A Small Mexican Town Becomes a Vital Way Station for Asylum Seekers

Whether Title 42 ends or not, Sonoyta, Sonora, and the Centro de Esperanza are preparing for the long haul, said Aaron Flores, codirector of the center.

Until 2015, the small Mexican town of Sonoyta, Sonora, scarcely figured in the migration landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border. But then migration from Central America and other parts of Latin America began to climb.

In March 2020, amid the coronavirus outbreak, former president Trump shut down asylum at the border by implementing a provision of Title 42, a public health code. Soon, more families began to arrive in Sonoyta, a small town of 17,000. “They had no money and nowhere to stay,” said Aaron Flores, who runs the town’s emergency services. “By the time they reached us, they were out of options.”

Sonoyta, which is halfway between the larger U.S. crossing points of Nogales and Yuma, Arizona, has become a way station for asylum-seeking families as they wait for Title 42 to lift and for their chance to present themselves before U.S. border agents.

Since it was implemented in 2020, Title 42 has been used more than 2.5 million times to expel asylum seekers from the U.S.—some of them repeatedly. With the stay by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, at the request of several Republican-led states, including Arizona and Texas, the December 21 deadline to end the Title 42 ban has once again been extended, which was anticipated by many who work with asylum seekers, including Flores. “I hate to be the Grinch,” he said. “People have a right under U.S. asylum law to apply, but the U.S. government will find a way to slow it down.”

An appeal filed by the Justice Department on December 7, arguing on behalf of Title 42, suggests that the Biden administration could use the controversial measure again at the border. Even if Title 42 does finally end, Flores said, he doesn’t believe that the growing pace of migration will stop anytime soon, which is why the town joined forces with a U.S.-based nonprofit called Shelters for Hope to convert an abandoned motel into a migrant resource center called the Centro de Esperanza, which opened in December 2021. The center provides meals, legal assistance, clothing, and shoes to families who want to request asylum in the United States. The center sees anywhere from 150 to 200 people a day, Flores said.

In addition to being Sonoyta’s director of civil protections, Flores is also codirector of the Centro de Esperanza, which they’re now working on expanding into a 150-person shelter, given the need. A week before Christmas, the center celebrated its first year with tamales, piñatas, and toys for the children. Dozens of families, mostly from Mexico and Central America, sat at tables in the courtyard of the center eating cupcakes as the children played.

In the last year, about 300 people applied for asylum with the help of the center and U.S. immigration attorneys, Flores said. But it’s a tough and long road, he said, and the U.S. immigration authorities are always changing the criteria on who can be exempted from Title 42 and file an asylum claim. “The Cubans get better chances, the Hondurans too, but it’s the worst for Mexicans,” Flores said. “And we have to be brutally honest with the single men who come here, because they have almost no chance.”

Whether or not Title 42 ends, Flores said, “we’re preparing for the long haul.”

The center recently received nonprofit status in Mexico, and Flores and Arlene Rivera, who helped form the U.S.-based nonprofit Shelters for Hope, are now seeking funding from Mexico, in addition to the individual donations they already receive from the town’s residents and from people in the United States.

Currently, the center can house about 30 people, Rivera said. But the need for a larger shelter is “immense,” she said. “We never intended this to be an overnight shelter,” Rivera said of the center. “But that’s where we are at now.”

John Orlowski, another member of Shelters for Hope, said they’ve met with officials from the U.S. Embassy and United Nations and no one knows what to expect for future migration levels. “We’re building a shelter for 150 people because the mayor of the town says that’s what his town can handle,” said Orlowski.

None of them expect the rate of migration to slow or the need to lessen. And legal deliberations over Title 42 could take several months, according to Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the Washington, DC–based nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. Many believe that Title 42 has reduced migration when it hasn’t, Isacson said. “All it’s done is create crazy distortions in which some nationalities get Title 42 applied to them and others don’t.”

It all depends on which nationalities Mexico will allow the U.S. to expel or whether the U.S. has diplomatic relations with a country, which can facilitate deportations there, he said. “Biden recently gave Mexico 60,000 additional temporary work visas in exchange for taking Venezuelans back,” he said.

The growing crisis of displacement and migration, exacerbated by the pandemic, is not just a problem for the United States to tackle. It’s hemisphere wide, Isacson said, “Colombia has taken in two and a half million Venezuelans. Costa Rica has 200,000 people in the asylum queue—mostly Nicaraguans, and Mexico is in its second year now of having 100,000 asylum applications.”

Last week, Isacson was in El Paso, Texas, where the mayor recently declared an emergency after the city began receiving thousands of asylum seekers—many of them Nicaraguans, some of whom had been kidnapped before fleeing to the border. “There were people wrapped in Red Cross blankets in the freezing cold and on the streets,” Isacson said. The United States has had several years to invest in a nonchaotic processing system for asylum seekers,” he said, but has chosen not to do so. “The laws we have are pretty strong on the right to seek asylum,” Isacson said. “What we don’t have is the appropriations for those laws to actually pay for processing in a dignified way at ports of entry.”

One example, he said, would be if the Biden administration tripled the number of asylum judges; court dates and wait times would be reduced from more than five years to less than two, he said. “If you’re turned down and you got your due process and you’re sent home, then that’s the message you’re going to send—I didn’t get it, and the word spreads,” he said. “Then the system can focus on saving the people who really are in danger.”

Eventually, the United States will have to acknowledge that these levels of migration are the new normal, he said. “There’s a lot that can be done without changing the law,” he said. “The question is, why hasn’t it been done?”