This is part of a series of stories about people seeking asylum or refuge in Southern Arizona and the complex, chaotic U.S. immigration system at the center of a humanitarian crisis. Read them all here.
In mid-December, a group of about 20 men from Senegal, Mali and Guinea trudged east along the rutted dirt border road in Southern Arizona. Some of them wore flip flops, others were wrapped in blankets, some carried backpacks or held plastic bottles of water as they traveled north of Lukeville’s Mexican sister city, Sonoyta, Sonora. “Bonjour,” they said.
They spoke French, Wolof, a few words of English.
One man wore a San Francisco 49ers baseball cap and heavily-dusted black athletic pants. As he arrived at a small shade tent set up by Humane Borders, an organization whose volunteers deliver water and food to people crossing the border, he let himself fall to the ground in exhausted relief.
Asked if he was okay (in English, a language he does not speak) he got the gist and smiled. He then let his head sink to his chest and dropped his shoulders in a universal gesture signifying bushed.
Next to him, two men from Mali took off their shoes. One of them slowly, methodically, washed his hands in the dust. They both then began praying, bowing their foreheads to the cold desert ground.
In a few hours on that winter day, with Christmas coming soon, Arizona Luminaria spoke with people seeking asylum or migrating from 10 different countries: Guinea, Mali, Congo, Senegal, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and México.
The people from Africa were one of a few dozen such groups, each containing between 10 and 40, walking the border road. They had all crossed through a gap in the border created by someone who had previously sawed through one of the steel-and-concrete bollards.
The ongoing displacement of people around the globe and volatile U.S. immigration policies over recent years has led to hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the border through the deserts or, further east, to ford the Rio Grande in order to request U.S. protection from persecution.
The border patrol’s Tucson sector — covering 262 miles stretching from the Yuma County line to the New Mexico State line — includes Lukeville and is bearing the brunt of the highest number of migrants and asylum-seekers crossing the U.S. border. The sheer numbers at 250,611, for fiscal year 2024 from October through January, have overwhelmed border patrol and community aid groups, and are eclipsing — by nearly 50% — the Del Rio sector in Texas, the second highest region for border crossings.
Measures put in place by the Biden administration restrict asylum access and crossings have become a political flashpoint in the run-up to the November election.
The local backlash against the federal government’s December closure of the Lukeville-Sonoyta port of entry, recent failed bipartisan border legislation in the U.S. Congress, and immigration measures by the Arizona legislature, have complicated an already chaotic system.
On March 4, Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed an Arizona bill that would have further criminalized crossing the border outside of ports of entry. Rather than enforce border policies the measure “demonizes our communities, hurts businesses and farmers, and burdens law enforcement and our judicial system. I know there’s frustration about the federal government’s failure to secure our border, but this bill is not the solution,” Hobbs said in a video after her veto.
Meanwhile, the future of people seeking asylum today after crossing the border into Southern Arizona remains uncertain.
Families as well as women and children traveling alone are among the huddled groups waiting along the Sonoyta border that December day in Lukeville. Ivis is 15 and trying to get to his dad in New Jersey. The boy from the northwestern Honduran city of Yoro has a wisp of a mustache. He’s with about 50 other people in front of a single U.S. Border Patrol agent lining migrants up in the cool midmorning.
The agent explained to Ivis and the others in Spanish that they need to take everything out of their pockets: “I don’t want anything in there but your ID and your cash.” The agent then ordered them to take off their belts, unlace their shoes, and pull the strings out of hoodies.
“I’m proud of myself,” Ivis said in Spanish of his trip so far. But he then blinked hard and long, swallowing repeatedly, not quite fighting off tears, but visibly nervous.
The officer made a lap of the line of people, telling them to unclasp all their earrings, necklaces and bracelets.
“The violence.” That was Ivis’s two-word explanation for why he had to leave Honduras. “What’s there for me?” he said. “It’s too violent.”
Along the road were still smoldering fires from where people had, the night before or very early that morning, gathered and waited for border patrol agents. The fires were kindled with dried desert brush, cholla, cardboard trash.
Student volunteers from a university in Chicago were being given a tour by Humane Borders. They passed out Welch’s fruit snacks and Rice Krispies Treats. As people ate, silenced by exhaustion, all that could be heard was sighing and the crinkling of plastic.
“We came for refuge”
The high numbers of migrants at and between the ports of entry along the U.S.-México border represent part of an “ongoing global displacement of people,” said Yael Schacher, the director of Americas and Europe for Refugees International with extensive research about asylum law and processes, including in Arizona and Sonora.
“This isn’t an asylum problem,” said Schacher, who holds a doctorate in American Studies from Harvard University. “We’ve got a lot of people coming, and we don’t have any clear way of managing them such that we could tell whether or not people have a strong or weak asylum claim.”
Schacher said many people crossing the border are registered, given a quick vetting, scheduled for a court date, and then released.
Schacher said border patrol is being stretched beyond current capacity, and an increasing number of people are coming from countries that México has not agreed to accept. That is, while México has agreed to take people from some Central American countries who are expelled from the United States, they are not receiving people from Africa, Asia or Russia. Detaining or quickly deporting those migrants would be logistically challenging and expensive.
Border Patrol agents take migrants into custody, run checks on them, and, at least in Pima County, release them to Casa Alitas, a welcome center. Some migrants, especially those with prior deportations or an arrest record, are sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention centers. Others are held in border patrol custody where they undergo their initial asylum screening.
A few minutes after the men from Africa caught their breath, prayed, and had a snack, a U.S. Border Patrol agent pulled up in an unmarked transport van playing loud techno music. The agent got out of his van, left it running and started eyeing the men now mostly hugging the shade under two plastic tents. In English, the agent asked various of the younger looking men how old they were. None of them claimed to be minors.
“You,” the agent said gruffly. “Line up. Over there.” The man he was talking to didn’t move.
“Go! Over there!” the agent said again. One of the other men translated the command into French. Eventually, a dozen of the men were loaded into the van.
Just past 10 a.m., three men from Guatemala, 20, 21, and 36 years old, were limping eastward toward border patrol agents.
The Guatemalans said they had been walking since 7 p.m. the night before, more than 15 hours. None of them wanted to give their names for fear of retribution.
One young man had a swollen foot that didn’t quite fit in his shoe. Both of the younger men had wrapped T-shirts around their thighs like bandages. Unlike some of the other people seeking asylum, most of whom slipped through gaps in the wall, the Guatemalan men said they had scaled the wall to ask for asylum.
“We came for refuge,” the 36-year-old said.
Calls for a new approach
The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner counted at least 197 deaths of border crossers in 2023, just in Pima County. Last September, the United Nations International Organization for Migration reported that in 2022 at least 686 migrants died or disappeared along the U.S.-México border, calling it “world’s deadliest migration land route.” Humane Borders aid workers make clear that those numbers are likely a significant undercount, as many people who die in the desert are never found.
The dangers and ongoing deaths are what drive Humane Borders volunteers to comb isolated sections of the desert looking for people in need, delivering water and food. Laurie Cantillo, a board member of Humane Borders, told Arizona Luminaria that the group’s volunteers are seeing some concerning new trends.
“People are being dropped by human smugglers in remote, dangerous areas where there are no services or reasonable access,” Cantillo said. “They are tired, cold, hungry, thirsty, and suffering from blisters and other ailments. I can only imagine the additional deaths that would occur if not for the efforts of many humanitarian groups who are jumping in to help them.”
The mishmash of various services offered, and the sheer difficulty of managing, as in Pima County, more than a thousand migrants a day being released, has prompted local and national leaders, as well as community members and migrants themselves, to call for a new approach.
Those calls range from significantly restricting access to asylum, more border infrastructure — including more miles of wall and more agents — as well as streamlining and expanding the U.S. refugee and asylum systems.
Most of the people crossing right now won’t be eligible for asylum, experts said. That’s due to asylum restrictions, mirroring Trump-era policies, put in place by the Biden administration in May 2023. The policy in most cases prohibits people from accessing asylum if they did not cross the border at a designated port of entry with an appointment obtained via the CBP One app.
With few exceptions to that rule, Schacher believes many of the people crossing the border now will be automatically denied asylum — once they’re finally seen, perhaps years down the road, by an immigration judge — because they did not seek asylum at a port of entry as currently required.
“I have spoken with hundreds of asylum-seekers,” Christina Asencio, director of research and analysis for refugee protection at the organization Human Rights First, said. “Overwhelmingly, these people want to cross through ports of entry.”
And yet, she explained, “the problems with CBP restricting access to the port and with equity issues with CBP One” essentially forces people, like those Guatemalan men who scaled the 30-foot border wall, to make more dangerous desert treks — as well as quash their hopes for asylum.
A shuttered port
In early December, officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, announced that they would be closing the port of entry between Lukeville, Arizona and Sonoyta, Sonora. The justification: “In response to increased levels of migrant encounters at the Southwest Border, fueled by smugglers peddling disinformation to prey on vulnerable individuals, CBP is surging all available resources to expeditiously and safely process migrants.”
At the same time, most interior Arizona border patrol checkpoints were shut down and agents from across the state were reassigned to respond to people crossing the Lukeville/Sonoyta border.
Lawmakers were not pleased.
Gov. Hobbs, along with both Arizona senators Mark Kelly, a Democrat, and Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, issued a Dec. 1 statement about the impending closure, calling it “an unacceptable outcome that further destabilizes our border, risks the safety of our communities, and damages our economy by disrupting trade and tourism.”
It was community members in Southern Arizona and Northern México who bore the brunt of the federal government’s response to immigration in and around Lukeville and Sonoyta. The closure left families living on both sides of the border separated from each other, and business owners in resort cities like Puerto Peñasco in Sonora worried about losing key tourism funds from Arizonans and other traveling Americans around the holidays.
A waitress at Granny’s Kitchen in Why, Arizona, about 25 miles from the Lukeville port of entry, told Arizona Luminaria that she has family in Sonoyta. “It’s usually a 25-minute drive (to see them), now it’s seven hours,” she said.
She didn’t want to be named because, like many people in the area, she has close ties to border patrol officials and didn’t want to come off as critical.
“It’s Christmas soon and my kids won’t see their grandparents,” she said.
While the Lukeville port was closed for the month of December, each day hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand, people crossed the border through gaps or cuts in the wall seeking asylum. Federal officials announced the port reopening on Jan. 2, and it was officially cleared for travel two days later.
By the first few weeks of January, however, the number of people crossing dropped precipitously. There were just more than 50,000 people apprehended by border patrol agents in the Tucson sector, which includes Lukeville, in January, compared to an estimated 80,000 in December, according to CBP statistics. Numbers were still high, however, compared to years past. In January 2023, there were just more than 20,000 people taken into custody in the Tucson sector.
Children and families
While much of the political and media attention has been focused on single adults crossing the U.S.-México border, families make up nearly as large of the share of total migrants and asylum-seekers recently apprehended by CBP. For fiscal year 2024, from October through January, an estimated 394,000 individuals who are part of a family, or 41%, were apprehended, compared with single adults at an estimated 520,000, or 54%, according to CBP statistics.
Since 2014, the number of children crossing the U.S.-México border has steadily increased. And while the U.S. government’s response to adults has been relatively straightforward — either provisionally let them in or detain them and commence the deportation process — with kids on their own it’s more complicated.
Ivis, the 15-year-old boy who left his home in Honduras because of violence, will likely be processed by border patrol agents and then transferred to custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to Ascencio.
The adults he was standing next to will likely head to Tucson’s Casa Alitas.
It’s two weeks before Christmas. The men, women and children at the border huddled together, helped each other into or out of jackets, shared water, picked up each other’s kids or backpacks, prayed together. They were mostly in good spirits. They expressed gratitude to the agents, to aid workers, and to reporters.
Ivis seemed lost.
“¿Qué me va a pasar?” Ivis said, asking in Spanish what was about to happen to him. He knew he was going to be taken into custody. He was just hoping that after traveling more than 2,500 miles alone, he would soon get to see his dad. Maybe in time for Christmas.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
