In Tijuana, migrants who hoped for U.S. sanctuary seek ways to settle down in Mexico

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On the long journey north from Honduras, Daniel Martinez had a simple plan: Make it back to the United States.

But as days spent waiting in migrant camps in Tijuana wore into weeks, as U.S. officials shuttered the border and launched a tear-gas attack, and as the list of people waiting to be called for asylum interviews in the United States swelled to more than 6,000, Mr. Martinez began looking elsewhere.

Today, the 19-year-old does a brisk business cutting hair in a Tijuana migrant centre. He charges 40 pesos ($2.70) for each cut and has a long line of customers who come for his signature style, “La Bomba” – short on the sides, long on top – or a shave with a straight razor. He has taken on an apprentice and, together, the two are making plans to open a small barber shop in the city.

Mr. Martinez, who taught himself to cut hair during his nine months in a Washington detention centre – before he was eventually deported – still hopes to make it back to the United States one day and rejoin his sister and nieces. But for now, he is planning to make a go of it in Tijuana.

“If we get enough clients, then I can spend some time here,” he said. “It depends on that.”

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More than a month after some 6,000 Central Americans arrived in the northern border city of Tijuana expecting easy passage into the United States, many are now grappling to find a Plan B.

Several migrants told The Globe and Mail they would try to slip across the border over Christmas, when they expect there will be fewer border guards on duty. But local officials and aid workers say that despite angry protests by local residents about the migrants' presence in the city – and the migrants’ own wishes to go the United States – most will likely end up settling in the city.

Mexican officials estimate that almost 3,400 members of the caravans that arrived from Honduras in early November remain in Tijuana. Another 1,200 have crossed the border and have been detained, while 1,200 more have returned or have been deported back to their home countries.

The caravan has put a rare international spotlight on Mexico’s immigration system. Under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the new federal government has promised a more humanitarian approach to the migrant crisis, pledging to improve conditions at shelters and this week negotiating an agreement with the United States to send billions in development assistance to Central America and Southern Mexico.

It has also offered migrants asylum and temporary humanitarian visas that will allow them to work in Mexico and access health care and schooling. Government agencies have held job fairs in hopes of filling more than 20,000 vacancies in northern border towns, many of them in factories.

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Aid workers and immigration lawyers volunteering in Tijuana shelters say migrants will have a better chance of being granted asylum in Mexico, which recognizes refugees fleeing generalized violence, than in the United States, where people typically have to prove they will be subject to persecution because of their race, religion, gender or membership in a social group that is targeted for violence.

Many of the migrants who have come to talk to California immigration lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski appear to meet the criteria for valid asylum claims in the United States; they have suffered violence or have faced threats and forced recruitment at the hands of gang members. But Ms. Toczylowski expects most will likely end up claiming asylum in Mexico instead, as a new policy of the Trump administration bars asylum claims by victims of domestic and gang violence. On Thursday, White House officials said the United States will now start returning asylum seekers to Mexico to wait for their claims to be processed; the practice all but assures that many of the migrants will be staying in Mexico for the long term.

Already more than 3,300 Central American migrants who arrived in caravans have claimed asylum in Mexico, according to UN estimates, although the majority of those are in Southern Mexico.

In Tijuana, however, fewer than 400 have filed claims. Many are holding tight to their dream of making it to U.S. soil, just steps away, a process that could take months. And the reality is that the United States has accepted less than 10 per cent of asylum claims from Central Americans in recent years.

“A lot of people believed that they could get inside [the U.S.],” said Miguel Angel Alvarado, who travelled with the caravan from El Salvador. “They still believe it. But it won’t happen. But in Mexico, there are a lot of opportunities to get papers.”

Mr. Alvarado lived in the United States for 18 years, working legally after the country granted temporary protected status to citizens of El Salvador in 2001. He earned good money in San Francisco Bay Area bakeries. But he let his work permit expire and was picked up by immigration officials and put into deportation proceedings in 2009. He missed a court date after he travelled to El Salvador to be with his mother, who was dying of cancer.

He tried three times to make it back to the United States but was caught by Mexican law enforcement each time. He joined the caravan after being released from an immigrant detention centre in Chiapas, in Southern Mexico, figuring it was his best shot at making it back to the border.

But once here, aid workers told him his chances of being admitted to the United States legally were slim, as he had abandoned his original deportation hearing. So this month, he applied for a humanitarian visa to work in Mexico and got a job offer at a butcher shop in Tijuana. But he is also scouting locations to cross the border undetected and make it back to San Francisco, where the pay is much higher; he can use his expired social-security number to work and his former boss has promised him a job.

“If I can find a good job in a bakery here and make 2,500 pesos ($170) a week, maybe I can think about it,” he said. “But it has to be a good opportunity.”

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Life in migrant camps at the border came as a shock to Estebana Martinez Perez, who left her home in El Salvador in October, when she heard from other migrants that the United States had created a special visa just for members of the caravan – a rumour she learned was false when she reached Tijuana.

She’s not interested in staying in Mexico. The country is not much safer or prosperous than El Salvador, where she scraped together money selling bottled water on the street – and where two years ago two of her nephews, both soldiers, were ambushed and decapitated by local gang members.

Recently, she and a nephew she travelled with have started talking about trying to jump the wall. “Maybe Monday or Tuesday, we are going to do something to cross the border,” she said. But she is nervous about the idea, worried that if she’s caught she could be deported back to El Salvador.

“I never imagined that I was going to have to wait a long time just to cross the border,” she said. “This is so different from what I thought it would be.”

Mexican officials say they expect as many as 4,000 migrants from the caravan to apply for humanitarian visas. Many migrants say they have a practical reason for applying for such visas: to normalize their status in the country and gain protection from the local police while they figure out how to make it to the United States.

“I want to go to the United States – that’s what I came here for,” said Jimmy Kelly Garvin Cantillano, who arrived with the caravan from the Honduran island of Roatan. “I didn’t come here to stay in Mexico.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Garvin Cantillano has applied for a humanitarian visa to live and work in Mexico, a move he said offers some safety when he leaves the shelter to scout a good location to jump the fence.

“If you don’t have papers and police find you on the street, they will take you and send you back to your country,” he said. “If they catch me and send me back to my country, at least with this visa I can come back to Mexico, no problem.”

Local officials point to Tijuana’s experience in 2016 with thousands of Haitians who arrived hoping to be admitted to the United States as a model of how members of the Central American caravan could settle in the city. Despite similar public backlash by local residents at the time, two years later, roughly 3,000 Haitians have settled in the city and many here consider their integration a success.

“They are already participating in the normal life of the city,” said Rodolfo Olimpo Hernandez, who heads the state government’s migrant council. “So for sure a lot of these people, when they come to realize that it will be hard to cross – and even if they do it will be really hard for them to stay in the U.S. – they might decide to stay here, too.”

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Soraya Vazquez Pesqueira, a human-rights lawyer who helped mobilize local aid groups to help the Haitian migrants, expects as many as 2,000 Central Americans may end up staying in Tijuana – more than half of those who are now camped out in the city.

She worries that the city is ill-prepared to help them. If Tijuana’s experience with Haitian migrants is any indication, she said, in three months the government will start shutting down the Central American migrant camps. It will then be up to activist groups such as hers to scramble to find them affordable housing, schooling, good job opportunities and skills training.

But, she adds, the widespread attention on the caravan is starting to spark a badly needed discussion about Mexico’s role as a destination for asylum seekers rather than just a transit route for those hoping to get to the United States.

“These types of migrants that are here to stay, we need to discuss that because it’s completely different from what we are used to,” she said. “Now, with this caravan, I think that’s going to start happening.”

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