New cruelty at the U.S.-Mexico border as reported by the Rev. Randy Mayer

The following is a report from the Rev. Randy J. Mayer, lead pastor at the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Arizona. Mayer is also the co-founder of the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans Humanitarian Group, and a member of the board of the American Waldensian Society.

The temperature is rising along the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s so hot that it feels like you are inside a brick oven that suffocates your lungs. But the rising temperature doesn’t stop the migrants from arriving by the hundreds in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

The Mexican cartels don’t care if it is scorching hot or the dark of night, they just want to deliver their commodity and collect their share of the profit — savage capitalism at its best. The news magazine The Economist recently said that the cartels have diversified their business model and now make just as much money smuggling people as they do on the sale of illegal drugs. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, between Nogales and Sasabe, the Sinaloa Cartel has tight control. They charge $6,000 a head for a baby or an elder, and no one crosses without paying their charge.

A new executive order

On June 4, 2024, President Joseph Biden issued an executive order placing significant limits on migrant asylum seekers in an effort to shut down the southern border. The order closes the opportunity for migrants who cross between ports of entry to ask for asylum once apprehension numbers reach 2,500 people a day.

It didn’t take long for the order to go into effect since the average number of daily apprehensions between ports of entry on the United States side of the border is as high as 4,000 people in a day. 

Since this new executive order was issued, officials in Nogales, Mexico, have reported as many as 500 people a day being deported to Mexico just at the DeConcini Port, and so it goes in key border towns. Essentially, this means dumping poor, desperate migrants on the streets with nowhere to go and no money to pay for anything.

To add insult to injury, there is a new interim rule that gives the Border Patrol the authority to bar migrants from returning to the United States for at least 5 years, and to press criminal charges if they try again.

A gut punch

This is a punch in the gut for the hundreds of families and individuals that humanitarian groups encounter each day in the desert along the border wall.

We’re talking about folks like Reyna and her four children, including four-month-old Diego. They fled horrendous violence in their home state of Vera Cruz, Mexico. Their house was burned to the ground by the cartel, their loved ones were murdered before their eyes, and they had to face the constant threat of the cartel kidnapping her children and forcing them into service. Reyna and her children finally escaped with the clothes on their backs. It took weeks for them to arrive at the border. They had no idea that the rules had cruelly changed and that President Biden’s new asylum ban had snuffed out their dreams of safety and survival. Within 48 hours, they were dumped on the streets of Nogales, Mexico, in the middle of the night.

Reyna described their experience as devastating and humiliating. The Border Patrol agent ignored her plea for asylum and disregarded her death-curdling cry of fear to return to Vera Cruz. Even under Biden’s new executive order, Reyna’s plea should have prompted a credible-fear interview with an immigration officer. Instead, the Border Patrol agent just shouted over her so he didn’t have to hear a word. In the end, all of her four-month old’s baby formula and diapers, and their family’s collective dignity were thrown in the trash by the Border Patrol and the United States government.

Desperation and fear running high

With desperation and fear running high, there is now the real possibility that migrants and their families will have no other choice but to cross the U.S.-Mexico Border in yet even more remote and dangerous parts of the desert as they seek to avoid detection.

With the rising heat, we know as humanitarian workers with 25 years of experience in the Sonoran Desert that President Biden and the U.S. government is creating the perfect storm that will cause hundreds of migrant deaths. And if the migrants don’t die in the scorching heat of the Sonora Desert, they most surely will be killed upon their return by the cartels that have already violently expelled them from their homes. 

The border may be miles away from the minds, hearts, and homes of most United States citizens, but the blood and suffering of the tired and huddled masses yearning to breathe free is dripping from each of our hands. And it doesn’t look like change is anywhere in the future.

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