Hondurans at the Gate

The caravan is overwhelmingly made up of young men looking for work—not women and children.

By the time we catch up with the migrant caravan, the group has already spent 10 weeks in the media spotlight and played a starring role in the midterms. Yet we are still unprepared for what we find—5,000 Central Americans camped in a small neighborhood rec center that reporters like to refer to over and over again as a “stadium.”

Keith Bowden and I had met up in San Diego and headed south to the border. Keith, 61, has lived on it for three decades—in Langtry, Texas, a town of 13. His Tecate Journals is an epic border tale, a chronicle of his canoe adventure down the Rio Grande. I got to know him early this year while I was traveling the U.S.-Mexico border by bicycle for this magazine. When I asked him in November if he wanted to go down and see the caravan first-hand, Keith responded within hours, “When do we go?”

We park on the American side early in the morning, change our dollars into pesos, and head for the San Ysidro Port of Entry. This is the most heavily trafficked border crossing in the world: a hectic labyrinth of converging highways and footbridges. Hundreds of cars inch through security checkpoints and are routed around enormous construction projects as the crossing expands to catch up with the daily crush of commuters. Everything is shoved up against fences from several different eras of border security, topped by halos of razor wire just installed by the troops sent to the border by President Trump. Three days earlier migrants attempted to charge the border here and were met by tear gas. As we wind our way through the different barriers and turnstiles, military helicopters fly overhead, and dozens of Mexican and American officers stand by in full riot gear.

A Tijuana taxi driver says he knows where the migrants are camped, and he has us there in 10 minutes. The Benito Juárez Sports Complex shares half a city block with an elementary school. Only a two-lane highway separates it from the border fence, but the closeness of the United States is an illusion. If you were to dodge the traffic and somehow climb over the 15-foot fence, there would be two more barriers even before you reach the stinking Tijuana River. Cross the river, and there are two more fences between you and American soil.

Read the rest from Grant Wishard HERE.