Bullets And Broken Dreams On The Border
Mass asylum on the Rio Grande is dead; the cartel war rages on
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As “The Border” is a top issue for the Trump White House it’s vital to have reporting on the ground you can trust. Juan Alberto Cedillo went for CrashOut to the “Little Border” cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, the turf of the Gulf Cartel, to see how migrants and smugglers were reacting to Trump’s policies; his trip coincided with a new round of shoot outs and U.S. warnings of IEDs, but he brought back this crucial piece of reportage. IG
Juan Alberto Cedillo with additional writing and reporting by Ioan Grillo
I was at the cathedral in the center of Matamoros when the gun shots rang out across the city and kept rattling away for close to half an hour. It was during Sunday mass and attendees stood outside the temple talking about the fighting but didn’t duck behind cover; fire fights in this border city are painfully common. “They don’t respect anything,” a woman told me. “Now the shoot-outs can be anytime.”
The latest round of fighting is blamed on a dispute between competing factions of the Gulf Cartel, which controls the stretch of border in Tamaulipas state from the Gulf of Mexico (just renamed by President Donald Trump as the “Gulf of America”) through the cities of Matamoros and Reynosa up to a township called Los Guerra. The Gulf Cartel grew as a cocaine-trafficking operation but more recently made millions from smuggling migrants over the Rio Grande, many of whom would then hand themselves in to claim asylum. Between 2021 and 2024, under President Joe Biden, the Border Patrol agents had over eight million “encounters” with migrants on the southern border, breaking records.
The numbers finally fell in the second half of 2024 as Biden limited the number of asylum claims in the run-up to the election. With Trump taking power, it has become markedly more difficult still to claim refuge. Minutes after he took office, an app called CBP One, which gave seekers appointments in a kind of lottery system, went off line, while soldiers have been sent to bolster security. The era of mass asylum claims on the U.S. southern border is over - for now.
On the south bank of the Rio Grande, I find shelters full of migrants who had traveled from countries including Honduras, Venezuela and beyond and had their appointments canceled. “In private, their state has been of crying and collapse,” says José Luis Pumarejo who oversees four Catholic shelters in Matamoros. “It has been a hard blow after everything they have been through.”
The Mexican government is erecting large tents in Matamoros and Reynosa, such as this one below, for deportees. They could possibly also use them for a revival of the “Remain In Mexico,” program that allowed asylum seekers to make claims but made them wait in these border cities.
While the clampdown has hit one part of the Gulf Cartel’s operations, the mob has plenty of other ways to make money. It charges quotas on imports of U.S. goods to Mexico including trucks of refined gasoline. It shakes down businesses, including a swelling number of clinics offering cheap plastic surgery that you see along this stretch of border and are popular with Americans. And some of the migrants who cannot apply for asylum could instead hire human smugglers to sneak through the lines of agents.
Fredy, a 27 year old from Honduras, traveling with his three-year-old son says:
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