This virtual tour of a Tex/Mex border encampment highlights the campaign to bring dignity and justice — as well as toilets, tents, and tortillas — to asylum seekers forced to remain in Mexico
Over the Wall & Under the Bus
Remember when then-candidate-Trump campaigned on the promise that Mexico would pay for his border wall? Ludicrous, right? Just one in a catalogue of lies that would come out of the Trump White House.
Like this one: That there’s actually an immigration crisis. Sure, the system needs a serious overhaul. But by 2016 the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US was at a decade low.
And this one: That the Migrant Protection Protocol — aka MPP, aka Remain in Mexico program — is a “resounding success.” That’s how Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Patrol, Mark Morgan, characterized it in September 2019, when he bragged to the press that since MPP rolled out the previous January, 42,000 “aliens seeking asylum and admission to the United States from Mexico” had been made to return there “for the duration of their immigration proceedings.”
What he didn’t say was that they’d tossed those 42,000 people — not aliens — back over the “wall” without access to any legal support. Or that over 98% of MPP victims would have to undergo hearings in kangaroo courts without representation, making it virtually impossible to successfully assert and win their asylum claims.
He did say: “The government of Mexico has agreed to provide them, while they’re waiting in Mexico, with appropriate humanitarian protections for the duration of their stay.” But that, too, was a lie.
The US/Mexico border is one the most dangerous places on Earth. And Mexico’s efforts on behalf of US asylum seekers have been woefully inadequate, if they’ve come at all. In Matamoros, for example, governmental intervention preceded my first tour of the refugee camp by exactly one month.
Join me as I recreate that day, first impressions and all. Then decide for yourself if MPP is a success, throws the notion of protection under the bus.
Matamoros Tent City: January 5, 2020
At the Matamoros, Mexico border-crossing-turned-refugee-camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Jim and my second full day in Brownsville/Matamoros was alive with celebration for it was Epiphany Sunday. We aided Team Brownsville’s weekly Escuelita de la Banqueta (Sidewalk School) and helped distribute a kingly breakfast of Roscón des Reyes. When it came the time to pass out children’s gifts that had been sent by well-wishers from all over the US, I decided to pull away. With 700 or so kids in the camp at the time — roughly one-third of the total population of 2,500 asylum seekers — it was going to take a while.
I picked my way around the myriad bodies hemmed in by the city of domed camping tents pitched at the base of the Gateway International Bridge since metering began there in July 2018. When MPP officially arrived a full year later, the number of tents — 200 at the time — logarithmically expanded, crawling across the town plaza, then up the embankment, and along the levee park above.
I found the best route up at the northern-most end of the plaza, just to the right of two battered dumpsters overflowing with trash that, even in January, was swarmed with flies. At the sign denoting Mexico’s 0-Km mark, a flight of stairs built into the slope provided passage from the hot plaza asphalt to the cool, tree-lined levee running parallel to the Rio Bravo, as the Rio Grande is known in Mexico.
At the Matamoros, Mexico border-crossing-turned-refugee-camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
I mounted the stairs and passed through an opening in the 8-foot-high chainlink and barbed wire barrier that in normal times would keep people safely away from the snarl of border traffic. It was festooned with freshly laundered clothing. Men’s ripped jeans, women’s floral print blouses, and children’s brightly-colored sweaters, tee-shirts, and leggings hung from the metal like holiday decorations. Above that, the detritus of single-use plastic shopping bags, snagged by the barbed wire, struggled to be free.
With the children hovering around Melba, and the adults hovering around them — for no one leaves a child unattended in Matamoros where kidnapping is the Gulf Cartel’s second-most lucrative enterprise — the camp that stretched along the levee was nearly empty. It was quiet, peaceful even, the hum of waiting traffic replaced by the sound of someone chopping wood.
No Average Camping Trip
Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp: the real result of Trump & Co’s Migrant Protection Protocol (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp: the real result of Trump & Co’s Migrant Protection Protocol (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
In contrast to the mosaic of tents pitched on the plaza, here under trees denuded of their lowest branches, clutches of shelters made of tents and tarpaulins sewn together and strung up with ropes formed multi-family compounds. They took me back to the week-long camping trips my father and his brothers used to take me, my siblings, and cousins on when we were kids. We called it “roughing it,” when each family pitched a tent big enough for six or seven around a campfire with nothing but logs to sit on. There, we spent evenings under the stars, cooking fresh catch from the nearby lake, playing kick-the-can in the twilight, singing songs in the dark, and charring marshmallows for ‘smores.
But this was no average camping trip. This was homelessness. And based on the condition of some of the dwellings, these people had been living like this for months.
Cooking stove made from a propane tank: Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Central to each compound was an outdoor kitchen, a cocina, that served many. Make-shift stoves were constructed out of dried mud, adobe-style, or from old propane tanks cut through to make space for kindling and wood. A rigged grill perched on top.
I approached a woman stirring rice in a deep metal pot stained black with soot. I asked where she got water to cook with, hopeful she wasn’t tapping the fetid Rio Bravo. She pointed to a tall, thermos-like structure. It sat precariously at the edge of the steep river bank, pumping up water with the help of a generator, then pushing it through a filtration system.
“They say it’s clean enough to drink,” she said, sounding skeptical.
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
“Tucker and GRM.” She lifted her eyes to the heavens and made a swift sign of the cross. Then, bowing her head, she held her clasped fingers to her lips, kissed them, and throwing her hand open, she tossed both kiss and prayer to the wind.
“We’re tending to Maslow’s basic needs.” - Tía Lizee
AquaBlock Emergency Water Kiosk: Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Water. Sunlight glinted off the polished chrome siding of the AquaBlock potable water station as an industrial-sized construction bucket sat under an open faucet, catching the water that fell out in an anemic trickle. It was, indeed, as clear as anything you’d see running from a kitchen tap. Faucets extruded from each of its four sides. More empty buckets — some stacked, some strewn — stood in the dirt beside it, available for community use.
I wondered out loud, and perhaps a little too critically, how long that would take to fill. My friend corrected me: Before the water station was installed, she said, there had been no potable water in the camp. Residents had to wait for the Tías or Team Brownsville to bring bottles in. In addition to producing a lot of waste, it meant the she couldn’t cook: bottled water was only for drinking and cleaning teeth. So, yes, the bucket would take time to fill, and one station wasn’t enough to serve 2,500 people. But access to potable water made it possible to feed her family again.
“When was it installed?” I asked.
“About a month ago.”
And, no. Neither Tucker nor GRM was with the Mexican government.
One of four “free” stores stocked by the Angry Tías & Abuelas of the RGV and managed by asylum seekers living in the Matamoros refugee camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Food and shelter. “Where do you get your oil and rice and corn meal and beans?”
She described the camp’s “free” store system, run by resident asylum seekers called “store managers.” Cooking utensils and food stuffs; tents, sleeping bags, jackets, and mats; diapers, feminine hygiene products, and toilet paper — all these things can be obtained at the tiendas, kept stocked by Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías.
Before the tienda system, necessities were distributed from the backs of trucks. But when the camp population exploded with the onset of MPP, lines became too long, it was impossible to know who got what, and frustration mounted when needs could not be met. A Team Brownsville volunteer came up with the idea of buying a large tent and some storage containers and identifying a resident couple to keep track of what came and went. Yami and Josue, who then lived on the plaza, were the first “store managers.” Their tent became Tienda #1.
The system worked so well, three more tiendas had been added by the time of my visit. The managers worked so hard, the Tías and Team Brownsville raised money to pay them. This kicked off a culture of building capacity within the camp.
Team Brownsville and the Tías store donations and purchased items in the tiendas, which managers distribute on demand. All residents have to do is ask. When an item is given out, it’s added to a list and replenished. That way, when a new family shows up, the store managers are ready and equipped to support them.
Victims of MPP trapped in the Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Safety. My friend was very pretty. Evidently, so were her daughters, especially her eldest. When I asked why they’d fled home, she said gang pressure to “rent” their 15-year-old had become too threatening. They were already being extorted for “protection” money on their pupuseria, but that insurance, it turned out, didn’t extend to the safety of their kids.
“It would kill us if they touched her,” she said.
“Do you feel safe here?”
“We never let the children out of our sight.”
One of several “private showers” installed by Resource Center Matamoros after one resident nearly drowned while bathing in the Rio Bravo: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Cleanliness. Between tent compounds, rudimentary shower stalls had been erected here and there. Tarps wrapped tightly around trees served as walls; an untied corner made a moveable door; carefully laid stones or boards created floors that lifted ones feet out of the mud. In one, a bucket could be rigged in the trees. A tug on the rope extending from the handle would bring water down over your head.
A skinny older man passed by just then. He wore baggy blue jeans held up with a string and carried a load of split branches slung under one arm. I asked where the wash water came from. He pointed to a large tank nestled among the tents and trees. It bore the name ROTOPLAS on its side.
“How are they filled?” I asked.
“Trucks,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin.
“From the government?”
“No. Gaby,” he said, “at the Resource Center.” She and Tucker brought in after a young girl nearly drowned while bathing in the river.
Waging War with Mud
Clotheslines: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Boundaries between tent compounds were marked by “fences” of drying laundry, hanging from rope lines strung tree to tree. An upside down SpongeBob smiled at me from a dark-blue, long-sleeved tee that waved gently in the breeze.
I pushed him aside and, ducking under the line, I barged into another multi-tent compound with a cocina and dining area. A table top of scrap lumber rested on legs resembling gnarly, twisting tree branches whittled to a sort of smoothness. Similarly constructed benches joined overturned buckets, like those at the water station, to provide seats and stools.
Outdoor dining room: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
A young woman gripped the wood of several tree branches in both hands and used the top leaves to sweep the dirt “floor.” All compounds were this tidy and rubbish-free. They were also all encircled by little trenches dug into the dirt, 6–8 inches deep and equally wide. Some were lined with pebbles. Each circular canal met a straight one at the lowest point in the landscape, then ran in the direction of the river, petering out along the way.
“What are these for?” I asked. They helped to move rain water away from the tents, she said. Then she went to state how lucky I was to be visiting in the dry season. Most of the time, it was either too wet or too hot here on the Rio Bravo. And when the rains come, the entire embankment turns to mud.
“It becomes too slippery to walk.”
Water trenches: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
She pointed out how her two-person tent had been raised up on fork-lift palettes. Others sat upon man-made mounds of built-up earth.
“Who dug the canals and built the mounds?”
“Tucker and the men.”
Squalid, but without Squalor
Protest signs from the #EndMPP #RetoreAsylumNow Vigil, January 12, 2020, Brownsville, TX (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)
My friend fled home when her husband, a Guatemalan border patrol cop, was murdered by the gang he’d been investigating. She took off with three small children and all the evidence he’d collected. She had presented it to CBP authorities not once, but three times, and in three places. Matamoros was the third port of entry she’d tried. In each place, she requested asylum. In each place, she’d been kicked back to Mexico. This was her last stop. There was nowhere else to go.
“At least this camp isn’t in chaos. Matamoros isn’t safe. But as long as we stay up here on the hill, it’s better than some of the other places we’ve been.”
There was truth to what she said. Of all the refugee camps I’ve seen, Matamoros is unique. While squalid, there was little squalor. The encampment was tidy. Floors were swept, even if they were dirt. Children and adults were washed, their clothes clean, their hair combed and plaited. And they were free to come and go.
My mind wandered back to my years in El Salvador, specifically to the community that had grown out of the refugee camp in Colomoncagua, Honduras. There, 10,000 people lived for a decade (1980–1991) surrounded by barbed wire and gun-totting soldiers. They’d fled the US-backed Salvadoran military’s scorched-earth campaigns only to be imprisoned at gun-point, cut off from the land — the only life they’d ever known.
But with materials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the support of international NGOs, they developed social, occupational, and leadership skills they previously had not known.
Before anyone knew it, the refugees of Colomoncagua were negotiating their own repatriation — not as individuals, but as a community. There was no dignity living behind bars in a hostile land, they maintained. They preferred to go home, even as Civil War still raged. In 1991, they packed everything — including the boards and nails of their dwellings — and carried it over the border to war-torn Morazán, where they recreated the community they’d established in refuge.
In Matamoros, where both governmental — as well as UN — oversight were absent, a similar force was at play: a community sown from shared need and common understanding was sprouting from the earth. There was a beating heart within the patchwork of tents and tarps, and its life-blood was the network of grassroots humanitarians — folks like the Tías and Team Brownsville as well as this Tucker and Gaby, GRM and the Resource Center, whom I had yet to meet. Clearly, they placed a premium on dignity, doing what they could to make squalid conditions livable for the victims of MPP.
A Community Grows in Matamoros
The Global Management Response clinic compound: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
The thrum of a generator drew me into a U-shaped compound of “Better Shelters” linked to a mobile clinic. A carpet, rolled out on the dirt in between, gave the compound a homey, welcoming feel. A large logo in red tipped me off instantly as to what “GRM” meant: Global Response Management, the camp’s health and wellness provider.
I pulled up an available camp chair and learned from a volunteer doctor that GRM shared no affiliation with either the Mexican government or the UN. The group had arrived in Matamoros in September, setting up shop under a white canopy on the plaza. There, it provided for basic health needs. But on seeing the camp’s rapid expansion, GRM director Helen Parry brought in the mobile unit. Legend has it that she just drove it onto the levee and parked it, ready to ask for forgiveness, rather than bothering for permission. She’d been in Matamoros ever since, overseeing a constantly evolving team of volunteer doctors and nurses.
The Venezuelan “colonia” at the Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
South of GRM, I found game courts enclosed in laundry-decorated chainlink fence. They’d been there long before MPP transformed the levee park into a refugee camp. Basketball hoops with ripped and/or missing nets towered over the tents splattered across the painted asphalt like friendly, if slightly rusted, sentries.
There, I met a Venezuelan family. The Epiphany party had ended and the camp was coming to life with the squeals of children. A group of barefoot boys kicked a soccer ball around in the dusty levee lane. As they watched their boys play, Mami and Papi explained how the community was organized:
The Mexicans had congregated furthest north, closest to the bridge. Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans lived in the middle area, where I’d been wandering. The basketball courts were occupied by Venezuelans. And under the “domes” — at this point everyone turned to look south — were the newcomers, representing a mix of nationalities,“now that the Mexican government was involved.”
That’s when I learned that INM, Instituto Nacional de Migración, had shown up exactly one month before, on December 5, 2019, to commence construction on the “domes.” The date was well remembered in both camp and town because work began, inexplicably, in the middle of the night, waking everyone in Matamoros.
The Government Wades In
The newest refugees under the latest shelter, the “domes,” constructed by the INM (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
I left the Venezuelans and continued on, passing a lonely big top on wobbly legs that as yet served no discernible purpose. Suddenly, I felt a shift in the culture of the encampment.
The prim structure of twin white canvas domes contrasted comically with the hodgepodge of tent and tarp compounds on the levee to the north and the individual dwellings below on the plaza. The same synthetic camping tents had been pitched under the canopy, lined up in tidy rows, like city blocks, separated by straight passageways. The only things out of place were the shoes kicked off in the walkways between zippered “doors.”
Eighteen months since metering began in Matamoros and six months after MPP exploded the population of refugees, the government of Mexico had built a tent to cover tents. Like those supplied by the Tías and Team Brownsville, these tents sat upon the same Mexican dirt. Only white plastic ground cloths separated tent bottoms from the mud to come. The wall-less structure promised little protection from wind or cold or slanting rain. The domes were pretty, for now. But pretty didn’t make tent living any more safe or comfortable or dignified.
The area under the domes was only about 1/3 full, suggesting the expectation of future arrivals. This made sense since MPP did nothing to stop people from coming to the US border. It only blocked their ability to cross. With the expectation of an ever-increasing population, I would have thought the government capable of more: Better Shelters or tents one can stand in, would betray greater humanity.
One-month-old Showers Stalls: Matamoros Refugee Camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
The encampment ended just beyond the “domes” with a block of 20 gender-neutral, cement-walled shower stalls. They, too, had been constructed just before our arrival. Another belated gift from the Mexican government, they were hardly sufficient to support 2,500 souls. No one was using them on that day either, perhaps because of the mud-caked floor dappled with trash trapped within?
One-month-old laundry station: Matamoros Refugee Camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
To the west of the showers stood an outdoor laundry station. It comprised 10 sloped wash boards set side-by-side. PVC piping connected them to a municipal water source that supplied the showers as well.
They should have been a welcome alternative to tripping down the steep bank of the Rio Bravo to scrub your laundry on the rocks. But on this day, the water pressure was low. A half-dozen frustrated people struggled angrily to rinse soap out of their clothing. The dirt beneath the station had become a pool of cloudy mud from the wash-water runoff. Strewn with rubbish, it was unsightly , and a likely breeding grown for insects.
One-month-old bank of temporary toilets: Matamoros Refugee Camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
Stretching north, perpendicular to the laundry station was a row of 30 Porta-Pots. Remarkably, they did not smell. Someone stood by, handing out toilet paper and cleaning them after each user.
“When did these arrive?” I asked.
“Last month.”
Introducing the Dignity Village Coalition
The Matamoros, Mexico border crossing plaza turned refugee camps, January 2020 (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)
I would come to learn that getting enough toilets to serve the Matamoros tent city population had been an on-going struggle. Many refugees simply squatted under the shadow of the bridge, leaving toilet paper and other unpleasant things behind. And the stench!
When that became too much, the Tías and Team Brownsville arranged to have a dozen Porta-Pots installed on the plaza. This enraged local residents and may have contributed to the company’s refusal to clean them with any regularity. Finally, the Mexican government brought the span of 30 reinforcements on the levee, thanks in large part to the grassroots humanitarians and volunteers who’d coalesced in the last quarter of 2019 to form a powerful lobbying entity on behalf of the asylum seekers.
Whether as individuals or groups, these humanitarians had arrived at different times in response to different needs: from feeding people, to sheltering and clothing them, to seeing to their basic health, to providing them with legal resources. But they all shared a common mission: to bring dignity and justice to the people — not aliens — that Trump & Co, through MPP, had washed their hands of and trapped in dangerous, squalid conditions.
By the start of my Texas road trip in January 2020, MPP’s victims numbered roughly 60,000. Having fled persecution, gang violence, domestic abuse, and crippling poverty, they could not now turn back. They were scattered all along the 2000-mile US border with Mexico, vulnerable and traumatized: a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, even before the arrival of COVID-19.
In complete disregard for international law and human rights conventions, Trump & Co created MPP not to offer people protection, that was another lie, but to end the right to asylum in the US. Through MPP, they made real people invisible to the majority of Americans. Fortunately, they remain visible to the heroes and humanitarians of the Rio Grande Valley.
Refusing to look away, they eventually joined hands, as the Dignity Village Coalition, to ensure Mexico doesn’t look away either.
Prepare to meet them. Prepare to be amazed.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”