Migrants face a freezing Christmas on the US-Mexico border

Hundreds of migrants prepared to camp out in the cold for Christmas on Mexico’s northern border, hoping for a quick rollback of US immigration restrictions as they weather the onslaught of a winter storm.

After the United States Supreme Court ruled this week that restrictions known as Title 42 could be temporarily maintained, many migrants are facing a Christmas weekend that the Mexican weather service called an “arctic air mass.”

“I’m staying here, where am I going to go?” said Walmix Juin, a 32-year-old Haitian migrant preparing for the weekend in a flimsy tent in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a city across the border with McAllen, Texas. “I never thought a Christmas like this would happen to me,” he added.

Temperatures in border cities are expected to matamoros and Reynosa, where several thousand people camp in the open or in makeshift shelters, hover around freezing on Saturday and only slightly improve on Sunday.

Further west, in Juarez City, Chihuahua, where hundreds of migrants have lined up to request asylum at the border with El Paso, Texas, temperatures are expected to drop to minus 6 degrees Celsius. Many have slept on the street.

Officials have provided more space in shelters in recent days, but some migrants are wary.

Wearing a baseball cap and a jacket zipped up to his chin, Venezuelan Antony Rodríguez, 29, has been trying to stay warm in Matamoros by huddling under blankets in a tent with five family members, a video shared with Reuters showed. .

After an arduous journey through Central America and Mexico, Rodríguez said he turned down the offer of shelter because he feared authorities would take them south by bus.

“We don’t want to go because we feel that they are going to send us back,” he said.

Another Venezuelan in Matamoros, Giovanny Castellanos, said he was camping in a tent at the border, wrapped in blankets, to keep abreast of events.

“You go to a shelter and you get away from here, where the real information is,” said the 32-year-old migrant.

Title 42 allows the United States to return migrants to Mexico or to certain countries without the possibility of applying for asylum. Before the court ruling, it was scheduled to end on December 21. With no clarity on when it will end, some officials fear their cities will be overwhelmed if more migrants show up.

“United States immigration policy affects a lot here on the border,” Reynosa Mayor Carlos Peña Ortiz said Friday.

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