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Opinion | A Town With a Heart, but Few Options, for Migrants


Twilight is gathering downtown, and strings of lights twinkling alive in the ash trees ring in San Jacinto Plaza. It was a calm evening, and the annual arts festival was in full swing, with bands bouncing in the square and children rolling in the streets with pastels. Half the city seemed to have turned into: Wandering between the stalls, I kept meeting people I was about to interview.

A towering El Paso native, John Martin is deputy director of the Center for Opportunities for the Homeless, a downtown shelter that has been “flooded,” in his words, by dozens of people. walking asylum seekers who have avoided city bus attempts. them onwards. We stood by a floating house decorated with Disney characters; Mr. Martin introduced me to his wife, who had moved across the river from Ciudad Juárez into the United States. The couple’s 8-year-old son scattered around us as we talked.

I heard shelters have been forced to turn their backs on people; Mr. Martin says he and his staff have squeezed sleeping spaces into the office and crammed rugs together until the shelter, meaning it can accommodate 84 people overnight, has time. The site holds 140 people. But people kept coming and in the end, there was simply no more space.

“Immigration in the United States has been broken, but one side of the fence wants to study the root cause of the problem, and doesn’t want to see what is happening right here,” said Martin, squinting under his rim. his cowboy hat. hat. “And the other side wants to build a wall that will become a dam and will eventually break.”

He paused, and smiled self-deprecatingly. “It’s the most political answer I’ve ever given,” he said.

The next morning, I drove along the border to southeastern El Paso and stopped at a small city park just across the street from the Zaragoza Bridge – a laid-back, blue-collar area that straddles the border and the Interstate Highway. state 10. A broom factory nearby. announced a few days earlier that it would close at the end of the year, bringing with it dozens of jobs.

On the grassy slopes of the park, Cecilia Macias throws a ball to her dogs. I told her I was writing about the border, and Ms. Macias immediately did the usual El Paso thing: She smiled and told me about her own connection to that river. She and her parents passed when she was 14, leaving Ciudad Juárez behind.

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