[News] The Migrant Crisis Thread

President Joe Biden’s executive action on immigration isn’t a slam dunk with voters, but it’s not entirely alienating Democrats and independents either, according to a new Monmouth University poll.

Democrats’ views of Biden’s border crackdown are consistent with voters across the board: 40 percent of registered voters approve of the move, 27 percent are opposed and 33 percent say they have no opinion. The executive order announced last week, which clamped down on migrants seeking asylum by establishing a numeric threshold that triggers closure of the Southern border between ports of entry, has the approval of 38 percent of Democrats, 40 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans.

The findings come as Biden seeks to boost voters’ perception of his handling of the border just months before the November election. The president is aiming to unify a Democratic base split on immigration, appeal to independents seeking a tougher hand and take action to lessen Republicans’ campaign advantage on the issue.

Nearly half of Democrats, 49 percent, view Biden’s executive action as “about right” when it comes to addressing illegal immigration, according to the poll. Twenty-four percent of Democrats view the order as “too tough,” and 19 percent say it is “not tough enough.” Overall, 22 percent of Democrats oppose the action.

Of the Democrats who say they oppose Biden’s move, 82 percent called it “too tough.” That’s in line with the views of a vocal faction of frustrated progressives who urged the president to pursue other kinds of immigration relief. In response, the administration is considering new actions for undocumented immigrants, with a particular focus on a “parole in place” policy for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.

Regardless of whether they favor or oppose Biden’s action, Republicans are united in their desire for a stronger crackdown on illegal immigration, with 74 percent calling the move “not tough enough.” Just 4 percent describe it as “too tough,” and 17 percent of Republicans say it is “about right.” Republicans are betting that Biden’s low approval ratings on immigration will help the party peel voters away from the president’s coalition, while Biden is seeking to hammer Republicans on their obstruction of a bipartisan border deal earlier this year.

“Frankly, I would have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation,” Biden said when announcing the move, “but Republicans left me with no choice.”

The poll found that slightly more surveyed voters approve of Biden’s action than approved of a House immigration bill and a bipartisan Senate border bill earlier this year, the latter of which was derailed by former President Donald Trump’s opposition.

Biden’s executive action, which is still being implemented, allows the president to close the border when crossings exceed an average of 2,500 per day over the period of a week. When average crossings have reached 1,500 or fewer for seven consecutive days, DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas can reopen the border two weeks later. During these high-volume periods when the border is closed, migrants facing apprehensions along the border will not be allowed to seek asylum.

Despite the more aggressive approach on immigration, Biden’s approval numbers have not improved, the Monmouth poll found, with 38 percent approving his job performance — down marginally from 42 percent in April.

The Monmouth University poll was conducted June 6-10, surveying 1,106 adults by telephone. The margin of error is plus-or-minus 3.8 percentage points.

Four in 10 (40%) Americans are in favor of President Biden’s executive order to secure the U.S. border with Mexico by turning away migrants who seek asylum at the border, while 27% are opposed. Another 33% have no opinion. Support is evenly spread across all partisan groups – 44% of Republicans, 40% of Democrats and 38% of independents are in favor. Republicans (29%) and independents (30%) are slightly more likely than Democrats (22%) to oppose this move. Overall, public opinion of Biden’s action is slightly higher than prior polls of immigration proposals from the Speaker of the House in April (35% favor and 23% oppose) and a bipartisan group in the U.S. Senate in February (23% favor and 33% oppose).

Just under half (46%) say the president’s executive order is not tough enough when it comes to dealing with illegal immigration. Another 17% of Americans say this order is too tough and 31% say it is about right. Most Republicans say Biden’s action is not tough enough on illegal immigration regardless of whether they favor his move (73%) or oppose it (86%). Among independents who support the order, 52% say it is not tough enough, but among independents who oppose it, 55% say it is too tough. Among Democrats who support Biden’s move, 69% say it is about right, but 82% of Democrats who oppose the order say it is too tough.

“Biden will never be able to satisfy Republicans on border policy. The real question is whether he can neutralize this issue among independents without alienating certain Democrats. These initial public opinion results suggest he may have achieved some of that, but it’s not a clear political win by any stretch,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period, witnesses say, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water.

The nine are among more than 40 people alleged to have died as a result of being forced out of Greek territorial waters, or taken back out to sea after reaching Greek islands, BBC analysis has found.

The Greek coastguard told our investigation it strongly rejects all accusations of illegal activities.

We showed footage of 12 people being loaded into a Greek coastguard boat, and then abandoned on a dinghy, to a former senior Greek coastguard officer. When he got up from his chair, and with his mic still on, he said it was "obviously illegal" and "an international crime".

The Greek government has long been accused of forced returns - pushing people back towards Turkey, where they have crossed from, which is illegal under international law.

But this is the first time the BBC has calculated the number of incidents which allege that fatalities occurred as a result of the Greek coastguard's actions.

The 15 incidents we analysed - dated May 2020-23 - resulted in 43 deaths. The initial sources were primarily local media, NGOs and the Turkish coastguard.

Verifying such accounts is extremely difficult - witnesses often disappear, or are too fearful to speak out. But in four of these cases we were able to corroborate accounts by speaking with eye witnesses.

Our research, which features in a new BBC documentary, Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?, suggested a clear pattern.

In five of the incidents, migrants said they were thrown directly into the sea by the Greek authorities. In four of those cases they explained how they had landed on Greek islands but were hunted down. In several other incidents, migrants said they had been put onto inflatable rafts without motors which then deflated, or appeared to have been punctured.

One of the most chilling accounts was given by a Cameroonian man, who says he was hunted by Greek authorities after landing on the island of Samos in September 2021.

Like all the people we interviewed, he said he was planning to register on Greek soil as an asylum seeker.

"We had barely docked, and the police came from behind," he told us. "There were two policemen dressed in black, and three others in civilian clothes. They were masked, you could only see their eyes."

He and two others - another from Cameroon and a man from Ivory Coast - were transferred to a Greek coastguard boat, he said, where events took a terrifying turn.

“They started with the [other] Cameroonian. They threw him in the water. The Ivorian man said: ‘Save me, I don’t want to die'… and then eventually only his hand was above water, and his body was below.

"Slowly his hand slipped under, and the water engulfed him."

Our interviewee says his abductors beat him.

"Punches were raining down on my head. It was like they were punching an animal." And then he says they pushed him, too, into the water - without a life jacket. He was able to swim to shore, but the bodies of the other two - Sidy Keita and Didier Martial Kouamou Nana - were recovered on the Turkish coastline.

The survivor’s lawyers are demanding the Greek authorities open a double murder case.

AMBLETEUSE, France (AP) — The rising tide crept above their waists, soaking the babies they hugged tight. Around a dozen Kurds refused to leave the cold waters of the English Channel in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable: French police had just foiled their latest attempt to reach the United Kingdom by boat.

The men, women and children were trapped again on the last frontier of their journey from Iraq and Iran. They hoped that a rubber dinghy would get them to better lives with housing, schooling and work. Now it disappeared on the horizon, only a few of its passengers aboard.

On the beach of the quiet northern French town of Ambleteuse, police pleaded for the migrants to leave the 10-degree-Celsius (50-degree-Fahrenheit) water, so cold it can kill within minutes. Do it for the children’s sake, they argued.

“The boat is go!” an increasingly irritated officer shouted in French-accented English. “It’s over! It’s over!”

The asylum-seekers finally emerged from the sea defeated, but there was no doubt that they would try to reach the U.K. again. They would not find the haven they needed in France, or elsewhere in the European Union.

Europe’s increasingly strict asylum rules, growing xenophobia and hostile treatment of migrants were pushing them north. While the U.K. government has been hostile, too, many migrants have family or friends in the U.K. and a perception they will have more opportunities there.

EU rules stipulate that a person must apply for asylum in the first member state they land in. This has overwhelmed countries on the edge of the 27-nation bloc such as Italy, Greece and Spain.

Some migrants don’t even try for new lives in the EU anymore. They are flying to France from as far away as Vietnam to attempt the Channel crossing after failing to get permission to enter the U.K., which has stricter visa requirements.

“No happy here,” said Adam, an Iraqi father of six who was among those caught on the beach in a recent May morning. He refused to provide his last name due to his uncertain legal status in France. He had failed to find schooling and housing for his children in France and had grown frustrated with the asylum office’s lack of answers about his case. He thought things would be better in the U.K., he said.

While the number of people entering the EU without permission is nowhere near as high as during a 2015-2016 refugee crisis, far-right parties across Europe, including in France, have exploited migration to the continent and made big electoral wins in the most recent European Parliamentary elections. Their rhetoric, and the treatment already faced by many people on the French coast and elsewhere in the bloc, clash with the stated principles of solidarity, openness and respect for human dignity that underpin the democratic EU, human rights advocates note.

In recent months, the normally quiet beaches around Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne-Sur-Mer have become the stage of cat-and-mouse games — even violent clashes — between police and smugglers. Police have fired tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. Smugglers have hurled stones.

While boat crossings across the Channel represent only a tiny fraction of migration to the U.K., France agreed last year to hold migrants back in exchange for hundreds of millions of euros. It’s an agreement akin to deals made between the European Union and North African nations in recent years. And while many people have been stopped by police, they are not offered alternative solutions and are bound to try crossing again.

More than 12,000 people have reached England in small boats in the first five months of the year, 18% more than during the same period last year, according to data published by the U.K.'s Home Office. The Home Office said 882 people arrived in the U.K. in 15 boats on Tuesday, the highest daily total of the year.

The heightened border surveillance is increasing risks and ultimately leading to more deaths, closer to shore, said Salomé Bahri, a coordinator with the nongovernmental organization Utopia 56, which helps migrants stranded in France. At least 20 people have died so far this year trying to reach the U.K., according to Utopia 56. That’s nearly as many as died in all of last year, according to statistics published by the International Organization of Migration.

People are rushing to avoid being caught by authorities and there are more fatalities, Bahri said. In late April, five people died, including a 7-year-old girl who was crushed inside a rubber boat after more than 110 people boarded it frantically trying to escape police.

Authorities in the north of France denied AP’s request for an interview but have previously defended the “life-saving” work of police and blamed violence on smugglers who have also attacked officers.

A spot on a flimsy rubber dinghy can cost between 1,000 to 2,000 euros (around $1,100-$2,200) making it a lucrative business for the smuggling networks led primarily by Iraqi Kurdish groups. They can earn up to $1 million a month (approximately 920,000 euros) according to a report published earlier this year by The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Sitting around a fire in an abandoned warehouse-turned-migrant camp in Calais, Mohammed Osman contemplated his limited options. The 25-year-old Sudanese man was studying medicine in Moscow when the civil war broke out in his home country a year ago. He suspended his dream of becoming a doctor. Forced to flee the fighting, his family could no longer afford to pay for his university fees and Osman was forced to leave Russia, where his visa only allowed him to study, not work. He crossed to Belarus and then to Poland where he says he was pushed back and beaten by Polish guards several times.

Eventually, he made it across the border and reached Germany where he tried to apply for asylum but was ordered to return to Poland, as per EU rules. All he wants now is to finish his medical studies in the U.K., a country whose language he, like many other Sudanese people, already speaks. The issue, as always, is how to get there. Talks of potential deportation to Rwanda have only added more stress and frustration.

“So where is the legal way for me?” he asked. “I am a good person. I know that I can be a good doctor. … So what is the problem?”

In another makeshift camp near Dunkirk that police routinely attempt to clear, more dreams were held in suspense. Farzanee, 28, left Iran to follow her passion: becoming a professional bodybuilder. Back home she was banned from taking part in competitions and persecuted for her sport.

“I was even threatened with my family, that’s why I left my country,” she said, refusing to provide her last name out of fear for her and her loved ones’ safety.

Together with her husband, they managed to get a visa for France with a fake invitation letter. But even on EU soil they fear they could be deported back to Iran and believe only the U.K. to be safe. They have tried — and failed — to board boats to the U.K. “seven or eight times” but have vowed to keep trying until they make it.

“Us and other Iranians like me, we have one thing in common,” explained Farzanee’s husband Mohammad. “When you ask them they will tell you: ‘free life or death.’”

A few days after this interview, Mohammad and his wife Farzanee made it safely to the U.K.

It was just past 10am, but the west Texas sun already burned high above the border fence, a serpentine steel line slicing the Chihuahuan desert in two. On the US side, a short distance from the Paso del Norte International Bridge, the Sacred Heart shelter stirred with activity.

Children giggled and shrieked as they chased each other in circles around the converted gymnasium, decorated with brightly colored piñatas, a mural of the Virgen de Guadalupe and a string of plastic flags, a small reminder of the countries they left behind: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico. Their parents, who carried them across jungles, rivers and entire countries, rested on mats. A mother breastfed her son. A woman braided hair.

This shelter is located in the heart of El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, a neighborhood that has served as the entry point for so many generations of immigrants arriving in the United States that it has been called “the other Ellis Island”.

It is here the newest arrivals find a moment of respite – a hot meal, fresh clothes and reliable wifi – suspended briefly in the crucible between a long, perilous journey and an uncertain future in the US; between the troubled places that pushed them out and a nation increasingly determined to keep them out.

“Bienvenido a los Estados Unidos,” a volunteer said, welcoming a group that had assembled for his presentation on the asylum process, a portal into the labyrinth of immigration codes and policies that holds their fate.

Diana, 26, listened carefully.

Five months ago, she and her partner, José, 28, fled Venezuela, where a spiraling political, economic and humanitarian crisis has plunged millions into poverty.

Together they crossed the Darién Gap, an inhospitable stretch of rainforest between Colombia and Panama. They waited months in Mexico trying unsuccessfully to make an asylum appointment with the US. But Mexico was a dangerous place to be, Diana said, pulling her knees tightly to her chest. They eventually ran out of money. “Despair” crept in, José said, and they decided to continue.

The pair surrendered to US authorities on a Sunday in early June, days before Joe Biden issued an executive order essentially suspending – at least temporarily – the country’s longstanding promise that anyone who steps foot on US soil has the right to seek asylum.

While political leaders hundreds of miles away in Austin – Texas’s capital – and in Washington clash over the “crisis” at the border, the people of El Paso are grappling with the human side of an unprecedented wave of global migration, driven by economic hardship, extreme weather, conflict and political instability. Though the border city has strained under the weight of receiving hundreds of thousands of migrants in recent years, it has also modeled compassion and resilience, rooted in a tradition of caring for those who flee north.

Opinions here are divided over Biden’s election-year asylum crackdown. Many are skeptical, jaded perhaps by claims that the border can be sealed and a mass movement of people stopped.

“From what we see at our shelter, people are desperate,” said Rafael Garcia, pastor of Sacred Heart parish, the church adjacent to the shelter. “They’re fearful to death, and so they’re going to continue to take risks, which they are doing right now.”

As migration has reached historic levels in recent years, El Paso, a liberal corner in conservative Texas, has intermittently been a central crossing point from Mexico. Local officials say they are proud of the city’s response to what it defines as a humanitarian and public safety “crisis”. But the sheer scale has taken a toll.

Earlier this month, Oscar Leeser, the city’s Democratic mayor, traveled to the nation’s capital to stand with Biden at the White House as the president formally unveiled his controversial asylum order.

“We’ve been asking for help for many years,” Leeser told journalists in El Paso, after returning from Washington. The president’s action was “a start,” he said, but Congress still needed to act.

Leeser, who was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, before moving to El Paso as a child, speaking no English, said the city strives to be a welcoming place for asylum seekers while remaining a safe place for residents.

Having adopted a “no street release” policy, he said local officials work to connect people with shelters and transportation before they depart to other cities, often Denver, Chicago or New York. When shelters are full, the city has opted to pay for hotel rooms. The city is also in the process of building an animal shelter in a vacant middle school now used as a shelter, part of the mayor’s vision to offer pet therapy as a mental health resource.

“We really want to make sure people are treated with respect and dignity,” Leeser said.

But the status quo is unsustainable, he said. During a peak last year, the number of arrivals rose as high as 1,700 people in a single day, leaving city resources stretched thin.

The number of people crossing has plunged since then, but remains historically high. Since October, the start of the fiscal year, there have been more than 204,000 encounters in the El Paso sector, which includes west Texas and all of New Mexico, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, a 39% decrease compared to the same period last year.

Leeser expects the asylum policy will work as a deterrent because “the consequences are greater now”. While the restrictions are in effect, people who do not establish a “reasonable probability” for asylum will be removed and subject to a “five-year bar” for re-entry, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s the mayor’s hope that the harsher penalties will encourage people to use the government’s preferred pathway, by requesting an asylum appointment through its smartphone app CBP One. Roughly 1,450 appointments are available each day via the app, but there is a months-long backlog that immigration advocates fear will worsen under the new policy, which opponents are challenging in court.

According to preliminary CBP figures released on Thursday, encounters with people at the border have fallen 25% in the two weeks since the asylum restrictions were implemented.

“Every time the federal government makes a change, we see a dramatic drop in the flow,” Jorge Rodriguez, the emergency management coordinator for the city and county of El Paso, told journalists, hours after the policy took effect.

But he said the situation can change abruptly, spurred by factors beyond Washington’s control – for example, the conditions in the countries people are fleeing, and the smuggling networks that profit mightily from global migration.

US enforcement tells only part of the story. Mexican authorities, under intensifying pressure from the US, are aggressively cracking down on people trying to reach its northern border, blocking their advance and busing them hundreds of miles in the opposite direction, towards its southern border with Guatemala.

As the route becomes more difficult to traverse, human rights advocates say people will be forced to stay in Mexico, where they risk extortion, kidnapping and violence. Already, shelters are beginning to fill in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city opposite the border from El Paso, as people hoping to claim asylum are turned back.

“Nothing’s going to stop the migration,” Juan Acereto Cervera, an adviser to the mayor of Ciudad Juárez, told journalists as part of the same panel in El Paso. “Nothing.”

In the baking Santa Teresa desert, a few miles west of El Paso, the hulking, rust-colored border barrier snakes through sand and shrubs. A day after Biden’s asylum policy took effect, the US side was desolate, save for scattered pieces of clothing, empty water bottles and a photograph of a little girl with big brown eyes. “Valeria” was printed neatly on the back, with a note, in Spanish: “You’ll always be my queen.”

For decades, the vast majority of those who crossed without authorization were Mexican men looking for work. Now people come from all over the western hemisphere. Families traveling with children make up nearly 40% of those who have crossed the southern border so far this year, while tens of thousands of young people have come alone. Rather than hide, they increasingly seek out authorities to surrender and request asylum.

On a tour with journalists, CBP officials declined to discuss the new asylum order, issued after Republicans blocked a bipartisan border security bill – at Donald Trump’s behest – that would have sent a surge of resources to the agency.

The policy remains in place until the number of illegal crossings drops below 1,500 for seven consecutive days. The last time the figure fell that low was in 2020, during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic.

It was the most restrictive action yet from the Democratic president, who recently invoked his own family’s journey from Ireland two centuries before to emphasize his compassion for the plight of immigrants.

But the southern border has become a defining feature of the November presidential election – and a major liability for Biden, whose “carrot and stick” approach – mixing policies that expand legal pathways into the US while tightening border restrictions – has left few satisfied.

Voters strongly disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border, polls show, while attitudes toward undocumented immigrants living in the US appear to be growing more hostile.

Trump, the Republican nominee who as president enacted a policy that separated children from their parents at the border, has stoked those fears, promising to carry out “the largest deportation in history” if re-elected.

Imelda Maynard, an attorney with the El Paso-based Estrella del Paso Legal Aid, called Biden’s action a “gut punch”. She feared the asylum clampdown would make people more desperate. They may attempt to cross in more remote areas to avoid detection. Or parents may attempt to send their children alone because unaccompanied minors are one of the few groups exempted under the new restrictions.

There are also questions about how evenly the policy will be enforced along the 2,000-mile border, particularly if the number of arrivals begins to rise again.

Inconsistencies, certain to be amplified on social media and messaging platforms, could send the message that it’s still possible to come, Maynard said, because: “You can’t battle hope, right?”

For many in El Paso, portrayals of the borderlands as wide open and consumed by chaos are worlds apart from the reality of their everyday lives.

In this predominantly Hispanic community, conversations slip easily between Spanish and English, and the border is a dividing line traversed daily by students going to school​ and relatives visiting family. Its ports of entry process tens of billions of dollars in trade annually.

“If one more politician says the border is broken,” said Jon Barela of the Borderplex Alliance, an economic development organization in El Paso, shaking his head. “The border is not broken.”

Barela blamed Washington for repeatedly failing to overhaul an immigration system nearly every elected official has declared broken, despite the country’s need for more workers. Modernizing guest worker programs and expanding pathways to citizenship for the long-term undocumented – once pillars of comprehensive immigration reform, left out of this year’s border security deal – would help power the US economy, he argued. His preference is a bipartisan immigration plan introduced by El Paso’s representative in the US House, Veronica Escobar. But Congress has shown no interest in an election-year immigration consensus.

As a border-state Democrat and a co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, Escobar has carefully navigated the choppy politics of the president’s immigration policies. This month, she signed on to a letter asking the administration to reconsider its asylum rule. Then, last week, the congresswoman joined the president at the White House to celebrate a suite of new executive actions aimed at opening a pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants living without legal status in the US.

Escobar is also sounding the alarm on growing anti-immigrant vitriol.

Right-wing talk of an immigrant “invasion” stir fears among residents, nearly five years after a white supremacist who railed against a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso.

“We have seen the way that they have targeted communities like this one, like El Paso,” Escobar said during a speech at the Texas Democratic convention, held in the city earlier this month. She accused Republicans, led by Trump, who has said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, of furthering the “demonization of vulnerable migrants who are seeking a better life”.

“All of that,” she said, “hangs in the balance in November.”

Near the remote border community of Sunland Park, New Mexico, temperatures swelled to 107F on a recent Thursday.

Agents often act as first responders for people suffering heat-related distress as they attempt to cross the border, a CBP official said. They provide water and administer medical care, the official said, adding that he anticipated rescues – and deaths – would continue to rise throughout the summer.

The day before, agents had recovered the bodies of two people found in the desert, believed to have died of heat-related injuries. Since then, two more bodies were recovered in the area and two people suffering heat-related injuries were rescued, according to the Sunland Park fire department.

“Last year, we had a record [number] of border deaths in our community, and with policies like these that is just going to increase,” said Aimée Santillán, a policy analyst at the Hope Border Institute, based in El Paso.

“It’s a very human issue that unfortunately has been dehumanized,” she said. “Migrants have become something else – a problem that needs to be fixed instead of people that need to be helped.”

At the Sacred Heart shelter on a recent Friday, volunteers sorted pairs of boxer briefs and other donated items. A woman from Venezuela chopped garlic in the kitchen. Preparing for the next group of arrivals was Michael DeBruhl, who now serves as the shelter’s director after a 26-year career with the border patrol.

More than 50,000 people have passed through since it opened the parish gymnasium as a shelter, practically overnight, in December 2022, as winter temperatures plunged and local officials scrambled to accommodate a sudden spike in migration.

There are fewer people these days. The night prior, the shelter had housed 74 people, well below its capacity of 120.

Many arrive here with children, mostly fleeing the crisis in Venezuela. DeBruhl, who is Mexican American, quips that he now keeps a bottle of Tabasco sauce with him to add spice to the milder Venezuelan dishes served at mealtime.

In his time with the shelter, DeBruhl has tried to provide a sense of uplift. When he started, people were sleeping on cots, which couldn’t be stacked and stored, so he procured mats that could be folded and tucked away in the morning. “Even the illusion of space, I think, is better for the soul,” he said, surveying the gymnasium, where José and Diana were preparing to depart for Houston.

DeBruhl said it would probably take several weeks to fully grasp the impact of Biden’s asylum order. Like others, he worries about the people toiling in Mexico – the more hostile side of the border, in his experience, by far.

But so long as it was better to leave than to stay, DeBruhl was sure people would continue to try. That is his mission now: to care for those who come.

“We didn’t want to leave our country,” José said. But he couldn’t afford to buy school supplies for his seven-year-old son or medication for his elderly mother. He came to the US, like so many before and after, to give his family a better life. If that had been possible in Venezuela, he would have stayed.

Prosecutors filed capital murder charges Friday against two men suspected of killing a 12-year-old Houston girl whose body was found in a creek after she disappeared during a walk to a convenience store.

The charging documents filed in Harris County, Texas, court do not list attorneys who could speak on behalf of Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, both jailed in the death of Jocelyn Nungaray.

The girl’s body was found Monday in a shallow creek after police said she sneaked out of her nearby home the night before. The medical examiner has determined that her cause of death was strangulation.

Police arrested Martinez and Ramos, who investigators said were roommates, on Thursday. Police said surveillance video showed two men approaching Jocelyn before walking to a Houston convenience store with her. The three then walked together to a bridge, where Jocelyn was killed, police said.

Acting Houston Police Chief Larry Satterwhite said investigators had scoured “every potential video feed” to identify the suspects.

“They were talking to everyone possible that might have seen something or heard something. And their hard work paid off,” Satterwhite said at a news conference Thursday.

The two men are Venezuelan nationals who entered the United States illegally in March, according to a statement Friday from the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Martinez was arrested March 14 and Pena on March 28, both by U.S. Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas, about 670 miles (1078 kilometers) from Houston, the statement said. Both were then released with orders to appear in court at a later date. How they traveled to Houston has not been revealed.

According to court documents filed Friday, the suspects allegedly lured the girl under a bridge and remained with her there for more than two hours. They allegedly took off her pants, tied her up and killed her before throwing her body in the bayou, a Harris County prosecutor wrote in a court filing.

Police said the results of a sexual assault exam on the victim are pending.

A few hundred feet from the US-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, Laura Aldana chuckled at the suggestion – made by both leading presidential candidates – that the region had fallen into chaos.

“Where?” she asked rhetorically. She gestured toward the street outside the downtown formalwear boutique where she works. “There’s almost too little to do here.”

Elsewhere in town, Oscar Felix Jr, a local radio host, shook his head at the idea that there was a crisis. “Yeah, no we are good.”

And a hundred miles east, in the border town of Douglas, Peggy Christiansen, a pastor at the First Presbyterian church, cringed. “I look at those conversations on TV, or on the news – and it just makes me mad,” she said. “The politicians are creating the mayhem.”

In Arizona – a key battleground state – residents living near the border are finding their region the centre of attention in a presidential election cycle where immigration has emerged as a top concern for voters.

The issue has darkened Joe Biden’s hopes for re-election – and the president, sensing this weakness, has promised to “secure the border and secure it now” with harsh new restrictions on people seeking asylum in the US. During the presidential debate last week, the Donald Trump honed in on the issue – redirecting questions about the economy, abortion and the environment to immigration and painting a cataclysmic scene of millions arriving at the border to “destroy our country”. If he wins in November, the former president has promised the detention and mass deportation of unauthorised immigrants, and an expanded border wall.

Here along the border, residents interviewed by the Guardian had many different ideas about how the US should respond to one of the largest surges in migration in the country’s history. But even those with wildly different political views and background were united in their scepticism that all that rhetoric would amount to much.

Some said they were increasingly feeling like pawns in a political game. Many were worried that the election year would further defer the sorts of broad reforms they’ve been requesting for years.

“It is interesting because every time it’s a political campaign, the migrants become a problem,” said Felix Jr, who runs the local Spanish-language radio station Maxima FM. “But they never talk about what is really affecting us.”

At the beginning of the year, the border’s Tucson sector – which stretches from Arizona’s border with New Mexico in the east to the edge of Yuma county in the west – became the busiest region for migrant crossings. Across the border, authorities were apprehending a record number of people – including about 2.4 million people in the fiscal year ending in September 2023.

Panicked local leaders have been publicly calling for more funding and resources from the federal government to shelter and feed the influx of people. In high-profile news reports, disgruntled ranchers and hardened immigration critics have recoiled at what they perceive as intruders on their land.

“I’m afraid of how the media has covered this, and how politicians have exploited that,” said Mark Adams, a coordinator for Frontera De Cristo, a Presbyterian ministry based in Douglas and across the border in Agua Prieta. He and other locals have bristled at characterizations of Douglas and other border towns as chaotic or overrun.

In September of last year, amid a rush of arrivals, Customs and Border Protection started releasing asylum seekers who had been granted humanitarian parole into small, rural communities including Douglas, Bisbee, Nogales and Casa Grande, rather than transporting them to bigger cities. Many of the mayors and sheriffs of these towns balked.

But in Douglas, a town of about 15,500 people, locals sprang into action, Adams said. The local Catholic and Presbyterian church, along with Frontera de Cristo, arranged housing for families and individuals. Local restaurants donated catered meals, and home cooks contributed giant pots of pozole.

Over a six-month period, the coalition welcomed about 8,500 people. The volunteer-run migrant welcome centre ran so smoothly. “Hardly anybody who wasn’t involved knew that this was even happening,” Adams said.

In recent months, as the number of migrant apprehensions dropped, officials once again began busing new arrivals directly to Tucson, where they could more easily seek out legal resources and flights to reunite sponsors or family members in other states. But some in his congregation were almost disappointed they wouldn’t get to welcome more people, Adams said.

“I told them ‘No!’ It’s so much better for them to go to Tucson,” he said, laughing. “But this is a small community and there was just such an outpouring of support. So to see this narrative that the migrants are a burden to our towns is really upsetting.”

Within the town, and all along its outskirts – where remote cattle ranches and scattered homesteads blend into desert and red rock mountains – other residents said the national rhetoric on immigration and the border often clashed with their realities.

Trump’s references, especially, to the border as a “war zone” make her wince, said Christiansen, the pastor.

“But I’m really disappointed that Biden and his people are just starting to do the same thing,” she said. “It’s like people are just starting to sprout this rhetoric that isn’t based on reality.”

Christiansen, who grew up on a cattle ranch about 30 minutes drive out of town and still lives in the country, often sees migrants crossing through her property, as do family members and neighbours. She can empathise with the complicated feelings some locals have about the surge in migration. Many have to contend with trash on their property, cut cattle fences, drained water tanks and other property damage that can cost ranchers earning slim margins of hundreds or thousands of dollars. Some worry about the threat posed by cartels who smuggle people across the border, she said.

But, she added: “In my family, if someone crosses the fence or some smuggler drops them off in the desert, if they need help we give them water and shade and a place to charge their phones. And then we mind our own business.”

Recently, she had offered a drink to a young man who was desperate and dehydrated when officers showed up at her door asking after a person of his description. “I don’t lie, so I had to tell them,” she said. “But this was just a young man and he was desperate. I hugged him, and I said I was sorry.”

West of Nogales, where the border wall slices across the ancestral land of the Tohono O’odham, Faith Ramon sees a monument to an immigration system that has failed both her community and the migrants it was built to deter.

“I keep thinking, why does it have to be like this?” she said.

Construction of the wall during the Trump administration destroyed sacred Tohono O’odham sites and desecrated burial grounds, wreaking ecological disaster in its path. In the ensuing years, she said, enhanced border security measures in the region have led to the near-daily harassment of Tohono O’odham nation members.

Anyone who doesn’t look white is at risk of getting pulled over or interrogated, said Ramon, a member of the Tohono O’odham nation and a community organiser with the progressive group Lucha, which is challenging an Arizona ballot measure that would empower local law enforcement agents to similarly target and question anyone they suspect to be undocumented.

Last year, border patrol agents shot and killed 58-year-old Raymond Mattia outside his home on the Tohono O’odham reservation. “If they want to secure the border, then they should be doing that,” she said. “Not hanging around my grandma’s backyard or my community store.”

“People are coming just for the quote-unquote American dream. And it’s becoming a nightmare,” she said, for everyone.

In a region where people have long felt ignored by both political parties, residents were divided over Biden’s recent executive order – which shuts down the border to nearly all asylum seekers once the average for daily unauthorised crossings hits 2,500.

When Biden announced the order earlier this month, Kat Rodriguez, the activist in Tucson, had just completed an annual 75-mile trek from Sasabé, Mexico, through the desert to Tucson, to honour migrants who died making the long journey north. “Every election, historically and consistently, the border becomes this poker chip that politicians throw in there to show that they’re tough,” she said. “And it seems like there’s this race to the bottom with some of these policies of who can be more draconian.”

She and other advocates worried that the restrictions would further push desperate people to try to cross covertly rather than wait to apply for asylum. “People are already waiting for unreasonable amounts of time,” she said. “And this just puts even more people in a vulnerable position.”

Some immigrant advocates and local leaders have also pointed out the order doesn’t come with additional funding or resources for enforcement, or for cities struggling to provide for the influx of people. And it’s unclear that the order would deter economic migrants crossing unlawfully, many of whom understand they do not qualify for asylum and therefore make treacherous journeys across the desert to evade authorities.

Others were more optimistic. “It makes me think Biden is looking out for the country,” said Rob Victor, a retired border patrol agent who has since settled in Douglas. Agents have been overwhelmed in recent years, he said, as have cities not just along the border and across the country who lacked the resources to shelter asylum seekers waiting in the US for their cases to be worked out in immigration courts.

That order, along with Biden’s executive action shielding the undocumented spouses of US citizens from deportation, are steps in the right direction to allow the immigration judges and patrol agents to focus on existing applications and border security, he said.

But on their own, the actions aren’t enough to address pressure at the border, he continued. “The answers are not at the border enforcement level, or at the border patrol level. We need comprehensive immigration reform,” he said.

He’d like to see the US hire hundreds more immigration judges, so that those seeking asylum don’t have to wait for years for a court date without the ability to earn money for themselves. And there should be more opportunities for temporary work visas for people who come to the US primarily looking for work, he said. “That has to be negotiated between the Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “Let’s get the Squad involved in this. And let’s get some conservative Republicans too. And Kyrsten Sinema – she’s a Democrat but moderate,” he said, referring to the Arizona senator, who visited Douglas earlier this year to deliver the bad news that congressional action on immigration was unlikely in 2024 after Trump helped sink the effort in February.

But Congress has repeatedly failed to reform the immigration system for decades. And people on both sides of the border have grown weary.

“For me it’s been three years,” said Maria Luisa Garcia, 55, who waits on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales, Sonora, each week – to meet with her niece on the US side, in Nogales, Arizona.

Garcia cannot cross to the US until her visa application is processed and her niece, who is also applying for residency, cannot cross south while her application is pending.

The two link fingers through the gaps in the rust-red steel bollards. “One more year, and return, they told me. One more and one more.” she said, shaking her head.