saved the courts time and money, and that he would take this, as well as criminal history, into account. First, repeat offenders were addressed individually. Nearly every defendant got about half or a third of the sentence prosecutors had recommended, usually meaning between 10 and 30 days. The judge would warn them that a repeat offense could be treated as a felony in the future and lead to a longer sentence. “I don’t want to see that happen to you,” the judge would often say, as well as “I do wish you luck, sir.” The stiffest sentence was for a defendant who had been deported twice previously, and been convicted of a D.U.I. in 2003 and child abuse in 2008. Prosecutors asked for 90 days. The judge, noting that the man had since stayed out of trouble, gave him 60 days.
The judge sentenced the rest of the defendants, for whom the government had requested a penalty of 10 days, to no time served. He told them that they were done, adding that they could now, if they wished, request an immigration hearing or apply for asylum. He praised their willingness to work hard and support their families, and wished them luck. “Let me say as a private citizen,” he added, “I’d be happy to have people like you in the United States.”
Do the migrants who come across the border know the policy nuances and loopholes before they arrive? We have hints, but, as far as I’m aware, no in-depth research. My own few conversations with them were too brief to shed light on it. One man claimed to have arrived legally, but his description of what had happened suggested the opposite. At the bus station, two women, Rosa and Brenda, each accompanied by a young daughter, told me they’d been upset and fearful upon getting apprehended by Border Patrol agents, but it wasn’t clear to me what knowledge they’d had of their options when they set out. In any case, they said, U.S. authorities had treated them well. Now, having spent the previous night at Sister Norma’s, both were heading onward to reunite with family already here. They hadn’t known one another prior to their arrival in the United States, but today their destination was the same: Minnesota.
Paying for bus tickets can be tricky. Family members here in the United States usually get a sudden call from Greyhound or some other bus company saying that a person they know just got to the United States and needs a ticket. “Many of them don’t believe us,” one Greyhound agent told me. “I don’t blame them.”
As I stood at the Greyhound counter, arrivals would approach the representative, offer their name, present their papers from D.H.S., and ask the desk agent to contact their family members. The Greyhound agent would make a call to the person and then, often, hand the receiver over to the customer. As one young man was speaking with family—“Muy bien, muy bien,” he said, with a soft smile, before explaining that, no, flying was not an option—the Greyhound agent explained to me that the company also allowed families to add $100 in addition to their tickets, so that the company could give the travelers cash for meals for a few days. But, often, people wouldn’t do it. At least a couple of times a day, the agent told me, he finds that the people who pick up on the other side say that they’ve never heard of the caller. It makes you wonder, he observed, if the government knows what it’s doing.
The politics of the border feel less racially charged when you’re on it. The police are generally Mexican-American, and so are the Border Patrol agents. The public defender in immigration court appeared to be Latina; so did the prosecutor. The volunteers for Sister Norma included people of all colors, and Border Patrol agents, despite policy disputes, are some of her biggest fans. (Chris Cabrera calls her “awesome.”) The immediate issue is a more distilled one of a lightly populated, reasonably safe U.S. city across a narrow river from a very crowded and very dangerous Mexican one. The contrast is stark. McAllen residents might have strong family ties across the border, but they still want a border. And the asylum seekers currently arriving aren’t from Mexico, either, but more distant places.
Cabrera told me that the problem isn’t the average border jumper. Instead, it’s the people pretending to be the parents of the children they’re bringing; the drug cartels in Mexico through whom all migrant traffic must flow; and politicians who let the problem continue. A few minor changes to the law, he says, could change the incentives to bring along small children on such a dangerous, sometimes deadly trek northward. If people know that coming as a child or bringing a child will allow you to enter the country after a few days of detention, children will come, and so will people who bring children.
As for the country that is receiving them, the many cities on the manila envelopes have no say in the matter. In the worst cases, asylum seekers have been gang members. But that is rare. The more mundane challenge is that nearly 1 in 10 students in U.S. public schools is already classified as an English-language learner. It gets expensive. Schools in Atlanta have budget shortfalls. So do those in Minnesota and New York, where teachers want an additional $200 million to address the needs of English-language learners. To offer someone a meal and shelter for a couple of nights, as Sister Norma and volunteers do, is a wonderful act of kindness, but costs per person are low. Years of public-school education are a different story.
Such questions are ever with us when it comes to immigration. What do we want for ourselves and for those who arrive? What do we owe, and what are we owed? How do we balance the principle of welcoming the needy with the principle of discouraging the endangerment of children? No two people will ever agree entirely, and policy will always take the form of factional compromise. But what you agree to only matters if it bears some relationship to reality. As so often seems to be the case with immigration, facts on the ground have been setting their own policy, and well over a million—some estimate 1.8 million—immigrants, authorized and unauthorized, arrived in 2016 alone. Immigration courts have more than 750,000 pending cases to address, and keep adding more to the docket, like a boat taking on water much faster than efforts to bail it out. Getting into the country has come to mean you’ll stay indefinitely.
There are two ways, then, to look at what Donald Trump has done in stoking fears of a migrant caravan, hundreds of miles south, making its way north. The first is to say that we already have hundreds of people arriving in the United States illegally every day and applying for asylum, so it’s an outrage to claim that this caravan is a crisis. The second is to say we already have hundreds of people arriving in the United States illegally every day and applying for asylum, and it’s an outrage to claim it’s not a crisis.
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