In the past week, over 600 people have been transferred from the migrant camp in Matamoros, Northern Mexico, to the Brownsville bus station in Texas. Those who could not afford a hotel or immediate onward travel were offered accommodation at a shelter in Texas.
The Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen is one of those shelters. Formerly a nightclub, it now caters to between 200 and 300 new arrivals each day, said Sister Norma Pimentel, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, the organization that manages the shelter.
Three large, crowded and noisy rooms offer a place to rest, and legal advice, showers, clothing and food are available. By the entrance to the shelter, volunteers handed out drugstore products from behind a counter, including baby milk, nappies, face masks and toiletries. A barrage of intrusive loudspeaker announcements constantly impedes any kind of meaningful conversation.
The population was overwhelmingly made up of young mothers with children under 5. Many who would have crossed the border unofficially before “surrendering freely” to the nearest immigration officer, explained Charlene D’Cruz, a lawyer with over 30 years of experience working in migration, one of the leaders of Lawyers for Good Government, and the director of Project Corazon Border Rights Program, Matamoros.
A handful of the guests in the shelter had arrived from the Matamoros migrant camp the night before. They spent the night sleeping on thin, blue, plastic mattresses before continuing their journeys to other parts of the United States. Those interviewed by Capital & Main planned to go to Florida, Iowa, Louisiana and California.