Asylum-seekers camped out for months on the Mexican side of the border waiting to legally enter the US hope Joe Biden wins the election, or they fear they will never get in.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of migrants are enduring the muddy, smelly encampment in Matamoros while they wait, for how long they don’t know, for appointments with Customs and Border Protection.
The tents are slick with mildew, stink from the portable toilets wafts through the air, mixing with the scent of chicken cooking on outdoor fires, with shoes ruined by the journey, discarded dolls, and assorted trash piled on the fringes.
Just over the Rio Grande is Brownsville, Texas, one of the biggest crossings, both controlled and irregular, along the southern border that is an ongoing flashpoint in the immigration crisis.
Unlike the up to 10,000 migrants swimming the river, scaling walls and clambering through razor wire to cross the border every day, the asylum-seekers in this camp applied through the CBP One app.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of migrants are enduring the muddy, smelly encampment in Matamoros while they wait for appointments with Customs and Border Protection
The tents are slick with mildew, stink from the portable toilets wafts through the air, mixing with the scent of chicken cooking on outdoor fires
Just over the Rio Grande is Brownsville, Texas , one of the biggest crossings, both controlled and irregular, along the southern border
The app allows them to claim asylum and wait for an interview at the border, after which they are released into the US pending a hearing to determine the validity of their claim.
Until they receive the email with their appointment time, they wait, in the vague hope their time will come and their months-long journey won’t have been in vain.
But they all have one big worry totally out of their control. If they don’t make it over the border by election day, they need Biden to prevail over Donald Trump.
‘I want Biden to win,’ Daniel Cortez, 45, a mechanic from Honduras told The Free Press.
His friend Richard Betancourt, 46, a pipe fitter who fled Venezuela, agreed as they sat under a tarp out of the drizzling rain.
‘If it’s Trump, it doesn’t matter how much I work or want to work. They won’t let me in,’ he said.
Another migrant, Alejandra Falcon, 26, added: ‘If he doesn’t win, I can’t imagine what will happen.’
Tanya Guadalupe, of Honduras, is alone in the mass encampment with her 3 children, Kenny,6, and Brian, 2, pictured, in Matamoros, Mexico. Guadalupe is also pregnant with a fourth child
A woman from Honduras holds her three-year old daughter as she sits with a group who returned to Mexico to await their US asylum hearing, as they block the Puerta Mexico international border crossing bridge to demand quickness in their asylum
A massive migrant encampment, mostly comprised of Venezuelans, is set up along the Rio Grande in Matamoros
Trump in his four years in the White House talked about building a wall to keep migrants out, but failed to stop the flow of people over the border and deported fewer people than Barack Obama.
Instead, he slashed legal immigration by making visas and greens cards harder to get.
Soon after he was turfed out of office by Biden, millions of desperate migrants were looking for a way north as the Venezuelan economy went into freefall and the country descended into lawlessness.
The vast majority of the migrants biding their time at the border, or skipping the wait by sneaking over it, are Venezuelans fleeing the all-consuming chaos of their country.
The include Alejandra and her brother Lionel, 23, who started the arduous 1,400-mile journey from Caracas eight months ago, meeting compatriot Christian Mohammed, 24, at a bus station in Panama.
The six-week journey involved four buses, 20 vans, and the extremely dangerous hike across the Darién Gap from Colombia to Panama – risking death fording rivers, hacking through jungle, and climbing mountains.
A church showed up to offer migrants bibles, dry rice and dry beans, which will be difficult for them to cook
The asylum-seekers in this camp applied through the CBP One app to enter the US legally
That Alejandra wasn’t raped and her companions weren’t robbed, and no one was bitten by a venomous snake was more than a minor miracle.
‘We’re like a family here. We know everyone. We take care of each other,’ she said of the camp, despite its hardships.
None of the trio were worried so many Americans don’t want them in their country, because the alternative was so bleak.
‘No matter what, it’s going to be roses, because it’ll be better than where we came from,’ said Lionel, who wants to join a friend working at a nightclub in Louisville, Kentucky.