Armed only with hand-held radios, four uniformed Mexican immigration officers didn’t hear the thumping footsteps until it was too late. They would be swamped.
An attacking, screaming mob of migrants, some with young children in their arms, stormed down the bank of the Rio Grande River just outside Matamoros, Mexico.
I watched as the immigration officials tried to stop the mob, but it was no use. When violence failed, they tried reason.
“Please, the babies! The kids! You’re going to hurt the kids!’ cried an officer in Spanish. ‘The children could drown! Stop! Please stop what you’re doing!’
Anyway, women with little ones and men with older children on their shoulders ran into the river that marks the border with Mexico.
They’re heading north to Brownsville, Texas.
And as the clock ticks down to the expiration of Title 42, the policy that allows U.S. Border Patrol to quickly deport illegal border crossings, and before new regulations take effect, these migrants decided they couldn’t wait any longer.
I came to Matamoros to speak to some of the thousands of migrants who have stormed here in recent days and weeks.
Why did they come? Have they not heard from the Biden administration that ‘the border is closed’?
According to the White House, after the end of Title 42, the US will begin enforcing another policy that has been on the books for a long time, called Title 8.
Armed only with hand-held radios, four uniformed Mexican immigration officers didn’t hear the thumping footsteps until it was too late. They would be swamped.
An attacking, screaming mob of migrants, some with young children in their arms, stormed down the bank of the Rio Grande River just outside Matamoros, Mexico.
“Please, the babies! The kids! You’re going to hurt the kids!’ cried an officer in Spanish. ‘The children could drown! Stop! Please stop what you’re doing!’
Under this rule, any migrant who illegally enters the US and applies for asylum, without first applying for asylum in another country, will be deported and possibly banned from the US for 5 years.
As far as I know, I’m the only American journalist here on the scene.
And firefights between warring Mexican cartel factions have been raging since upriver in Reynosa — this medium-sized northeastern Mexican metropolis, just a few miles from the Gulf, seemed like a good place to start.
As many as 10,000 American immigrants have arrived, growing the city’s population of 520,000, with more showing up at the city bus station by the minute.
Many migrants walked off the buses with a big smile. They are so confident in their chances of entering the US that many of them don’t even bother to set up camp. They go straight.
One thing is clear: they don’t think the border is ‘closed’.
“Do you know people they (the Americans) let in”? I asked four young Venezuelan men who had just arrived by bus and walked straight to a queue on the river bank for their turn to jump in.
“Si,” they all answered immediately in unison, nodding their heads.
Tell me about them, I asked. “Lots of people,” said one. ‘Family members.’
“I have two cousins who let them in,” one man explained.
Another volunteered that he had a cousin who had crossed the river here a few days earlier and showed me the name and address of the hotel in Pidgeon Forge, Tennessee.
A woman holding a young sleeping child agreed, “My mother. She’s in.’
As many as 10,000 American immigrants have arrived, growing the city’s population of 520,000, with more showing up at the city bus station by the minute.
I came to Matamoros to speak to some of the thousands of migrants who have stormed here in recent days and weeks.
They all want only one thing: a quick trip across the border to seek asylum and then release into the American heartland on whatever letter of consent, short term or long term, the Biden administration will give them.
But not everyone is willing to gamble on an illegal crossing, at least not right away.
The relatively wealthy can spring for a room at the $70 a night Best Western hotel where I stay. But the poverty-stricken masses live in a sprawling, ever-expanding city of makeshift shelters sprung up along a dusty, sparsely wooded two-mile stretch between a city road and the river.
Tons of detritus litter the banks, much of which seeps slowly into the Rio Grande below, becoming entangled in a thick blanket of green riverweed that completely covers the deceptively powerful river currents.
The heat here is already in May. So, despite a pile of port-o-potties, the stench of human waste hangs over everything.
Mexican officials – in uniform or T-shirts with the government logo – patrol back and forth. Some ride ATVs, others are on foot. But all are powerless to stop the migrants as they try to cross en masse, which has been happening day and night for almost two weeks.
Still, the lingering Title 42 deportation threat deters some from applying for a new humanitarian parole program called CBP-One, which has been set up by the Biden administration.
After a virtual screening, CBO-One applicants are granted a residence permit in the US while their asylum applications are processed. By mid-April, 99% of applicants had been approved, but many thousands are still pending.
Here at the Matamoros Best Western I met my first Dagastanis, a woman and her daughter, sitting at a table with a man from Belarus and a Russian.
In fact, my hotel and a hotel across the street was filled with well-to-do Kyrgyz from Central Asia, all of whom had won the CBP-One lottery.
Tons of detritus litter the banks, much of which seeps slowly into the Rio Grande below, becoming entangled in a thick blanket of green riverweed that completely covers the deceptively powerful river currents.
The Kyrgyz were preparing to be led across the international bridge, legally and personally delivered to the Americans or processed.
I asked a Kyrgyz what terrible thing had happened at home that made him eligible for a humanitarian permit.
He refused to say. But when I asked him why he had come, he said: ‘because the door is open’.
A dozen immigrants at the main camp told me they would wait the weeks or months it takes to get their CBP-One humanitarian entry permit. That is, unless things change after Title 8 goes into effect.
“After Thursday, if you see someone crossing over and applying for asylum and you see they’re allowed in, what are you going to do?” I asked a Cuban woman who said she would continue to wait for her CBP-One permit.
Here at the Matamoros Best Western I met my first Dagastanis, a woman and her daughter, sitting at a table with a man from Belarus and a Russian.
I asked a Kyrgyz what terrible thing had happened at home that made him eligible for a humanitarian permit. He refused to say. But when I asked him why he had come, he said: ‘because the door is open’.
“If I see or watch an officially credible news channel on TV that they let people in, I would,” she said, waving a hand over her head grandly at the river behind her. And I mean right away. Straight away.’
Elsewhere in the camp, everyone I spoke to expressed the same strong preference to waive their CBP-One application if they could get past faster with an illegal river crossing.
A group of six Venezuelans who had been waiting for CBP-One for several years said they would cross immediately if they learned that all of the American’s loud talk turned out to be nonsense.
So, the tens of thousands wait and watch.
If the US border is indeed closed and America starts enforcing a strict five-year ban on those who break the rules, these migrants may think twice about breaking the law.
But if the threats from the Biden administration turn out to be hollow, there’s only one place these desperate people will go: to the North.