Thursday, 28 Mar 2024

‘A storm is coming’: migrants stuck on US-Mexico border as temperatures plummet

‘A storm is coming’: migrants stuck on US-Mexico border as temperatures plummet


‘A storm is coming’: migrants stuck on US-Mexico border as temperatures plummet

Christmas was not uppermost in their minds. Bitter cold, uncertainty and urgency were.

Just after 1am at an intersection in downtown El Paso on Thursday, Arturo folded a backpack to make a pillow on the street. The 22-year-old Venezuelan wore a sweater underneath an oversized hoodie wrapped around his face as the temperature plummeted.

A fellow countryman huddling on the concrete nearby broke the news: "Se viene una tormenta" - a storm is coming. Hundreds stuck on both sides of the US-Mexico border are being blown every which way by a legal tempest, but this was a literal, Arctic-level storm.

Arturo, who asked for his last name to be withheld out of fear of being expelled back across the border, looked up at the lights of one of the tallest buildings in this Texas city, a hotel that he couldn't afford, and spoke of wishing for a warm bed.

What little he had left after a long and dangerous overland journey, which included being robbed, he was planning to spend to get to Chicago, where compatriots have promised him a construction job, he said. The work will allow him to send money back to his home town of Yaracuy in western Venezuela, a nation barely functioning for many of its citizens. The money would go to his nine-month-old daughter who was born with respiratory issues.

"Each medical exam was $30 and the medicine was around $25. I was making between $15 and $25 a week," Arturo said, while showing a photograph of his daughter on his phone. "That's why five days after my wedding, I decided to leave."

City authorities in El Paso have been unable to shelter many sleeping rough on the streets or at the bus station in recent days after crossing the border unlawfully amid US restrictions and crises in their home countries.

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