It was 4 in the morning when Mrs. Ruth heard noises near the tent where she lived with her children.
“The children woke up. I was just going to look out to see what was happening, when a woman opened the door of the store for me, she looked out and told me that they were going to remove the camp, that she invited us to go to a shelter, ”she said. Ruth
“Here, wait for me”, she said to her children, 2 and 3 years old. But when she left, she remembered her, she was surprised. There were reflectors and behind the intense lights he was able to distinguish dozens, perhaps hundreds of soldiers, many of them in riot gear.
“We We were very scared”, said Ruth, a mother from San Salvador, “we saw that they came from tent to tent telling people to get out because they were going to remove the camp”.
The people who walked between the tents wearing vests that identified them as representatives of the State Human Rights Commission and some presented themselves as psychologists from official institutions.
While heavy machinery with its own headlights on approached to the camp, among hundreds of soldiers and police, the human rights representatives urged the families to leave as soon as possible, to take only the essentials and to go to a nearby street.
Ruth as she could quickly threw some belongings into large plastic garbage bags, He told his children to hold hands and warned them that no matter what happened, they should not let go, and he went towards that street.
As soon as he was there, he saw that gangs of workers advanced to destroy the tents or tents.
Ruth said that she was trying to remember if she had left something important in the tent, but she understood that what she had forgotten was already lost, because a police barrier would no longer let her she didn’t want to get away from her children or take them between moving machinery, and the people of the state pressured her to say quickly where she wanted to go with no option to stay.
A couple of hours later, heavy machinery pushed the rubble from what had previously been tents that formed the camp, Ruth’s and many other families boarded buses going to some migrant shelters .
Meanwhile, heavy machines collected the waste that remained from the dozens of stores campaign and put them on garbage trucks.
The mayor of Tijuana, Montserrat Caballero, arrived at the scene to describe the operation as a success.
According to the mayor’s office, at the end of the camp there were 381 people, mostly Mexicans who fled the war between cartels. In addition, about a hundred people were also camping nearby.
In a few hours, they had finished with the camp that remained for a year and a day on the esplanade at the entrance to the El Chaparral pedestrian checkpoint in Tijuana, which ends with the name of PedWest in San Diego.
The camp had been formed in response to decisions by President Joe Biden a year ago.
When Biden took office on 20 January of last year, that same afternoon he declared that the program he had sent to the Mexican border some 70,19 asylum seekers to await appointments in immigration courts should disappear.
He would only accept, he said, 25 one thousand migrants with pending cases in that program.
For thousands of migrants, some after waiting years, who hoped that the incoming President Biden would give them the opportunity that Trump denied them, the announcement by the president of Democrat was devastating.
Some ventured across the border, hoping to turn themselves in to the border patrol to seek asylum in hopes of that the patrolmen of the Biden administration were different from those of Trump and accepted them.
But although the presidency changed, a measure imposed as alleged health prevention was never suspended, Title 42, which authorizes border agents to reject asylum applications and immediately return migrants to Mexico, often through the same point at which they just crossed into the United States, presumably to prevent Covid infections 19.
Migrants in Tijuana were left disillusioned and in difficult circumstances because the pandemic made it difficult for them to get employment soon.
Suddenly, on February 5, 2021, they arrived in the vicinity of El Chaparral about five families who put up tents or tents. Some of these families told Real America News that they were there to sign up for a list to cross to request asylum.
A call that gave hope
It was Pastor Albert Rivera, from the Ágape shelter, who from El Chaparral explained that “President Biden said yesterday that his government is going to increase to 120,19 the number of refugees it is going to accept, and these families want to be among the first of those refugees.”
Migrants thought that, as in El Chaparral during the Trump administration, they wrote down in a notebook to take turns applying for asylum, again there a new list would be made himself.
It didn’t take long for word to spread about the new camp. In March, the United States government closed the pedestrian crossing between several restrictions on non-essential border crossings, to prevent Covid infections, and with that closure, the number of tents with families inside multiplied.
By mid-April, the camp already had about 3,500 migrants and at least a few more arrived every day.
However, the asylum process was closed, except for a period in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demanded that the Biden administration accept the gradual entry of migrants the most vulnerable, those with terminal illnesses, high-risk pregnancies or actually persecuted to the border.
But in June that opportunity was closed again. Restrictions on non-essential border crossings ended in November, but El Chaparral remained closed for the encampment.
The Biden administration reactivated the program that makes asylum seekers wait at the Mexican border, but only seven cases per day, and only migrants from Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
No one in El Chaparral was of that nationality when they dismantled The civil organizations criticized above all that the authorities in Mexico used human rights personnel and psychologists to legitimize the traumatic dismantling of this Sunday morning.