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HOW SHIFTING U.S. POLICIES LED TO ONE OF THE DEADLIEST INCIDENTS
INVOLVING IMMIGRANTS IN MEXICO’S HISTORY  
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Perla Trevizo
May 1, 2024
ProPublica
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_ A year ago, 40 men were killed in a detention center fire in Ciudad
Juárez, Mexico. A ProPublica-Texas Tribune examination shows that
landmark shifts in U.S. border policies helped sow the seeds of a
tragedy. _

Bodies of those who died during the fire inside a Mexican detention
facility were laid in a parking lot outside the offices of the
National Migration Institute near the U.S.-Mexico border in Ciudad
Juárez on March 27, 2023. The fire killed 40 immigrants a,
Credit:Paul Ratje

 

Stefan Arango, a 31-year-old Venezuelan husband and father, felt
immediately nauseated by the smells of sweat, urine and feces when
Mexican guards ordered him into the cinder block cell in the border
city of Ciudad Juárez. The tile floor was strewn with trash, and
several men inside lay on flimsy mats that were incongruously covered
in rainbow-colored vinyl. The windows were so small that they didn’t
allow in much light or air. And, perhaps mercifully, they were so high
that the men couldn’t see they were just a short stroll from El
Paso, Texas, the destination they had risked everything to reach.

It was March 27, 2023, and Arango had been detained by Mexican
authorities who had agreed to help the United States slow the record
numbers of migrants crossing the border. A guard allowed Arango to
make a one-minute call to his younger sister, who’d come to Juárez
with him and whom he’d left waiting at a budget hotel nearby. She
sobbed, worried that he was going to be deported back to Venezuela.

He couldn’t tell exactly how many men were inside the temporary
detention center, maybe more than 100, but new detainees were being
brought in while others were being taken away. Those milling around
him were grumbling. They said they hadn’t been given water for
hours. They hadn’t been given enough food. No one was giving them
answers. Why were they being held? What was Mexico going to do with
them?

At about 9:20 that night, some of the men began banging on the metal
bars that ran along the front wall of the cell, demanding to be
released. One of them reached up and yanked down a surveillance
camera; another climbed the door and pulled down a second camera.
Others started to pile the sleeping mats against the bars until they
blocked the guard’s view.

At least one of them flicked a lighter. Within minutes, the cell was
engulfed in flames and smoke. Arango pleaded with a guard: “Brother,
don’t leave us here.” But the guard turned his back, saying,
“Good luck, dude,” as he fled.

Arango rushed to a bathroom, now filled with dozens of others, all
screaming for help. He turned the shower on to wet his hoodie,
thinking it would protect him from the heat. Then the lights went out.
Everything stung — his eyes, his nose, his skin. He sat himself down
and whispered a prayer. The detainees’ cries stopped, and he could
hear the sounds of bodies hitting the floor.

When he opened his eyes, he was wrapped in a mylar blanket, lying in
the parking lot amid rows of bodies. Arango pulled the cover off his
face, gasped for air and raised his hand, hoping to be seen. He heard
a woman’s voice shout, “Someone lives among the dead!”

Forty men were killed and more than two dozen were injured in one of
the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history.
Investigators put the blame for the incident on the migrants who set
the blaze and the guards who failed to help them. The United States
urged immigrants to take heed of the tragedy and pursue legal methods
for entering the U.S., without acknowledging that some of those caught
in the fire were attempting to do just that when they were detained.
However, an examination by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
underscores that it was the foreseen and foreseeable result of
landmark shifts in U.S. border policies over the last decade, by which
the Trump and Biden administrations put the bulk of the responsibility
for detaining and deterring staggering numbers of immigrants from
around the world onto a Mexican government that’s had trouble
keeping its own people safe.

The bodies in the Juárez parking lot were not only evidence of the
tragic consequences of U.S. policies, but they were also graphic
representations of the violence and economic upheaval raging across
the Americas. The dead had traveled there from Guatemala, Honduras, El
Salvador, Colombia and, like Arango, Venezuela. Over the past decade,
growing numbers of people from these countries have traversed Mexico
and crossed the U.S. border to file claims for asylum that take years
to resolve and allow them to live and work in the United States during
that time.

When first running for president, Donald Trump used the scale of the
arrivals to jolt American politics, vowing to build a wall between the
United States and Mexico. As president, he effectively turned Mexico
into a wall, pressuring that country’s president to take
unprecedented steps that required nearly everyone applying for asylum
to wait there as their cases went through U.S. immigration courts. And
citing the pandemic, he ordered border officials to quickly return
immigrants to Mexico or to their home countries under a little-known
section of the public health code — Title 42 — that allows the
government to limit the numbers of people allowed into the country in
an emergency.

Democrats denounced the measures as inhumane, and early in his
presidency, Joe Biden moved to loosen those policies, only to keep
versions of some when the rising numbers of migrants coming into the
United States started to cause political repercussions for him and his
party.

 

The result was chaos on both sides of the border, although as numerous
experts had predicted, the worst of it unfolded in Mexico. Squalid
tent encampments sprouted in Mexican border cities that didn’t have
sufficient shelters and other resources. Frustrations among migrants
fueled protests that blocked major roads and bridges. Mexican
officials cracked down harder by rounding up immigrants and packing
them into already overcrowded detention centers.

A Biden administration official would not comment on the role U.S.
policies played in the fire, except to say that it had taken place in
a facility that “was not under the jurisdiction of the U.S.
government.” A White House spokesperson expressed condolences to the
families of those who died — but also didn’t answer questions
about the policies that contributed to the incident and are still in
place. Instead, he pointed to the ways that Biden had expanded legal
pathways for immigration, calling it the largest such effort in
decades.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, was among many
legislators who’d warned Washington, and specifically Biden, that
such a tragedy was inevitable. “The whole system in Mexico is partly
a creation in response to initiatives that the United States began,”
he said in an interview. “That’s why we should care, because we
bear some responsibility.”

How We Got Here

Immigrants, many from Venezuela, sleep by the entrance of an
international bridge that separates Ciudad Juárez from El Paso,
Texas, as local residents walk by. Some of them were waiting in the
border city while trying to get an appointment to enter the U.S. using
the government app CBP One. Credit:Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The
Texas Tribune

The dangers of outsourcing immigration enforcement to Mexico were
clear to experts and political leaders on both sides of the border
long before the Juárez detention center erupted in flames.

“Mexico is simply not safe for Central American asylum
seekers,” wrote the union
[[link removed]] that
represents the U.S. government’s asylum officers as part of a
lawsuit against Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program in 2019.
“Despite professing a commitment to protecting the rights of people
seeking asylum, the Mexican government has proven unable to provide
this protection.”

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reported that year that
migrants were being held in filthy, overcrowded detention centers, at
times without sufficient food and water. Those conditions, the
commission said, were spurring immigrants to protest, including by
setting fires. Prior to the fatal Juárez fire, at least 13 such
incidents had occurred at detention facilities across the country,
including at the one in Juárez. The earlier incident there occurred
in the summer of 2019 and was started in a similar manner, when
disgruntled migrants set their sleeping mats on fire. About 60
detainees escaped unharmed.

The Trump administration rejected the warnings, saying that the system
was clogged with meritless claims
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turning away people who didn’t qualify for protection made it easier
to address the needs of those who did. The Trump campaign didn’t
respond to questions about the impact of the former president’s
policies, except to say it did a better job than Biden of keeping
migrants safe by removing the incentives for them to make the journey
to the border. In a statement, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that
under a second Trump term, the message would be, “DO NOT COME. You
will not be allowed to stay, and you will be promptly deported.”

Asylum is a thornier issue for Biden because of divisions within his
own party, with some advocating for a more generous system and others
worried that the existing backlog makes the system virtually
impossible to fix. As a result, his presidency has been marked by
moves aimed at placating both sides.

On his first day in office, Biden suspended Trump’s “Remain in
Mexico” policy — officially called the Migrant Protection
Protocols — which he’d said had “slammed the door shut in the
face of families fleeing persecution and violence” and created
humanitarian suffering in Mexico. And he began rolling back the Title
42 COVID-19 restrictions by exempting unaccompanied minors from the
ban. All at once, a border that had nearly been shut to asylum seekers
had a new opening at a time when historic numbers of immigrants were
on the move globally. Among them were nearly eight million
Venezuelans, fleeing an authoritarian government and a collapsed
economy, in one of the largest displacements in the world.

Within weeks, the numbers of people attempting to cross the southern
border reached levels that hadn’t been seen in decades
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Biden reached out to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
for help. After denouncing the conditions that migrant families had
been forced to endure in Mexico, the Biden administration began
pressuring that government to take them back. “We’re trying to
work out now with Mexico their willingness to take more of those
families back,” Biden said at a news conference
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adding later, “I think we’re going to see that change. They should
all be going back.”

On March 19, 2021, his administration announced the U.S. would send
2.5 million COVID-19 vaccines to Mexico. That same day, López Obrador
declared that he’d close Mexico’s southern border to nonessential
traffic, citing the pandemic.

Immigrants continued to come nonetheless. By the end of Biden’s
first year in office, the Border Patrol reported that encounters with
immigrants had soared to 1.7 million, compared with 859,000 in 2019.
The numbers rose further, to 2.2 million, in 2022, the year that Biden
announced plans to lift Title 42 entirely. Republican governors in 24
states immediately filed suit against the administration to stop the
move. And one of those governors, Greg Abbott, began sending busloads
of people who’d crossed the border into Texas to cities controlled
by Democrats, including New York, Chicago and Denver.

Biden, faced with a political crisis on top of a humanitarian one,
responded with an array of measures. While fighting to overturn Title
42 in court, his administration expanded its reach to allow U.S.
officials to immediately expel to Mexico Venezuelan, Haitian, Cuban
and Nicaraguan migrants. He required asylum seekers to use an app, CBP
One, to make appointments for entry to the United States and
authorized border officials to turn back those who hadn’t done so.
He also barred some people from seeking refuge in the U.S. if they
didn’t first apply for asylum in a country they passed through en
route.

President Joe Biden speaks with Border Patrol agents in El Paso,
Texas, on Jan. 8, 2023. The visit followed an announcement by the
administration to expand the use of Title 42 to include Cubans,
Nicaraguans and Haitians. Credit:Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

In a nod to immigrant advocates, he paired that move with a program
that allowed about 30,000 people from the countries that were newly
affected by Title 42 to apply for temporary humanitarian visas from
home, as long as they passed a background check and had a financial
sponsor in the U.S. He also opened centers in some Latin American
countries from which migrants could apply to come legally. But none of
it seemed to have a lasting effect on making his party happy,
deterring new migrants from arriving at the border or keeping them
safe.

In January 2023, two months before the fire, nearly 80 Democrats in
Congress, including Grijalva, wrote Biden a letter to say that they
remained concerned.

“As the administration well knows, current conditions in Mexico —
the primary transit country — cannot ensure safety for the families
seeking refuge in the United States,” the letter read. “We urge
the Biden Administration to engage quickly and meaningfully with
members of Congress to find ways to adequately address migration to
our southern border that do not include violating asylum law and our
international obligations.”

Days before the fire, the Congressional Research Service echoed that
warning, saying that the buildup of immigrants in Mexico had
“strained Mexican government resources and placed migrants at risk
of harm.”

Maureen Meyer, a vice president at the Washington Office on Latin
America, said, “There’s an enormous human cost to prioritizing
enforcement over human wellbeing and safety. The fire is probably one
of the most egregious examples of what could happen.”

Strips of paper bearing the names of the 40 men killed in the fire are
tied with marigolds to the fence surrounding the immigration detention
center where they died. Credit:Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The
Texas Tribune

A City on Edge

Arango had fled his country a decade ago because, he said, supporters
of the country’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro had
threatened him for campaigning on behalf of the opposition. He also
found it impossible to make a living for himself and his two children
on the roughly $40 he earned monthly as a soccer player and coach in
Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city. He initially moved to
Colombia but left there after struggling to find gainful employment
and moved again to Bolivia, where he met a woman whom he married.

In early 2023, Arango was still playing soccer, and there were signs
his wife might be pregnant. He’d been hearing upbeat stories from
Venezuelan friends who had migrated to the United States and were
settling into new jobs. Because the United States had broken relations
with the Maduro government, Venezuelans did not have to clear the same
immigration hurdles as other nationals. They were largely shielded
from deportation and had not been subjected to Title 42.

Arango’s sister, Stefany, had a boyfriend who’d made it across the
border and gotten a construction job in Austin. Arango believed he
could do the same.

Stefan Arango, who survived the fatal fire, is among nearly eight
million Venezuelans who have fled an authoritarian government and a
collapsed economy in the past decade. Credit:Paul Ratje for
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

In about 36 grueling days — across hundreds of miles of inhospitable
terrain — Arango and Stefany, 25, arrived in Juárez in mid-March
2023, riding on top of a cargo train. They found themselves in the
middle of a city on edge. Juárez, with 1.5 million residents, had
long been more of a way station for immigrants headed to the United
States than a final destination. But the U.S. gateway that had been
open to Venezuelans was now shut. They were subject to the same asylum
restrictions as Central Americans. They couldn’t cross the border
without an appointment, and there were only about 80 appointments
available each day through El Paso.

Juárez’s shelters and hotels were filled beyond capacity, and
thousands of migrants set up camps under bridges and along the banks
of the Rio Grande. They crowded busy intersections and shopping
districts, begging for food, money and work. Many complained that they
had been robbed by Mexican criminal organizations and harassed by the
police and immigration agents. The longer they stayed, the more
frustrated they and the city struggling to accommodate them became.

The day Arango and his sister arrived, hundreds of migrants blocked
one of the bridges that connected Juárez with El Paso and pleaded
with U.S. officials to be let in. The United States deployed officers
in riot gear and raised a curtain of concertina wire to keep them out,
while Mexico used the national guard to disperse them on the other
side. Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar seemed to sum up his city’s
sentiment the next day. “The truth is that our patience is running
low,” he said. “We’ve reached a tipping point.”

Migrants wait in Ciudad Juárez alongside a barbed-wire fence that
separates the city from El Paso, Texas. Frustrated with the low
numbers of people who can get appointments through the CBP One app,
some of those stranded in border cities decide not to wait and instead
turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents. Credit:Paul Ratje for
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

The city went on heightened alert and began putting more immigrants in
detention. During the first three months of 2023, officials in Juárez
conducted at least 110 sweeps around the city — almost as many as
they had done in the entire previous year. On the day of the fire,
Arango had left his sister at the hotel to look for work and buy food.
He was with a handful of other immigrants walking near the border
fence when they were picked up by Mexican immigration agents and taken
to the city’s only immigration detention facility.

Built in 1995, the facility sits on the banks of the Rio Grande, which
forms the border between Mexico and the United States. The detention
center was divided into two cells about 100 feet from each other. One
was completely bare and was meant to hold no more than 80 men, while
the other had bunk beds and could hold up to 25 women. Two former
detainees said the men’s cell had four toilets and as many showers.

Alis Santos López, a 42-year-old Honduran, had been held in the
facility for two days by the time Arango arrived — and according to
Mexican law, which called for him to be released after 36 hours, he
shouldn’t have been. Unlike Arango, he wasn’t hoping to start a
new life in the United States. He was trying to get back to the life
he’d already established. Santos had worked for 10 years as a roofer
in New Jersey but was deported at the end of 2022 back to his native
Honduras.

The economic hardships and violence that had pushed him to abandon his
country before seemed to have worsened. The municipality where his
family lived, Catacamas, was among the most violent in Honduras. When
he and his wife discovered men lurking around their house one night,
he thought they’d targeted him because he’d come home with money
that he’d earned in the United States.

Within weeks, he’d set out again for New Jersey, this time with his
wife, Delmis Jiménez; three children; daughter-in-law; and grandson
in tow. The group said they had been robbed and extorted throughout
the journey and had run out of money in southern Mexico. Santos went
on without them, promising that he’d send for them. But Juárez
officials at the local bus station intercepted him shortly after he
arrived.

Alex Santos Jiménez, 20, from Honduras, shows a photo of his father,
Alis Santos López, who was detained by Mexican immigration officials
at the bus station in Ciudad Juárez and taken to the immigration
detention center two days before the deadly fire. Credit:Paul Ratje
for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Rodolfo Collazo, then 52, was one of two federal immigration agents
and three private security guards on duty at the facility on the night
of the fire. Trained as a computer engineer, he was still relatively
new to the job and had taken it because he couldn’t find anything
better in his field. It paid under $10,000 a year, but Collazo was
able to cobble together enough to make ends meet by working a second
job with a ride sharing company.

Records from Mexican prosecutors’ investigation into the fire, court
testimony and interviews, including with officials who worked at the
detention facility, indicate that it was woefully ill equipped to hold
immigrants for long periods. Not only were there insufficient
accommodations for the detainees to eat and sleep, the cell lacked
basic safety equipment like working fire extinguishers and smoke
detectors and had no emergency exits. Scuffles and hunger strikes
among detainees were not uncommon.

About 6 feet tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, Collazo was sometimes
torn between his sympathy with the immigrants’ plight and the
responsibilities of his job. They’d sometimes complain that they’d
run out of basic supplies like soap and shampoo, and he’d go out and
buy them when he had a little extra money. On the night of the fire,
he noticed that the detainees seemed more agitated than normal, and he
tried to make small talk to calm them. But he was summoned away from
the facility to transport a couple of Salvadoran children — brothers
ages 10 and 14 — to a different facility for minors.

When he returned about half an hour later, thick black smoke was
already billowing out of the building. The guards were scrambling
outside and told him they couldn’t find the keys to the men’s
cell. Collazo ran into the building but felt his eyes sting and his
lungs fill with smoke. “I’ve never felt anything like it,” he
said. “It was horrible.” Barely able to see or breathe, he turned
back around. (In a surveillance camera video taken from inside the
detention center at the time of the fire, which was made public as
part of an investigation by La Verdad, El Paso Matters and Lighthouse
Reports
[[link removed]],
an agent is heard saying that she had told the detainees she was not
going to open the cell.)

Firefighters descended on the scene and managed to fight through the
flames, break into the holding cell and attempt to rescue those
inside. Paramedics rushed to care for those who were unconscious. The
dead, including Santos, were laid together in four neat rows on the
cold asphalt outside the building.

A Mexican soldier saw one of the bodies move. It was Arango.

Uncertain Future

To mark the first anniversary of the fire, there was a march in
downtown El Paso. Across the border in Juárez, residents hung mylar
blankets on the fence surrounding the detention facility to honor each
of the immigrants who died there and celebrated a special Mass at Our
Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral. “It’s a tremendous tragedy,” El
Paso Bishop Mark Seitz said, citing the loss of “40 young, aspiring
lives.” But the greater tragedy, he said, would be to “forget the
persons and families that continue to suffer.”

The names of the migrants killed in the 2023 fire, including Alis
Santos López, are written on mylar blankets on the fence surrounding
the detention center that burned to mark the one-year anniversary of
the incident. Credit:Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

By then, the Mexican government had closed the Juárez facility and
temporarily suspended operations at 33 others across the country. The
head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, which enforces the
country’s immigration laws, was charged criminally with failure to
perform his duties, although he remains free and on the job. The
institute didn’t respond to requests for comment. Agency officials
have previously defended their treatment of immigrants in their
custody.

The “Remain in Mexico” policy and Title 42 have been lifted, but
Mexico still stands as a critical arm of U.S. immigration enforcement.
With poll after poll showing that Americans consider securing the
border a priority as the country prepares for this year’s
presidential elections, the Biden administration continues to require
asylum seekers to use an app to gain entry to the United States.
It’s also fighting in court to be allowed to bar some people from
seeking asylum if they hadn’t asked for refuge in countries they
passed through en route to the United States. That rule is significant
because nearly every asylum applicant has crossed through another
country — especially Mexico — before reaching the U.S.

Stephanie Leutert, an immigration expert and former Biden
administration official, said she’s not surprised that the fire
hasn’t forced the administration to reverse course. “If migrant
deaths would lead to policy change, we would have changed policies a
long time ago," she said.

Seitz, who advocates for immigrants, lamented the same thing. “I
wonder how many deaths it’s going to take,” he said in an
interview. “Will there be a time when our country wakes up? What
will it take for us to recognize that we need to head on a different
course?”

Meanwhile, the repercussions of those policies continue to play out in
the lives of those affected by the fire.

At a federal prison about 10 miles from where he once worked, Collazo
is now the one behind bars, along with two Venezuelan immigrants and
several of his former co-workers. He’s awaiting trial for
involuntary manslaughter and causing injury to 67 men for his role in
the fire. He says he is not guilty. If convicted, he could spend the
rest of his life in prison. His wife, María Trujillo, and children
have sold their cars and borrowed money to pay his legal fees, which
so far exceed $50,000. Trujillo, 53, has begun cleaning houses and
selling tamales. Meanwhile, his daughter, Tania Collazo, 35, works
extra shifts at a local hospital as a medical assistant. She even
traveled to Mexico City last year to appeal for help from López
Obrador.

Because they have so little faith in the system, they often do some of
the investigating themselves by speaking to other former officials and
detainees who might have information that could help Rodolfo
Collazo’s case.

“Every day I fall asleep and wake up with the agony of what if the
system fails again,” Tania Collazo said. “He’s never getting
out.”

First image: Mexican immigration agent Rodolfo Collazo’s wife,
María Trujillo, left, and his daughter Tania Collazo say they try to
stay positive, but the longer he’s behind bars, the harder it is to
remain hopeful. Second image: A photo of Rodolfo Collazo sits atop a
table at their home in Ciudad Juárez. Credit:Paul Ratje for
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Arango spent about three weeks in an induced coma in a hospital in
Mexico City after a respiratory arrest. He’d suffered carbon
monoxide poisoning and severe damage to his lungs, kidneys and throat.
During his monthslong recovery, his moods were as erratic as a ride on
a roller coaster — giddy one moment to be alive, distraught to the
point of trying to put his fist through a wall when the doctor laid
out the complicated medical challenges that stood in the way of his
recovery while his wife struggled back in Bolivia on her own. A
devastating low point for both of them came when she miscarried their
baby, a boy, while Arango was hospitalized.

In September of last year, the Biden administration allowed Arango and
his wife, along with others who survived the fire, to enter the United
States for humanitarian reasons. The couple traveled by bus to Austin.
His sister had already made it there. When Arango, tall and slim, saw
her, he smiled and wrapped her in a long, tight hug.

While he said he is thankful to be alive, there are still times he
falls into a deep depression. “I’m still working on finding myself
again,” he said. “I ask God for time to get back to the Stefan I
was before. A better Stefan.”

Arango looks back to Mexico one last time before he crosses into the
United States. Arango, along with his wife and others who survived the
fire, were granted permission to enter the United States for
humanitarian reasons. Credit:Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas
Tribune

 

First image: Arango places his hands on a Bible he traveled with
through seven countries and the Darién Gap, a stretch of jungle
between Panama and Colombia. As the smoke and flames spread through
the cell inside the detention center, Arango said, he fell to the
floor and prayed. Second image: Arango and his wife, Patricia Moyano,
from Bolivia, send voice messages to friends while waiting inside the
Greyhound bus terminal in El Paso before traveling to
Austin. Credit:Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Jiménez didn’t know her husband had died in the fire until three
days after, on her birthday. Santos’ body was sent back to Honduras.
His family had returned from southern Mexico to receive it and bury
him near their home in Catacamas. Jiménez picked a silver-colored
coffin and wore a T-shirt with, “You will always live in my
heart,” emblazoned on the front.

“All this suffering,” she thought during the ceremony. “For
what?”

His death, however, didn’t deter her and her family from leaving
Honduras again. She knew there was a chance that they might meet the
same fate trying to get to the United States, but she said she felt
even less safe staying in Honduras. So the family set out again,
riding buses and walking along railroad tracks, trying to get an
appointment through the CBP One app, not understanding they had to be
in northern or central Mexico in order to use it. Their feet blistered
and their bodies covered with bug bites, they slept in abandoned
buildings or on the porches of people who took pity on their plight.

A Mexican nonprofit sent them money for bus tickets to Mexico City,
where they continued trying their luck on CBP One. Eventually, after a
month, they got an appointment, for last November, the day before
Thanksgiving. And they were off to Juárez.

Jiménez, her long black hair tied back in a ponytail, stood atop the
dividing line between Juárez and El Paso with her children and
grandson. Her small frame tipped back under the weight of her backpack
stuffed with clothes and some of her most precious possessions: their
wedding rings, a silver watch Santos gave her for Mother’s Day and a
framed picture of him. As she walked into the United States, she
couldn’t get over how close he’d come.

“It was really just steps for him to fulfill his dreams.”

Delmis Jiménez stands on top of the international bridge that divides
Ciudad Juárez and El Paso as her family waits for U.S. customs
officers to allow them into the United States. Her husband died
attempting to reach the U.S. eight months earlier. Credit:Paul Ratje
for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

_Perla Trevizo is a reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune
Investigative Initiative. Trevizo is a Mexican-American reporter born
in Ciudad Juárez and raised across the border in El Paso, Texas,
where she began her journalism career._

_ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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_This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit,
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