A young boy and girl walk across the bridge and into Juarez, Mexico as a CBP agent and his partner stand guard to make sure people don't cross into the U.S. illegally using the opposite side of the Paso del Norte Port of Entry between El Paso and Juarez, Nov. 1, 2018.Ivan Pierre Aguirre
As the pastor of a Christian church in West Texas, Eddie Lee doesn’t like to talk politics from the pulpit. His congregation comprises both Republicans and Democrats, some of whom have deep family ties just across the border that El Paso shares with Juarez, Mexico.
But outside the church, Mr. Lee applauds U.S. President Donald Trump’s tough talk on border security and plans to reward the Republican Party with his vote this year.
“I want it to be where there can still be that congenial back and forth for those people that live in Juarez and live in El Paso,” he says. “But we’ve got to have secure borders because of the evil that’s in the world today.”
Mr. Trump has been appealing to that kind of sentiment.
Instead of campaigning on the roaring economy, he has made an immigrant “invasion” the focus of his efforts to get Republicans to the polls on Tuesday, as U.S. voters head into the most hotly contested midterm elections in recent history. The outcome will decide which party controls Congress. Most polls suggest the Democrats are poised to retake the House of Representatives.
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With a caravan of thousands of Central American asylum-seekers winding its way through Mexico to the United States, Mr. Trump has ordered 5,000 troops to the border to build tents and erect kilometres of “beautiful” barbed wire. He has threatened to bar immigrants from claiming asylum unless they present themselves at authorized border crossings and has pledged to prevent babies born to undocumented mothers from gaining U.S. citizenship.
“You think we’re letting that caravan come into this country?” Mr. Trump asked a crowd in Cleveland on Monday, part of a three-state tour to rally his base hours before the election.
While El Paso has not received any of the 4,800 troops that have so far been sent to the border, the region is at the centre of the country’s political battle over immigration. It was ground zero for the Trump administration’s policy this year of separating detained migrant children from their parents, which sparked widespread protests before the practice was blocked by a California judge. More than 1,500 unaccompanied children remain housed in a tent city erected in nearby Tornillo.
The battle over the Texas border is also expected to play a pivotal role in one of the country’s tightest Senate races. Polls show Ted Cruz, the high-profile Republican incumbent from Houston, slightly leading Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic congressman from El Paso.
Mr. O’Rourke, who made frequent appearances at protests at the Tornillo tent city over the summer, has said relatively little about immigration since Mr. Trump began militarizing the border in recent weeks.
But Mr. Cruz, like the President, has made the migrant caravan a main plank of the late stages of his campaign. He accused Mr. O’Rourke of supporting illegal immigration after one of his staffers donated goods to a Catholic charity helping migrants released from immigration custody in El Paso.
Meanwhile, with the caravan still hundreds of miles away, El Paso continues to grapple with the fallout of the country’s political gridlock over immigration. The city’s shelters are overflowing with migrants recently released from custody. Hundreds of immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba remain camped out on a pedestrian bridge in Juarez as immigration officials sort through a backlog of asylum claims that may only worsen after Tuesday’s vote.
"Trump should be helping people. He shouldn’t shut down the process of immigration,” said Roselia Velazquez, who arrived at the border in Juarez on Saturday from Guatemala with her eight-year-old daughter. “This is a country that helps people – that’s how the world views the United States.”
At home, Ms. Velazquez figured Mr. Trump’s tough talk about border security was just empty threats and that the large caravan she had heard about would be long gone by the time she arrived at the border. So she was surprised to find herself at the back of a week-long line to cross into El Paso, with the number “176” written on her forearm in black marker – border officials' makeshift system for marking an asylum-seeker’s place in line.
Surrounded by huge piles of blankets, clothing, food and Halloween candy donated by charity groups on both sides of the border, Ms. Velazquez has started wondering if it would be better to just return home, where she struggled in poverty but has three children she was hoping to bring over to the United States once she got settled.
“The [immigration] process is a lot harder here than I’d imagined,” she said through tears, as her daughter wiped her face with a tissue.
As she spoke, locals travelling back and forth to Juarez to shop stopped to take photos. Others brought wheelbarrows filled with sandwiches and hot soup or handed out Catholic prayers.
The deep ties between El Paso and Juarez have helped turn the city’s politics blue in one of the country’s most Republican states.
But while El Paso has tended to elect Democrats, the city remains conservative in many ways. When it comes to the border, many voters here say they are caught between their town’s strong cultural and economic bonds with Juarez and their support for Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.
That debate has become a point of tension within many families.
Vicente Rodriguez’s grandparents migrated from Mexico and support allowing the migrant caravan to cross the border. They have urged him to keep up with the family’s tradition of voting Democrat. But Mr. Rodriguez, 23, who is midway through an eight-year military service obligation, believes the United States should make it harder for people to cross the border illegally.
“My grandparents say: ‘I hope [the migrants] will get help.’ I say help them, too, but the country you’re living in now is the one you should support,” he said. “When it comes down to it, you have to choose between family and culture or the way the system should work.”