The Border Crisis Won’t Be Solved at the Border
More than a decade after he first got deported, Marco was staring into the United States from a bank of the Rio Grande. Across the turgid river he could see a tangle of mesquite and huisache trees in the town of Eagle Pass. U.S. Border Patrol agents milled about, but Marco felt undaunted. “I know it wasn’t the legal way,” he told me recently, “but I was about to fulfill my dream of getting to be in this great country.”
Marco (a pseudonym) had spent a year traveling north from his home, in Honduras, stopping to work construction jobs along the way to save money for bus tickets. Worried about getting kidnapped and held for ransom, or killed, by cartel members, he had plotted how to avoid gang turf, researching the least treacherous routes through Mexico. Instead of heading to a migration hub such as Juárez or Tijuana, he aimed for Piedras Negras, a smaller town across the river from Eagle Pass where, he had heard, criminal gangs were less active.
Unfortunately another danger lurks on this stretch of the border—the Rio Grande itself. Here the steel-gray river flows deep and fast, over sunken trees and hidden rocky depths. Hundreds of migrants have drowned in these waters in recent years. Marco, a broad-shouldered 34-year-old, knew how to swim, but two of the four who had traveled north with him did not, and for a couple of days in October 2021 they walked back and forth along the banks of the river, looking for the safest place to cross. On their third day of searching, a man wearing a black ski mask and holding a M14 rifle emerged from the bushes behind them.
