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Edited by
Amanda Kolson HurleyBloomberg Businessweek March 8, 2021● A migrant camp empties as
Biden undoes Trump’s “Remain
in Mexico” policyside,” as the camp dwellers, who came from Central
America, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela, call the U.S.
“We just put ourselves in God’s hands,” Caal, 52,
said on Feb. 24, sitting on a log inside the make-
shift home as his wife cooked some black beans
over their little fire pit.
On Feb. 25, a month after President Biden
ordered an end to Remain in Mexico, aid work-
ers told Caal and Trujillo to report to a United
Nations clinic in the camp for a Covid test and be
ready to move. A few hours later, they were among
the first 27 people allowed to cross the Gateway
International Bridge to Brownsville. As of March 2,
more than 500 had followed, about three-quarters
of the camp’s population, according to UN agencies
coordinating the effort in Mexico.
Emptying the camp would eliminate a symbol
of Trump’s immigration crackdown and count as
an early success for Biden, who aims to undo his
predecessor’s most draconian anti-immigrant pol-
icies. The move comes as the new administration
prepares for a battle to pass a sweeping immigration
reform bill and as it draws criticism for reopening
a Trump-era shelter for migrant children in Texas.For 10 months, Francisco Caal lived with hundreds
of other asylum seekers in a tent city across the
Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, forced by
President Trump to wait there for the U.S. govern-
ment to decide his fate.
He’d fled Guatemala with his wife, Jeannethe
Trujillo, he says, after he endured death threats
and a bullet in the gut, the couple fearing for
their lives. When they reached the U.S. border
and asked for asylum, immigration agents turned
them back because of the Trump administration’s
2019 “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seek-
ers. They waited and worried in a squalid limbo,
spending their days inside a home made from rag-
ged tarps lashed to the camp’s chain-link fence, all
with a view of U.S. soil, just 70 feet away.
They prayed that Covid-19 wouldn’t get them
before they were allowed to cross to “the otherAfter a Grim Limbo, Hope