Jack Herrera writes:

Each night as Janiana tries to sleep, she wonders about what’s going to happen to her baby grandnephew. The woman, a 26-year-old from Honduras, lives in a tent together with her 20-year-old niece, the baby’s mother, in a tent village of hundreds of asylum seekers like them that formed right next to the pedestrian bridge that leads from Mexico into California. They’re among the tens of thousands of people crowded in dire conditions across the length of the border who have fled violence, extreme poverty, natural disaster and other circumstances in their various home countries in the hope of being given asylum in the U.S. And as more keep coming, the number of tents keeps growing.

During the day, young children play in the center of the encampment, kicking miniature soccer balls, as their parents watch. At night, when the temperature drops, Janiana can hear the coos and cries of babies throughout the camp, including the one in her own tent. In recent weeks it has rained heavily, and the camp has flooded. There are no bathrooms or showers, and many migrants get by on very little, often forced to skip meals. Tijuana also has one of the highest crime rates of any city in the hemisphere, and the migrants are often the targets.

“We are waiting patiently; we want to cross the right way and obey all orders,” says Janiana, who spoke on the condition that we only publish her first name. “But Tijuana has become a jail city for us. Do you know how degrading it is to sleep outside?”

Across the border, the situation looks different. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have shown up in the United States in the last few months, creating something of a political firestorm. As the Biden administration scrambles to process the children, temporarily housing them in some of the same overflow facilities made infamous during the previous administration, the “kids in cages” critiques have roared back to life. There was a similarly large arrival of unaccompanied minors in 2014 and 2015, but unlike then, when almost all of the migrant children made the entire journey on their own from Central America, today many are splitting from their families right here, in the shelters and camps of Northern Mexico.

The door to the U.S. has been shut tight to asylum seekers since last March, about the time when Janiana first arrived in Tijuana, when the Trump administration issued an order at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that every migrant — child or adult — would be immediately “expelled” back to Mexico or their home country if they attempted to cross the border, without even a chance to make a case that the persecution they face qualifies them to stay. After he took office this year, Joe Biden kept the policy largely in place, but began to admit unaccompanied minors even while continuing to expel both adults and children who enter with families. Since the shift in policy, some parents and guardians have made the devastating decision, calculated only out of desperation, to send their children off ahead of them, alone, to cross the border.

The result is a new form of family separation — but instead of happening at the hands of federal agents in American government facilities, it’s taking place, family by family, in camps like the one Janiana lives in. The fact that minors won’t be expelled like everyone else has rapidly spread by word of mouth across the length of the border. And while many families choose to stick together, the pressure to separate weighs heaviest on the most vulnerable — families who fear death, whether from persecutors who have followed them to the border, or from extreme hunger. [Continue reading…]