TIJUANA, MEXICO—Misery has an odor. It is worse than sewage, worse than filth, worse than death.
Misery has a face, hundreds of them. They are the faces of the forgotten, the ignored, the faces of throw-away people two nations have rejected.
Misery has an address. It is the fetid drainage canals of the Tijuana River where a squatters colony hides what remains of once-ambitious people who have been reduced to begging, drug abuse and crime. It is the gaping crack in a damned corner of la tierra where earth and hell intersect in a chasm of despair, drugs, disease, dread and death. It is las America’s secret refugee camp.
Misery has company. More is coming over every day.
Carved between the Tijuana Centro de Bomberos fire station and a ramp to the via rapida highway is a refugee camp like no other. It gets no Red Cross or United Nations support. Tension crackles through Campamento para Migrantes Deportados like static electricity. Apathetic faces drift about the malodorous tent city. Angry car horns on the adjacent via rapida stab the dead air, but the people are oblivious. More than 600 deportees deprived of showers create a cloud of nauseating smell that almost pushes aside the reeking sewage nearby.
Wretch-inducing stink is the least of the deportees’ maladies. Police abuse, abject poverty, extortion and powerlessness bind the deportees to the camp like paralysis. Just days, weeks or months ago the refugees were living and working in the United States, free to eat, sleep, play and shower in peace.
Then la migra swept in and turned their lives upside down. Men and women, boys and girls who lived in the United States—some for decades—were deported, led through the gates of San Ysidro, Otay Mesa and Calexico then abandoned in Mexico.
They returned to a birthland that does not want them and segregates them from Mexican society. Neglected, forgotten and scapegoated, they have been rejected by two nations. Even God seems to steer clear of Campamento para Migrantes Deportados.
On any given day there are hundreds of people hunched in small igloo tents in a community square across the street from the municipal headquarters of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the current ruling political party of Mexico. Misery does not appreciate irony. Although the size of the camp does not compare to refugee camps in Somalia, Syria or Jordan, the level of misery is comparable—if not worse.
Surviving the satanic squalor of stale water, sludge and the stench of sewage, inhabitants must fight the elements of nature as well as harassment from local criminals, drug cartels and the Tijuana police. Neighborhood gangs extort the inhabitants for their paltry money and property.
Police brutality is even more shocking.
Residents of El Bordo, their name for the camp, are easy prey for lazy police officers eager to close high-profile cases. Tales of wrongful arrests and detentions of the “usual suspects” are a daily occurrence at the migrant camp. Tijuana police, residents claim, will sweep in and randomly grab men whom they later book as perpetrators of unsolved crimes. Case closed, and no one misses the “criminals.” Most are never seen again.
Julio Cesar admits he was a criminal. He grew up in the U.S., but was arrested and deported for a crime. His wife avoids the emotional burden by staying with their child in Los Angeles. Phone calls are rare because most of the money goes to heroin. It dulls the depression, he said.
Juan Manuel, 63, worked in Los Angeles for 30 years in construction before being apprehended while on his lunch break last summer. He was deported, leaving behind 12 children. He now withers away in Tijuana with a drug addiction in a place he had never been before.
Many of the deportees lived in the United States for decades, some since infancy. Contrary to talk radio rhetoric, most undocumented migrants are not apprehended while committing crimes, but are caught without identification during traffic stops, inland checkpoints or immigration enforcement operations. Once processed for removal, the migrants are transported to the border and turned over to Mexican immigration. Arriving like tourists in a foreign land, the repatriated nationals are left to fend for themselves. Some speak little to no Spanish.
To address the growing number of deportees that are ignored by the Mexican government on local, state and federal levels, Sergio Tamai founded Angeles Sin Fronteras (Angels Without Borders) in 2010.
“We were born in Mexicali in 2010,” he said. “We realized that the United States government was deporting between 200 and 300 people on a daily basis.”
America has deported nearly 450,000 people under the Obama administration, Tamai said. National Public Radio places that number closer to 1.5 million.
Tamai said El Bordo was opened in August and more than 600 migrants now live there. Angeles Sin Fronteras volunteers are helping residents return to their home states in Mexico by working with Grupo Beta to assist them with travel costs and obtaining identification cards.
Javier A. Reyes lived in the United States as a successful home repairman for 10 years until he was deported two and a half years ago. He is a “coordinator” at the camp who hopes to return to the U.S. legally, but has no idea how or when that will happen.
Jobs in Mexico are hard to come by and require valid identification. Without a birth certificate and a permanent residence, a deportee cannot get the necessary identification. In order to pay rent to have an address they need a job. This cycle of dysfunction leaves most deportees with no options but to work on the streets and save enough money to try and cross back into the U.S.
Residents of the camp struggle to guard their meager possessions. Savage fights are common. “Coordinators” wearing green vests attempt to police their own. They are chosen from camp members to maintain order. If residents want to remain in the camp, they have to follow some rules. But not many. Alcohol and narcotics flow like the nearby sewage.
Not all the deportees are model citizens. Some were criminals, or, better said, desperate people who broke the law. Many, though, did nothing more than roll through a stop sign or “drive while brown” in the wrong neighborhood.
It comforts many Americans to think undocumented immigrants are all criminals or uneducated laborers, but many are also award-winning writers, gifted musicians, law students, architects and business owners. They are also among the deported.
Tent dwellers at El Bordo are the lucky ones, if the word applies. Skimming the basin of the river canal, hundreds more people live in lean-tos made from tires, wood and cardboard boxes the locals call ñongos. El Bordo’s resourceful individuals use whatever trash is available.
With more inhabitants the dangers also increase. Used hypodermic needles and trash litter the landscape of a concrete riverbed covered in mud, garbage and slime. Plastered in spray paint and graffiti, the walls offer words of inspiration like the gigantic El Sol Brilla Para Todos (“the sun shines for everyone.”)
Other signs are not so cheerful. Atop the northern bank of the river is a reminder of the doom that lingers so close to the people that live here. A lone grim reaper hangs from a noose like a skeletal scarecrow, taunting inhabitants that they must face death to cross to the other side.
Less than 100 yards north of the dangling la muerta is a sparkling new multi-million dollar inspection station built for the Aduana Mexico, Mexican Customs. Just beyond that another construction project is underway, new inspection facilities on the U.S. side designed to protect the country under the pretext of national security and the war on terror.
Undocumented immigrants are collateral casualties of the war on terror. For three centuries people and goods moved freely across la frontera. Travelers returned home when it was time. A metal wall now forces people who are undocumented to stay put in el norte and live in the shadows.
Those are the ones who survived. Thousands die crossing. Thousands live in refugee camps like Campamento para Migrantes Deportados. It is possible that the dead are actually the fortunate ones.