Dinnertime approaches at Vida Plena Corazón Contento soup kitchen and migrant shelter in Hermosillo. While a noodle soup simmers in an industrial-sized pot in the kitchen, Omar Cabrera washes a car out back.
Soon, people in need from the community will line up in the street for Styrofoam cups filled with soup. But for now, it’s just residents like Cabrera here, mostly migrants from other countries who are passing through Hermosillo on their way to or from the border.
Cabrera has been at the shelter for about a year as he attempts to seek asylum in the United States, after fleeing extortion in Honduras. Now, he helps out around the shelter.
“Lately, it’s been flooded with people who have returned [from the border],” he said, taking a break from the car. “People have been coming back and don’t know what to do.”
After the Trump administration closed the door on asylum seekers last week, thousands of people are left in Mexico with no clear path forward. Some find themselves here in Hermosillo, a city of close to 1 million about three hours south of the Arizona border. The government has converted a large gym into a shelter and reception center on the south side of the city in preparation for the influx.
'It’s disheartening. No one knows what to do'
The smaller, nonprofit Vida Plena Corazón Contento shelter consists of two sleeping spaces and a kitchen in a squat, concrete building. Right now, it’s housing around 30 people, Cabrera said, including children. While students play outside during recess at the school across the street, the children of the migrants who are staying here play on the shelter steps on the other side of a tall chain-link fence.
Cabrera finally had an appointment to claim asylum scheduled for last Sunday. But it was cancelled when Trump shut the Biden-era CBP One app down on his first day in office. The app allowed asylum seekers to make the case for an appointment at a point of entry before arriving at the border.
“It’s disheartening," Cabrera said. “No one knows what to do.”
Some migrants just stay here at the shelter for a night or two before heading elsewhere. Some go to Mexico City to regroup or find work. Others go back to the border to try again. Still others are long-term residents, like himself, and like Raquel Mujica, who has been at the shelter for eight months with her husband and two kids.
She cried when Trump’s executive orders came down last week.
Mujica and her family left Venezuela for Colombia when she faced a high-risk pregnancy with her younger son, now a curly-haired toddler who babbles by her side in an oversized yellow t-shirt. She said he wouldn't have survived if they had stayed in Venezuela, where health care infrastructure is crumbling and those who don’t support the ruling party can experience violence. She said, more than anything, she wants to get the rest of her family out of Venezuela.
“There are families that want to enter [the United States] to have stability and not suffer anymore,” Mujica said through tears. “We don’t want this. This isn’t a life.”
During her time in Mexico, she and her family have experienced theft and kidnapping. Now, they’re out of money and trying to figure out what to do next.
Migrants may turn to dangerous smugglers
Cristina Hernández, who studies human rights and migration in Mexico City, said people stuck in similar situations could turn to more dangerous options to cross the border, like hiring human traffickers to smuggle them across.
“[Smugglers] will be very clever to look for places that they can enter to the United States, and I think they are going to sell that to a lot of people that are waiting,” Hernández said.
Historically, working with smugglers has come at a great risk to migrants. Criminal organizations often charge migrants high prices to bring them across the border in dangerous ways. According to the nonprofit Humane Borders, a humanitarian group that tracks migrant deaths along the border, more than 4,000 migrants have died in Arizona’s southern desert region since 2020. That number only accounts for the remains that have been recovered in the vast, sparsely populated Sonoran Desert.
For Mujica, the uncertainty of what comes next for her family is crushing. She wants safety for her two boys. Her older son is 9 and has lost years of schooling. While we talked, he stopped by and put a 50 peso bill in her hand, a little over $2.
“He tells me, ‘mami, I want to work.’ That’s not the mentality a child should have,” Mujica said. “I don’t want my son at this age to know anything about work. I just want him to be professional, to be a good person, to help others.”
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