A short walk south of the U.S.-Mexico border, volunteers give haircuts to migrants at the Kino Border Initiative shelter.
It’s a little less busy here two months into President Donald Trump’s administration, and shelter spokesperson Yohana Oviedo recalls the first day he returned to office.
“It was one of the most painful moments,” Oviedo said.
Many migrants whose long-awaited appointments for asylum got canceled upon Trump’s inauguration are still waiting at shelters in Nogales, Sonora. Other new residents at the shelter, which provides migrants with a place to stay and connects them with legal and medical aid, are recent deportees from the United States. Many migrants who have been denied asylum appointments since Trump took office have left Nogales for other cities in Mexico to try to work and wait until a better time to try to cross the border.
But the asylum seekers who remain at the border are holding out hope. Many are escaping violence, like Julio, who is staying at a different shelter in Nogales, Sonora, and asked to use his first name because he is fleeing his home in the Mexican state of Michoacán after being kidnapped and tortured. He has been in Nogales for five months.
“My plan is to wait and see if there’s a solution,” Julio said.
That limbo state reflects what many migrants have felt in the two months since Trump took office. Many asylum seekers are in debt to smugglers, are escaping violence at home and have few other options than to bide their time in Mexico until there are policy changes at the border.
On this warm, sunny day, at the Casa de la Misericordia y de Todas las Naciones shelter where Julio is staying, a few small children in school uniforms wander around brightly painted grounds.
The shelter in the hilly east side of Nogales, Sonora is a little over half full, director Alma Angélica Macías said. The 60 or so people staying here is less than their usual amount, but migrants keep coming.
She said two families from El Salvador have arrived at the shelter since Trump took office, plus a family from Honduras, and families from Mexico — where cartel violence continues with intensity in some states.
“Some have left, others have arrived,” Macías said.
Trump’s presidency won’t last forever, and many of the migrants staying here have no choice but to hope for a change, she said.
Some of those residents were packed at a picnic table under the shade of a large tree in the courtyard of the shelter, where a group from the University of Arizona led an activity to create drawings reimagining this area if there were no border. The migrants filled pages with stick figure families reunited and cars crossing freely.
But the reality of the border hit shelter resident Jessica hard two months ago.
Jessica asked to use her first name to protect her safety. She says she left her home country, El Salvador, after being threatened by a gang for not bringing food to members they had in hiding.
After leaving her daughter and granddaughter at the border of Mexico and Guatemala for safety reasons, the 49-year-old and her husband then set off in a caravan on foot. They walked for days.
“It was very painful, we suffered,” Jessica said.
They boarded a train north, headed to the border for a CBP One appointment set for Jan. 18, two days before Trump took office and canceled asylum appointments.
But they were detained by Mexican authorities on their way to Nogales. She missed her appointment, which would have been one of the very last, by less than two hours. When they arrived late, she cried.
“It hurt a lot,” she said.
For the next few months at least, she’s going to wait here, she said. She’s hopeful that the president’s border policy will soften as time goes on.
Like Jessica, Julio and his family aren’t leaving the border, despite the Trump administration closing the door on asylum seekers like them.
“More than anything, it’s for my kids,” Julio said. “So they can grow up somewhere safer.”
That place, he said, will be the United States.
