“So, how’s your data collection going?” asked a colleague over the phone. I was silent a moment.

 

What data collection?

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Days before, I had all but stopped my thesis work in the migrant house in northern Mexico when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. My Fulbright grant was a Graduate Degree Program helping me pursue a master’s degree in public health with a concentration in nutrition and food security at the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública in Mexico. After nearly two years, this was the moment I had been waiting for: data collection for my thesis, in which I analyze food insecurity and coping strategies in the unique population of international migrants in transit for Mexico. As a visiting researcher, my job at the house was not only to apply surveys and interviews, but to just hang out and chat, flip tortillas, play with the kids, bandage wounds: in short, to get to know people. But when the pandemic arose, my thesis was put on hold when, for the time being, a public health degree was of better use to support the incredible team running the house.

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There is a uniquely widespread and well-established spiderweb of migrant houses in Mexico, each of which are points of reference and, often, salvation to migrants transiting the country headed north. They provide food and a bath, and shelter for one night, or three; some for much longer, for those awaiting the resolution of asylum claims or legal cases. They are run by civil society organizations with little or no public assistance, which over time have formed strong support networks amongst each other. Almost all guests - men, women, children – come from Central America, where they have been repressed, threatened, or starved into undertaking a life-threatening journey across Mesoamerica for the United States, where they might have a better chance at life. Unfortunately, too many find that the dangerous route through Mexico brings more of the same hardships which they left behind. 

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From the first meeting in the house graciously hosting me, in which COVID-19 was brought to the table, it took only four days to make the historic decision to close the doors. It was far from an easy one. As humanitarians, how could we refuse those who come in need? Then again, if we didn’t, how could we protect the people already inside from exposure to the virus? Refusing entry, in the same country where the trending COVID-19 social distancing directive #Quedateencasa (stay in the house) is being pushed by the Secretary of Health, keeps migrants in the streets: easy prey both to criminal groups and infectious disease. Migrant houses are the closest thing to social security an undocumented migrant can find in Mexico, and without them people are left without reliable food, shelter, and access to health and legal services. Faced with the growing pandemic, Mexico followed emergency protocols which close “non-essential” organizations, including the principal public institutions like migration, and organizations responsible for and asylum claims. 

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Thousands of migrants and subjects of international protection are frozen in place without permission to stay in Mexico, or permission to leave either. Honduras was among the first countries in the Americas to close its borders in an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Now most of the world has followed suit including the US, with Mexico taking a notably more lenient stance. Thanks to this regional imbalance, undocumented migrants including subjects of international protection, are trapped in Mexico; the country receives as many migrants as ever, but they can neither exit to the US, nor be deported back to the countries almost all call home. To the north, the controversial US Migrant Protection Protocols, have gone to the next extreme, scrapping procedures protecting human rights to allow the immediate deportation of undocumented migrants without even a health screening. This has already resulted in non-Mexican internationals being shipped to Mexico without ensuring their rights to safety, health and due process in either country. Of these individuals, several were later identified as potential COVID-19 cases. 

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As overcrowded migration stations keep filling up, at least three revolts have already erupted among detainees demanding release from the inhumane conditions inside which encourage the spread of COVID-19. National and international organizations present in Mexico have called for the release of non-criminal detainees in custody, echoing similar demands in the US. However, a poorly-managed release, such as in growing reports of foreign migrants abandoned by migration agents at the closed southern border with Guatemala, are equally harmful. 

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Back at the house, the people were frustrated as they were caged in, bombarded with new rules for handwashing and dishwashing, physical distancing and bleach mixing. To many there, where the average education level is primary school, public health measures seem superfluous against an “enemy” is as small as a virus, and still invisible in their daily lives. They have bigger problems. And with eyes towards the US, or on the resolution of a life-saving asylum case, staying frozen in place indefinitely was not necessarily feasible. But where else? Each day, COVD-19 cases were reaching new heights, creeping further into the Americas. Migrant houses were shut. Social distancing regulations and xenophobia against migrants as possible contamination sources were unlikely to allow begging at doorsteps. Visas and asylum petitions were frozen indefinitely, in Mexico and the US. The borders to the US and their home countries were closed. One colleague at a migrant house in the south of Mexico echoed my doubts, wondering just where the people would go, in a world too paralyzed by fear to remember those stuck in the middle.

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“Caro” one migrant told me, almost pityingly, “what does it matter? The borders are always closed to us.”

The following day, Fulbright mandated my evacuation from Mexico. I was flown from an empty airport straight north across that impossible border, to the “safety” of the world’s largest current outbreak of COVID-19. And there they remain, at the mercy of a world too scared to open the door to strangers.