Venezuelan migrant Julio Marquez sells lollipops near the border in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, holding a cardboard sign scrawled with marker: “Help us with whatever comes from your heart.”
He has the same message for U.S. President Joe Biden, who visited the Texas city of El Paso, just across the border, on Sunday.
“We hope he helps us, that he lets us pass, since we’re suffering a lot here in Mexico,” said Mr. Marquez. “He has to listen to the people on this side.”
Mr. Biden walked a muddy stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border and inspected a busy port of entry Sunday on his first trip to the region after two years in office, a visit shadowed by the fraught politics of immigration as Republicans blame him for record numbers of migrants crossing into the country.
At his first stop, the president observed as border officers in El Paso demonstrated how they search vehicles for drugs, money, and other contraband. Next, he traveled to a dusty street with abandoned buildings and walked along a metal border fence that separated the U.S. city from Ciudad Juarez.
His last stop was the El Paso County Migrant Services Center – but there were no migrants in sight. As he learned about the services offered there, he asked an aid worker, “If I could wave the wand, what should I do?” The answer was not audible.
Mr. Biden’s nearly four-hour visit to El Paso was highly controlled. He encountered no migrants except when his motorcade drove alongside the border and about a dozen were visible on the Ciudad Juárez side. His visit did not include time at a Border Patrol station, where migrants who cross illegally are arrested and held before their release. He delivered no public remarks.
The visit seemed designed to showcase a smooth operation to process legal migrants, weed out smuggled contraband, and humanely treat those who have entered illegally, creating a counter-narrative to Republicans’ claims of a crisis situation equivalent to an open border.
But his visit was likely to do little to quell critics from both sides, including immigrant advocates who accuse him of establishing cruel policies not unlike those of his hard-line predecessor, Donald Trump.
Mr. Biden’s first border visit as president comes days after a new policy aimed at reducing illegal migration has been criticized by migrant advocates for limiting asylum access.
The two-pronged approach offers legal pathways to the United States for certain Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Venezuelans who have U.S. sponsors, while expelling people of those nationalities back to Mexico if they attempt to cross the border without permission.
Mexican migration agents and state police on Saturday patrolled the concrete banks of the Rio Grande river dividing Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, as groups of families attempted to clamber through loops of concertina wire into the U.S.
“Duck down,” Erlan Garay of Honduras instructed a Colombian woman and her three children, including a boy clutching a Spiderman toy.
“They’re going to request asylum, they have a chance,” he said, adding that he would look for somewhere else to clandestinely cross, and shrugging off a drop of blood where the fence pricked his hand.
Mr. Marquez said he and his partner, Yalimar Chirinos, do not qualify for the new legal entry program because they lack a U.S. sponsor.
“They’re constantly changing the laws, every week,” Ms. Chirinos said, wearing a black hoodie and a single pink-and-blue glove to try to ward off the cold.
The couple has spent five months in Mexico after crossing several countries and the dangerous Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama. They sleep at night on the street without a tent or blankets, hugging one another to stay warm, wary of criminals known to rob and kidnap migrants.
At one point they crossed undetected into Texas, but after several days without food or a place to stay, they turned themselves in to U.S. officials, who sent them back to Mexico.
Mr. Marquez said he will stick it out another 15 days hoping to find a legal route into the U.S., before looking for a way back to Venezuela.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said, breaking into tears. “Mr. President, if you’re going to deport me, deport me back to my country, not back here to Mexico.”
Others were undeterred, even after their own expulsions to Mexico.
“Send me wherever you want, I’ll come back,” said Jonathan Tovar, speaking on Friday from behind the fence of Mexico’s migration office in Ciudad Juarez. “I want the president of the United States to give me and my family a chance.”
This story was reported by Reuters. Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.