What Life Is Like in the Town Where Trump Is Actually Building His Wall
January 8, 2019Victor Medina-Razo wants to shave before we take his picture. He walks across the sunlit courtyard of Casa del Migrante in Juarez and into the cinder block bathroom. With a 99-cent razor and soap, he expertly slices the bristly five o’clock shadow he’s grown over the last week, leaving only his preferred goatee. He puts on a tough guy face when my friend Zach shoots his portraits. After a few minutes, Victor waves his hand. That’s enough.
It is late September and still over 90 degrees most days in El Paso and Juarez. Victor has just arrived at Casa del Migrante—the only migrant shelter in all of Juarez, a sprawling, dusty, and polluted city of some 1.3 million souls—after an eight-day journey. It began in the Sonoran Desert, which Victor walked through to cross the border with a handful of other migrants. They walked the desert for 14 hours, living off bottled water, cans of tuna, and crackers. In the early morning light they came upon a ranch. The dogs began to bark and soon, six men on motorcycles arrived and arrested Victor and the others. They were taken to a jail, then another jail, a prison maybe. Victor isn’t sure. He signed paperwork he didn’t really understand and was taken back to the jail, or the prison, whichever it was. Then he was put in a van and taken back to Mexico, to Juarez. Now, he is at Casa del Migrante, deciding what to do next.
It is a simple decision.
“I will go back,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
Victor’s determination to seek a better life in the United States, born of economic desperation, is typical of migrants. Like many, he wants to cross the border not just for himself but for his family: If Victor’s son is to achieve his goal of becoming an aeronautical engineer, Victor will have to live and work in the US and send money home. This dynamic predates Donald Trump, but what has changed since—and especially in the last six months—is made apparent by the brief timeline of the story of Victor’s most recent crossing. Where Casa del Migrante used to see 30 or 40 migrants dropped off a few times a week by Mexican immigration authorities, the shelter is now seeing 100 or so. On Monday, more than 200 milled about the shelter, playing soccer and basketball.
Trump’s detention machine is bigger, faster and stronger than ever before. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding 44,000 people in detention each day on average, a record high. But the agency plans to do even more in 2019 and has asked Congress to provide more funds in this year’s budget so ICE can detain a historic high of 52,000 people each day.
The increased capacity of the machine is evident across the border as well, and the stressors on the system have been exacerbated recently by a surge in Central American migrant families seeking asylum here. Federal courtrooms were packed over the summer with first-time, nonviolent offenders—many of them those same Central American families—arrested for illegally crossing. The migrants prosecuted under "zero tolerance"—the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border illegally instead of just those with a criminal history—continue to fill up jails and other local holding facilities as well as private prisons across the country.
The consequences of these policies are evident everywhere you look. At El Paso’s Fort Bliss, construction has been ongoing for months on a facility there. Over the summer, ICE put out a request for information from contractors on construction of a facility or facilities that could hold 12,000 migrants on a military base. (It's unclear how many of these beds will ultimately be at Fort Bliss.) Just outside the city’s downtown a portion of Trump’s famous wall is being built—against the wishes of many in the community. The four-mile, $22-million wall is being erected alongside the railroad tracks and the river that separates El Paso from Juarez, one of the most heavily patrolled border crossings in the entire world.
“Of course, it’s completely unnecessary,” Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada told me Monday.
All of it—the effects of the deportation machine, the wall, the troops sent in on Trump’s orders, the border guards patrolling in riot gear at the busiest crossing between El Paso and Juarez—feels like Washington forcing its policies on El Paso from 2,000 miles away.
“There’s no chaos at the border,” said El Paso County Commissioner Vincent Perez. “No one from the federal government came here and asked us how we feel about these policies.”
While Trump’s hardline anti-immigration policies provoke debate in El Paso and DC, those who are hoping to cross the border illegally care less about the broader issues than they do about the pressures in their own lives that cause them to migrate.
For almost two years Victor Medina-Razo lived in America. He was one of more than 100 Mexicans working at a tree farm in Oregon run, Victor said, by two dozen white Americans working in the office who all knew their laborers were undocumented immigrants. He lived with another man in a garage that had been converted to an apartment and worked six 16-hour days a week. On Sundays he ate menudo with the other workers and walked to a nearby school where he ran laps around the track. For 18 months this was his only leisure activity. He earned $7.35 an hour and every dollar that didn’t go to rent or food went back to his wife and child in Mexico. He’d promised her he wouldn’t miss Christmas that year, 2003, so he went home.
Victor had earned enough money in Oregon to buy land and build a home in Guerrero. With the leftovers he took his wife on a vacation to Acapulco. Then Victor went back to work as a sound engineer, rigging up PA systems for parties and events in the nearby towns. But he couldn’t earn enough. His son was getting close to finishing high school and wanted to go to college so he could become an aeronautical engineer. Victor knew he’d have to go back to the United States to earn enough money to make that dream become a reality.
He saved up his money to pay a smuggler about $2,000 to guide him across the desert. What was a journey of three days and three nights when Victor first came to the US now only took 14 hours—they had a better route. Victor’s goal was to get to a town and make contact with a family member who had promised him a job at a car wash in Colorado. Victor would make $14 an hour there, at least twice what he made in Mexico.
But that dream began to fade when the dogs at the ranch started barking. It died when the men on the motorcycles showed up and arrested Victor and the others. He cries when he tells this part of the story. He was so hopeful.
But there is life in the dream. Victor wipes his eyes and says that the family member in Colorado will help him get across this time. Someone will be there waiting for him—where he does not yet know—when he crosses the invisible line. This time, he won’t fail.
“I know God is ahead of me, and with his help I know I am going to cross.”
Justin Glawe is an independent journalist based in Dallas. He writes a newsletter, Where Do We Go From Here.
Zach Nelson is a photojournalist and videographer based in Brooklyn.
