EL PASO, Texas (AP) — When Luis López was lost in the Darien Gap last year with his wife, then seven months pregnant, their two young children and her grandmother, they knelt in the mud to beg God not to abandon them.
“If I was bad, let me die here, but I arrive with my family,” the 34-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker recalled on Friday about his prayers. Now in El Paso, the family has found shelter with the local Catholic diocese.
But “the jungle,” as many migrants call this particularly dangerous stretch of their journey from South America to the United States, hit them again two weeks ago. López’s sister called him through tears. She, too, had had to flee and now she was trapped in the jungle with her 68-year-old mother, who had suffered serious injuries in a fall trying to flee from armed men.
The two women, rescued by Panamanian border police, are now on their way to Texas. They do not know how they will cross into the United States, since the new restrictions on asylum went into effect last Thursday with the lifting of the pandemic immigration regulations known as Title 42.
Although the Joe Biden administration has billed the new policy as a way to stabilize the border region and deter illegal immigration, thousands of people continue to migrate to flee poverty, violence and political persecution at home.
“The border and what happens at the border is not the cause of the problem associated with immigration, it is a symptom of a broken system in many ways,” said El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who has helped the López family since they They arrived at the shelter on diocesan property last September.
Although they barely had a last bag of oatmeal mixed with river water left in the jungle, López knew they could not return to Venezuela, where she had received death threats after stopping working for government officials.
“They called me ‘death to traitors,’” he recalled of phone calls and visits by armed men that began last spring.
When the threats spread to his sister, his ex-wife and their two children, López sold his trucking company and left for Colombia and then Central America. A smuggler took all of his savings in exchange for taking them by boat to avoid the Darien Gap, but instead he took them straight into the jungle.
There they found dead bodies and armed bandits, and tried to comfort four women they found crying near the road because they had just been raped, López said.
When they got lost, they received directions from other migrants who had hidden in the dense vegetation but responded to their cries for help. Lopez confronted the smuggler and went into shock, passed out next to a stream.
“The children shouted ‘Mommy, my dad!’ My only solution was to kneel down, ‘My God, don’t take him with me,’” said Oriana Marcano, 29.
Once they made it out, they still faced the risk of robbery, extortion, and refoulement in Central America and Mexico. “Unfortunately, the jungle is not everything,” López said.
Later, a group of Cubans picked them up over the border barrier in Ciudad Juárez, on the other side of El Paso. They were detained, held for a couple of days, and then released at the shelter.
Two hours later, Marcano went into labor and was taken to the hospital. López was left behind, with no money and no certainty that the family could stay beyond that night. The man who had promised to sponsor them in the United States, a requirement of the new immigration rules, withdrew his offer and told López that she had moved to Canada.
“There I met a man dressed in black, white hair, he told me ‘calm down, calm down,’ with his Spanish, which is more or less,” López recalled.
Seitz decided to take them in until the family recovered.
“They had no sponsors, so we basically said, ‘I guess we’re up to it,’” said Seitz, who wears a badge with a picture of Pope Francis that reads, “Defending migrants because the pope said so.” “We’ll keep trying to be Christian. ”.
As they wait for their summer court date to apply for asylum and a work permit, López and his wife have wasted no time. He has refurbished a battered van to start a painting and home improvement business, for which he has already printed business cards. They both volunteer at the shelter, Marcano when the two older children are in kindergarten, Lopez sometimes overnight as well.
He likes to greet newcomers in Spanish, telling them “¡ya están libres! I am a migrant, I went through what you went through. They are in the hand of God.”
Those in charge of the shelter in El Paso are not sure how many people will arrive in the next few, how many will be released by US authorities, how many will be deported, how many are still walking through Central America, desperate to find a way to get to the United States.
About a mile south of the shelter, at least half a dozen migrants had set up a makeshift tent at a gate in the border wall.
In recent days, hundreds of people had lined up there to be processed by Border Patrol. But on Friday evening only a handful of Texan National Guardsmen stood guard on the dusty riverbank. By noon on Saturday, the migrants’ tents were no longer visible.
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