Miguel Ángel was unintentionally the first person to cross the border this Monday through the pedestrian checkpoint from El Chaparral to San Ysidro, when he reopened the West Pedestrian Crossing, or Pedwest, for its contraction in English, after almost three years of remaining closed to consequence of the pandemic.
Shortly before 6 in the morning, the time the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office would reopen, Miguel Ángel was waiting for Mexican immigration officials to tell him to come present his documents to cross into California.
Pedwest was closed in March 2020, before that date “the most I could do was an hour and a half, two hours at the most,” the 27-year-old told La Opinión.
In contrast, while Pedwest was closed, up to 30,000 pedestrians who cross daily from Tijuana to San Diego via San Ysidro had to use only the generally crowded east side crosswalk.
Miguel Ángel talked about how the closure to the west impacted him. “We have to get up at 3 in the morning at the latest to be already lined up from 4 to 4:30, to be able to cross on time.” He goes to work at 7:30 a.m. in the Otay area, about six miles east of San Ysidro. He works from Sunday to Thursday and on Friday and Saturday he just wanted to sleep a little more.
It was during the Trump era that Pedwest closed, that pedestrian checkpoint that was open 24 hours a day and up to 22,000 pedestrians came to cross that crossing from Tijuana to San Ysidro every day.
Now the reopening has a limited schedule from 6 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon and only in the direction from Tijuana to California, but the federal authorities of both countries have the expectation of extending the hours and later opening the passage from north to south .
“It’s going to be quite a process, we have to first adapt the entry” to California, said the delegate of the National Institute of Migration (INM) in Baja California, Manuel Alfonso Marín Salazar.
He added that his officers are going to open before 6 in the morning to check documents and that people who cross a bridge to go to San Ysidro are ready at 6 in the morning, right before the door where CBP will also check the documentation.
“Then we will see the exits from north to south”, from San Ysidro to Tijuana, said the delegate, but stressed that the reopening of the pedestrian crossing coincides with the start of classes in schools in California and with the return after December vacations of dozens of of thousands of people who live in Tijuana and cross the border to work.
The restart of operations of the pedestrian checkpoint yesterday was very slow. In the first hour, at most a dozen people crossed. Miguel Ángel said that he found out about the reopening in a Facebook group in which people who cross the border daily find out about waiting times and conditions encountered by drivers and pedestrians.
Mrs. Eli Cifuentes spoke that she was already going from her house to the San Ysidro checkpoint when she found out in one of those groups on social networks that El Chaparral had opened.
That the authorities have opened “is going to be very good, because now we are going to divide” between the two pedestrian crossings “and we are going to do much less time.” Mrs. Eli crosses the border to do her regular grocery shopping and now that only the eastern pedestrian side was open, “she was doing between three and three and a half hours, depending on the people.”
Although no one confirmed it, the reopening of El Chaparral-Pedwest coincides with the North American Leaders Summit meeting that began this Monday between presidents Joe Biden, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Baja California Government Secretary, Catalino Zavala, said that the Mexican authorities will be aware of incidents that may occur during Pedwest operations.
Zavala highlighted safety after visiting Pedwest. “She is one of the busiest checkpoints in the world, so we have to be aware of any incident”, such as blockades or attempts to cross without documents.
On Monday, Mexican immigration officials treated those who arrived at the Pedwest checkpoint without incident.
Élida works at a clothing store in San Diego and said she is greatly relieved that Pedwest has reopened.
“I come from Rosarito, and to be on time for work I had to get up even earlier” than those who live in Tijuana; “I hope they don’t close it again, it seems to me that they took too long to open again.”
A few weeks after the US authorities closed Pedwest due to the pandemic, up to 3,000 migrants camped on the esplanade of the checkpoint on the Mexican side in a camp they called Esperanza. One of the incidents that Secretary of Government Zavala referred to.
The camp continued for almost two years, until February 2022, when the Tijuana municipality used heavy machinery to force the eviction.
Although the area was cleared, Pedwest was only used in the spring of 2022 when up to 118,000 Ukrainian migrants crossed through San Ysidro seeking asylum, and then for nearly 200 migrants a day with humanitarian exceptions seeking asylum to cross through that same checkpoint. .
Jason Wells, executive director of the San Ysidro Chamber of Commerce, had warned that with the closure of Pedwest, border trade would languish.
According to Wells, 95 percent of consumers in San Ysidro are cross-border shoppers.
The closure of the crosswalk most impacted the largest shopping center along the US-Mexico border: Puerta de las Américas in San Ysidro, precisely where the west crosswalk ends in California.
Karla Gutiérrez, a young woman who passed through Pedwest this Monday and works at that shopping center, said that “since the start of the pandemic, only last December we recovered sales a little, but it was nothing compared to what we had when Pedwest was open regular hours every day.