Listen to people on this side, say migrants as Biden visits border

Venezuelan migrant Julio Marquez sells lollipops near the border in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, holding a cardboard sign scrawled with marker: “Help us with whatever comes from your heart.”

He has the same message for US President Joe Biden, who visited the Texas city of El Paso, just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, on Sunday.

“We hope he helps us, that he lets us pass, since we’re suffering a lot here in Mexico,” said Marquez, 32. “He has to listen to the people on this side.”

Biden’s first border visit as president comes days after a new policy aimed at reducing illegal migration was criticised by migrant advocates for limiting asylum access.

The two-pronged approach offers legal pathways to the US for certain Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans who have US sponsors, while expelling people of those nationalities back to Mexico if they attempt to cross the border without permission.

Mexican migration agents and state police on Saturday patrolled the concrete banks of the Rio Grande river dividing Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, as groups of families attempted to clamber through loops of concertina wire into the US.

“Duck down,” Erlan Garay of Honduras told a Colombian woman and her three children, including an eight-year-old boy clutching a Spider-Man toy.

“They’re going to request asylum, they have a chance,” said Garay. He would look for somewhere else to cross clandestinely, he said shrugging off a drop of blood where the fence pricked his hand.

Marquez said he and his partner, Yalimar Chirinos, 19, do not qualify for the new legal entry programme as they lack a US sponsor.

“They’re changing the laws every week,” Chirinos said, wearing a black hoodie and a single pink-and-blue glove to try to ward off the cold.

The couple have spent five months in Mexico after crossing several countries and the dangerous Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama. They sleep at night on the street without a tent or blankets, hugging one another to stay warm, wary of criminals who rob and kidnap migrants.

At one point they crossed undetected into Texas, but after several days without food or a place to stay, they surrendered to US officials, who sent them back to Mexico.

Marquez said he will stick it out another 15 days, hoping to find a legal route into the US before looking for a way back to Venezuela.

“I don’t want to be here any more,” he said, weeping. “Mr President, if you’re going to deport me, deport me back to my country, not back here to Mexico.”

Others were undeterred, even after their expulsions to Mexico.

“Send me wherever you want, I’ll come back,” said Jonathan Tovar, 29, speaking on Friday from behind the fence of Mexico’s migration office in Ciudad Juarez. “I want the president of the US to give me and my family a chance.”

Reuters