Trump’s immigration, tariff policies transform the U.S.-Mexico border

El Paso, Texas – Juan Ortíz crossed a heat to 100 degrees along the American-Mexican border, weighed down by a backpack full of water bottles which he planned to leave for migrants trying to cross this rugged terrain.

Only there, there had not been many migrants lately.

When Ortíz started to fall in this particularly dangerous desert extent near El Paso almost two years ago, he sometimes met dozens of people trying to reach the United States in a single afternoon. Now he rarely sees it. Border passages have started to decrease in the last months of President Biden’s mandate and have plunged at their lowest levels for decades under President Trump.

“It is dramatically different,” said Ortíz, the silent desert with the exception of the cracking of his steps in the sand and the whirlwind of a border patrol helicopter. “Migrants have no hope.”

These borderlands surrounding El Paso were long a place of risk but also opportunities. Migrants chasing the American dream crossed by tens of thousands of people a year, sometimes dodging federal agents and often looking to ask for asylum.

But the repression of Trump’s immigration – a total prohibition of asylum, a mass deportation campaign and the unprecedented militarization of the border – have changed life here in a bad way.

Motorists go to Mexico Thursday at the Paso del Norte International Bridge, which links El Paso, Texas, with Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. .

On the other side of the Rio Grande d’El Paso in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, shelters built once in life, rich in the smell of cooked stews and the chatter of people who plot their passage in the United States

Today, these shelters are largely empty, populated by migrants blocked in Mexico when Trump took office, and others who were in the United States but who decided to leave, frightened by policies designed to instill fear.

Maikold Zapata, 22, had been one of the lucky ones.

He entered the United States last year via CBP One, a government application which helped more than 900,000 migrants to make asylum appointments to the entrance ports. Zapata worked as a landscaper in El Paso, returning most of his earnings to his family in Venezuela but sometimes folies on a steak dinner or a visit to a water park with friends.

What kept Zapata at night was an imminent hearing date for his immigration affair.

Since Trump took up his duties, Zapata had heard of federal agents who even arise during immigration routine hearings and removing migrants to handcuff. He was afraid of being arrested and sent to a detention center like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, or in a distant country-perhaps Salvador or South Sudan, where the authorities have sent American deportees in recent months.

Pastor Francisco Gonzalez Palacios, in the Albergue Vida refuge whom he directed in Juárez, says that the number of migrants who have fallen there in recent months.

“Imagine arriving in Africa without documents and without money,” said Zapata. “No.”

Inevitor his hearing date at the beginning of July was not an option either, because the electronic bracelet of his wrist allowed immigration agents to follow his location.

Thus, Zapata stuffed its few possessions in a backpack and walked south above the bridge of the American-mexic border, abandoning its asylum complaint and the dream that had taken on two continents to realize. He plans to return to South America, susceptible to Colombia, where his mother lives. “I’m going to go back, work again throughout the way.”

A migrant holds his child at Oasis del Migrant, a small shelter for migrants from Juárez.

For the moment, he lives in Oasis de Migrance, a small refuge in downtown Juárez, where he became friends with another Venezuelan who made a similar choice.

Richard Osorio, 35, decided to leave the United States after her husband landed in immigrant detention. Osorio, who worked in home care for the elderly, said that it only looked like a matter of time before immigration agents captured it: “I was filled with fear.”

He hopes that his partner’s lawyer will be able to persuade the United States to expel man towards Mexico and that he and Osorio can make a living there.

The vast majority of migrants languid along the border have never went to the United States.

Eddy Lalvay got closer. He was 17 years old when he and his 5 -year -old nephew, Gael, arrived in Juárez last year. Originally from the equator, they were trying to reach New Jersey, where Gael’s mother lives.

But before they could cross, they were arrested by the Mexican authorities, who sent them to a government refuge for minors.

Eddy Lalvay, at the Albergue Vida refuge in Juárez, arrived at the border with his young nephew a year ago.

Lalvay was released at the age of 18. But Gael remains in detention, where he recently was 6 years old, and the authorities say that they will only release him a parent or a grandparent.

“I try to be strong, but I feel horrible,” said Lalvay during a recent afternoon when he was sitting in another refuge in a neighborhood of the working class in sprawling industrial parks.

Francisco González Palacios, a Christian pastor who directs the installation and directs a network of denominational shelters, said that the number of migrants hosted by the network has increased from 1400 to 250 in recent months. “No one comes from the south,” he said.

Some non-profit shelters and groups providing legal or humanitarian assistance to migrants may have to close, he said, because many were indirectly funded by the American agency for international development, which Trump closed.

He said to migrants gathered in his shelter to rethink their goals now that their “plan A” – a life in the United States – is out of reach.

“Look for a plan B,” he said. “Stay for a while, start working. God will help you. “

But other Trump policies harm the economy in the region, limiting the opportunities of migrants.

Migrants walk in the courtyard in Albergue Vida Shelter in Juárez.

Juárez has long attracted Mexicans from the poorest regions of the country who come to work in its factories, which exploded under the North American free trade agreement, producing automobile parts and other goods intended in the United States

But Trump’s threats from Trump, away, prices on Mexico goods, amazed industry in the Juárez region, factories from thousands of workers.

“We are in the midst of enormous uncertainty,” said María Teresa Delgado Zarate, vice-president of the Juárez index, a commercial group. About 308,000 workers are employed in factories today, she said, compared to 340,000 a few years ago.

The Mexican Juan Bustos, 52, recently lost its mounting job by manufacturing car parts. Most of the time, he aligns himself at 6 am outside the factories that say they hire to try to get a new job.

“It’s not easy as it was before,” he said.

Much of life in Juárez depends on the decisions made in Washington, he said. “He changes his opinion from minute to minute,” said Bustos about Trump. “We are at his mercy.”

Seen from the Mexican side of the international border, the barbed wire marks the border dividing Mexico and the United States.

On the American side, the industry is also in shock from pricing uncertainty.

Jerry Pacheco, who operates an industrial park in Santa Teresa, NM, a few kilometers west of El Paso, said several companies that had planned new projects have been withdrawn since Trump took office.

Its park leads to a new militarized area which extends to 200 miles over a large expanse of New Mexico. Another area of 63 miles long was established along the nearby border in Texas.

The Pentagon, which has made the designations, deployed some 9,000 troops in active border service as part of the Trump directive to extend the role of the military in reducing migrant passages. Migrants who enter the new “national defense” areas while crossing the border are held by American troops, responsible for intrusion and given to the immigration authorities.

This is part of a broader militarization of the application of immigration in this border section.

U-2 spy planes have piloted missions in the sky. At the base of the army close to FT. Bliss, the United States is building a new immigrant detention camp of 5,000 beds.

The United States has also pushed Mexico to prevent migrants from reaching Juárez and other border cities, and Mexican troops have increased the application in recent years. The defenders of migrants blame these policies on a fatal fire in a detention center in Juárez in 2023 which killed 40 migrants and injured 27.

Migrants spend time at the migrant shelter oasis in Juárez.

The bunk beds are stuck in a room of the albergue vida shelter in Juárez because the refuge has formerly welcomed migrant scores each month.

Ortíz, the activist, used to cross the part of the border which was transformed into a national defense zone, leaving water for the migrants who crossed. But a recent afternoon, when he left to check a water tank, he was arrested by agents of the border patrol who warned him that he is intrusion into military land.

The accumulation of troops on the border and Trump changes to the asylum system have made almost impossible for migrants to cross, said Ortíz. In June, there were fewer meetings of border patrols with migrants than in any month recorded, according to the White House. During the day with the least meetings, border agents have apprehended only 137 people throughout the border 2,000 miles long.

Richard Osorio is now staying at the Oasis refuge from Miranch to Juárez. Osorio, from Venezuela, decided to leave the United States after her husband landed in immigrant detention.

But Ortíz is convinced that migration levels cannot remain so low forever. There are too many jobs that must be filled north of the border, he said, and too much poverty and conflicts south of it.

This region is a migration site since precolonial times, he said. El Paso, which means “La Pass”, took its name from Spanish esporalists who arrived at the end of the 16th century and established a commercial route leading from Mexico to Santa Fe.

The movement, he said, is part of our nature.

“You can never fully stop human migration,” said Ortíz. “You have never done it and you will never do it.

The most desperate to cross will find a way, he said. And that will probably mean paying even more important smugglers and take more risky routes.