From “The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border” by Cristina Rathbone
Shocked by the sight of so many people – and particularly of so many children – camping out by the city’s ports of entry to the States, local government agencies repeatedly offered them space in the shelters set up for immigrants. But the people were wary. There were official-looking forms to fill out in the shelters, they’d been told, and copies made of state-issued IDs, and they preferred to stay anonymous out on the street. There was no real way of knowing, they said, exactly who was connected to the people with semiautomatic guns and open-topped jeeps and no visible humanity left in them who’d been terrorizing the small towns and mountainous villages from which they were in flight. Plus, the shelters were all far away. And with no process regulating their access to the border and no limits on their freedom of movement within what was, after all, their own country, they refused to go.
Besides, they told themselves, and me, and anyone who came by the street and asked: They believed in God and if God willed them to cross soon, they would cross soon. And if God willed them to wait, they would wait. And while it was true that the US officials at the checkpoint on the top of the bridge kept turning them away, they did occasionally relent and let a family in to officially ask for asylum. And who was to say when that might happen next?
Only one things was sure, a fruit seller from Guerrero whose entire family had been threatened by a local cartel after he begged for more time to pay their “protection” fees told me: no one on that street was going to risk missing the next time – maybe in an hour, or later that night, or early the next day, or the day after that – when US officials finally open their hearts and let them all in. “Primero Dios,” he told me, wrapping things up. “First, God willing.” And “Si, si, primero Dios,” the small group of men around him replied, echoing their amen down the block.