Over the past month, this small stretch of river has turned into the symbolic ground zero of the US battle over the border and immigration, the central issue of a contentious election year. But its fault lines extend well beyond these waters. This is also the epicentre of the problems that have dogged both America and Mexico for years: drug cartel money, the exodus from crumbling regimes and an existential struggle over the identity of the United States itself.

In December, Border Patrol agents processed more than 71,000 migrants and asylum seekers who crossed the river into the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass. They formed part of a record number of more than 300,000 migrants processed along the entire border in that month. In response, on January 10, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered his state National Guard (a section of the army under the governor’s control) to fortify Shelby Park, a 47-acre patch of scrubby land by the river.

In a historical irony, the park is named after a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender to the Union in the Civil War. When the Biden White House ordered that Border Patrol agents be let into Shelby, Abbott refused, setting up a stand-off between the state and federal powers over who polices the border. The Texas governor has also clashed with Washington over the use of razor wire, which the federal government argues is unnecessary and harmful. Activists of the Right have sided with Abbott: hundreds declared they would lead a convoy to support Texas and “take our border back”.

Travelling in from Mexico City, I arrive in Piedras Negras on a Friday night to find a rainy and windy Rio Grande, and meet Benicio Herrera, a hardware store owner walking his Labrador along the bank. When I ask about the fortifications on the US shore, he shrugs his shoulders. “There are two sides to this,” he says. “On one hand, the migrants have human rights. But on the other, we have never seen numbers like this before so there is going to be a reaction.”

Opinions on the migrant surge in Mexico are mixed. Over in a park by the bridge into the US, I talk to Cipriano Arguello, who’s selling potato chips and chicharrón (pork rinds), who is sympathetic to those crossing. “People forget where they have come from,” he says. “We are all migrants.” Watching over his juice stand in a nearby market, however, Francisco Vázquez says he supports the hardened measures. “They have to implement tactics for security,” he says. “They should have done this a long time before.” The Piedras Negras residents also have varied opinions on the convoy of activists making their way to Texas. Some refer to them as “patriotas” or “patriots”, while others label them the “anti-migrants”.

These mixed feelings reflect how migration over the US border has transformed in the last decade. The vast majority going over used to be Mexicans, sneaking in between the official bridges to find work. But now Mexicans make up less than a quarter, with the rest coming from around the globe, particularly Venezuela and Honduras, but also South Africa, China and Russia. Most of them enter Mexico through its southern border, before trekking through the cities and countryside to the north.

On the Saturday morning, I visit the Casa de Migrante, a Catholic shelter where migrants can get a bed. Sitting on the sidewalk, Francisco Lugo tells me how he fled Venezuela with his wife and four children, after he was threatened by a government-linked militia demanding money. He wants to apply for asylum, but like many plans to cross the river and make his application in the United States. Lugo knows nothing about the convoy but has heard about a military build-up. “God will help me find a good time when the water is low and we can go over the river,” he says.

Later, a Cuban man arrives at the hostel and reveals he had been kidnapped. A mechanic by trade in his late 20s, Minardo Escalona describes how he was abducted in the city of Monterrey, taking a taxi which handed him to the gangsters. He was kept for three days until his family in Cuba sent $2,000 by Western Union. “They give you scraps to eat, just to keep you alive to pay,” he says. “I’m glad I made it but I feel terrible that my family had to lose all that money.”

Gangsters, usually affiliated to the cartels, have been kidnapping migrants in Mexico for over a decade, but there has been an uptick in cases. It’s an especially cruel crime: wrenching money from the poorest and most desperate. But human smuggling in Mexico is a bloody and ever-evolving racket. In the Eighties, the smugglers, known as polleros or chicken herders, were local players who would take migrants over the border for a couple of hundred dollars. As the fences got higher and demand got bigger, networks have formed that stretch from American cities and down into Latin America. A Central American can now expect to pay about $15,000 to go from their home all the way to their destination in Chicago or San Francisco. The human smugglers work with the cartels, and that price buys immunity from kidnapping (or so they hope). Those who can’t afford or don’t want to pay, risk getting nabbed.

While cartels control most of the Mexican border, Piedras Negras is in the state of Coahuila, which has a heavily armed police force that has chased out the remnants of the Zetas cartel. However, Isabel Turcios, a nun who runs the hostel, says the police have simply taken over the business of shaking down migrants themselves. “They hunt them down and they get every peso they can from them,” she said. “It’s terrible.” I ask Turcios about the convoy and the barbed wire. “There are women and children crossing,” she says. “Why do they keep giving these people the incentive to go north and then punish them for it?”

As Saturday heats up, I go to the river and see the Texas National Guard speeding up and down on boats, each manned by two soldiers. I talk to a group of their Mexican opposite-numbers watching from the south side. An officer tells me their instructions can vary on whether to arrest migrants or let them through, but in recent weeks they have been working hard to round them up. “We do the work of containment of the migrants,” he says. “I feel bad detaining these people looking for a better life but that is what our orders are.”

These Mexican efforts are a large part of the reason that there are not many migrants actually crossing this weekend, as activists, cameras and politicians descend on the area. In January, US border authorities processed 176,000 migrants, a big drop from December although still a high number. But the pressure has not disappeared: there are already reports that, since the start of February, the migrant flows have shifted to the parts of the border in Arizona and California.

A decisive solution remains elusive. The successive governments of Obama, Trump and now Biden have all worked to get Mexico to slow down the migrant flow using a range of incentives and threats, but the crisis has only grown. And last week, this cooperation was threatened by a tangential matter. Three media outlets, including the investigative organisation ProPublica, released stories relating to an old Drug Enforcement Administration probe into a cartel that allegedly financed the 2006 election campaign of Mexican President Andrés Obrador. The President reacted angrily, accusing the US State Department of plotting against him, and said this could threaten how Mexico was containing the migrants. Biden was forced to personally call Obrador and made clear the two were “committed to continuing their productive partnership”.

Thus the situation on the ground remains critical but stable. Travelling with Mexican investigative journalist Juan Alberto Cedillo, I head north of Piedras Negras. As we trek along a dirt path, a police car speeds over to check who we are. We show our press IDs and move on. While Juan holds back, I head further into the hills and see a movement in the trees. Walking into the woodland, I spot the khaki of uniforms and see two soldiers crouched with a dog and their guns.

Unlike the troops in town, they aren’t friendly. They demand I hand over my phone and, when I refuse, they threaten to set the dog on me. They are tense, looking through my phone and accusing me of making a call to give their location away. When Juan rings, they put him on speaker and I say I am being detained. He quickly alerts a group of journalists who keep an eye on security. Eventually, the soldiers check by radio and confirm I’d been checked out by the police. I am allowed to walk away.

Early the following day, I make the journey everyone is here for, crossing the bridge into Eagle Pass and the United States. The convoy to “take our border back” had been staying at a ranch north of the city. There were reportedly a few hundred attendees, far fewer than some had hoped, or feared, and no violence. There had been similar, smaller convoys to Yuma, Arizona and San Ysidro, California. Governor Abbott, along with 13 other Republican governors, is holding a press conference inside Shelby Park but the convoy members aren’t allowed in. Most have headed home but there are still a few in downtown Eagle Pass.

Many of the convoy members are retirees in their 70s, and don’t at all fit the profile of ferocious MAGA insurrectionists. I talk for a long while with a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran from Texas and Frank Lite, a 60-year-old businessman from Tennessee. They are both strong conservatives, and say that while they are fine with legal immigration, the border needs to be secured. And they enthusiastically support the Texas governor’s taking the park, “1,000%,” as Lite puts it. “He should have done this three years ago.”

More from this author

Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl

By Ioan Grillo

Walking down the street, I talk to another group of retirees from the convoy, including a former airplane mechanic and his school teacher wife who drove a thousand miles from Florida, picking up others on the way. They all seem in a festive mood and talk about meeting good Christians while protesting to close the border. Outside Shelby Park itself, there is a counter-demonstration of activists protesting the National Guard’s seizure of the park. “Our river, our land,” says one banner. “Trump for prison,” says another. An elderly member of the convoy in a wheelchair lightly heckles them from across the road.

Jesse G. Herrera, 70, a retired poet in the counter-protest, says the park should be used by the residents. “It’s a city park. It’s not a state park. It’s not a federal park. It belongs to the people.” When I ask about the razor wires, he is dismissive. “It’s a waste of money. It’s not doing anything, it’s a joke. It’s political theatre.” Inside the park itself, TV crews are getting ready to film the governors. I find Jacob Tackett, an army veteran of Afghanistan from Virginia, and Nolan Meeks, who works for a body armour company in California. They flew down to document the event, thinking it would be far bigger.

Tackett said he was especially keen to verify the claims of whether there was a genuine stand-off between federal and state forces. And, after speaking to the troops, he said the reality was far more peaceful than reports made out. “The most poignant quote I got was from a company commander. His phrase was: ‘If you look at our Humvees, none of them have guns mounted on the trucks. What does that tell you?’” The supposed militarisation of the border is clearly an exaggeration, Tackett says. “If there were a stand-off, there would be guns mounted on trucks. And clearly that isn’t the situation. Clearly, the federal authorities were happy to have the assistance.”

Before the politicians arrive, the troops set up a backdrop in front of the river with Humvees and soldiers and barbed wire. The 14 governors arrive in a convoy of armoured vehicles, and then give short speeches that are live-streamed on Facebook. “Now that we have taken control of this area, for the past three days, there is an average of only three people crossing illegally in this area,” Abbott says. I walk back into Mexico along with Tackett and Meeks and watch the rest of the governor press conference from the Mexican side.

Looking down on Shelby Park, you can see what a small section of border it represents. Whatever Abbott has achieved here is no gamechanger. Tackett says that seeing the border for himself shows how much both sides distort the issue for their bases. “It’s very clearly a dog and pony show to drive donations,” he says. “There is a corrupted incentive structure from the conservative side of the house not to fix the problem either… The migrants themselves are the currency.”

Having spent two decades covering America’s southern border with Mexico, it’s hard to disagree with him. Forces deep within their political and economic systems lack the will or ability to solve an overwhelming problem, yet know fully well how it can be deployed to make hay on the airwaves. The result isn’t just a setting for hope and tragedy — but a stage for political theatre.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador claimed the migrants themselves had started the inferno, after burning mattresses in protest at their treatment. But witnesses denied this, claiming that they were stripped of possessions, including lighters, when they were processed. Whatever the cause, the fire, which claimed the lives of at least 38 victims, is a potent symbol of the dysfunction that reigns on the US-Mexican border.

The grim reality, of course, is that it is just one symbol among many. Two weeks before the fire, hundreds of asylum seekers, mostly Venezuelan, amassed on a bridge crossing and stormed past the guards on the Mexican side of the bridge — only to run into a thick line of armed officers on the US side. The attempted rush ended in failure.

Perhaps more than any other, the border problem is the most divisive issue in the United States. And of all the concerns surrounding it, the contested status of asylum provokes some of the most emotive responses. But amid all the bipartisan furore lies a simple truth: the effective collapse of the asylum system can be blamed on both Republicans and Democrats.

There are now almost 1.6 million asylum seekers in the US awaiting hearings, with an average wait of over four years. The number has increased seven-fold since 2014, rising steadily under Obama, Trump, and now Biden. A decade of internecine political battles has bent the asylum system out of shape, with measures being constantly introduced, rescinded, and challenged, in a splattering of judicial cases that reach all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Most recently, both Trump and Biden have failed to get a legal handle on the situation. A pandemic measure to expel people who have been in a foreign country with a communicable disease, known as Title 42, was first used under Trump in 2020, repurposing a clause from a 1944 health law. Despite Biden promising to throw it out, Title 42 is still used, and is applied arbitrarily in different areas on different days to different nationalities. Last summer, meanwhile, Biden revoked a previous agreement made by Trump in 2019, which stipulated that applicants wait in Mexico for processing, encouraging refugee camps to spring up in cartel-controlled cities. Since then, thousands of migrants have been stuck in Mexico, while the camps simply re-emerged over time. Migrants who do make it over can be flown or bused thousands of miles, only to be expelled over a different section of the border.

Those who manage to stay in the US face a different form of bureaucratic chaos. A private contractor was paid to put ankle monitors on some of those released, but was recently found to be misreporting its numbers. Elsewhere, asylum seekers are being released from detention centres without the documents they need to appear in court. “It’s in really terrible shape,” says immigration lawyer Vinesh Patel, who says it could mean the numbers of asylum seekers are even higher than the records show.

On the ground, hopefuls trying to cross are confronted by mixed messages and haphazard rulings. Outside a shelter in El Paso, I meet Anthony Zamora, a 33-year-old barber from Venezuela. In November, Zamora fled his home in Caracas after a government-backed militia threatened him for not paying extortion. “They are extremists,” he says. “They would kill me.”

Zamora travelled over land through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, where he arrived in Juárez and tried to use a US government app to apply for asylum. After weeks of it not working, he crossed the river and handed himself to border patrol agents to make his case. From there, he was flown 700 miles to San Diego, where he was ejected back into Mexico under Title 42. On the Mexican side, Zamora caught a bus back to Juárez and crossed again into El Paso. This time, he has successfully begun an asylum application. “Thanks to God, I have started the process,” he says. “I am waiting for my audience. I want to explain why I fled.”

This crisis has its root in the dramatic rise in those arriving at the border to claim asylum. During the Nineties and 2000s, the majority of those crossing the border without papers were Mexicans looking for work. The busiest corridor was the Sonora Desert, where the Border Patrol made the largest number of arrests, usually returning people to their homeland. Since 2014, however, the majority arriving are from across Latin America. Rather than trekking over the desert, they head to the Rio Grande, which is closer when you traverse Mexico from Guatemala. And an increasing number apply for asylum.

More from this author

Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial

By Ioan Grillo

Dating from 1951, US asylum law states that “any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States… irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum”. This can be lost in some news coverage of the border, which frequently discards the nuance between economic migrants and asylum seekers, the latter of whom are purportedly fleeing for their lives and freedom. This line can already be blurred in the first place when people are running from both bullets and hunger.

Today, the influx of asylum seekers from Latin America is partly a consequence of a swing back to authoritarian governments in the region over the last decade. The most severe case is Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro’s regime has jailed hundreds of political prisoners and where GDP plummeted by roughly three-quarters between 2014 and 2021, leaving millions malnourished. Since 2015, more than seven million people have fled the country, an exodus even greater than that from Syria. Cuba and Nicaragua also have authoritarian governments and correspondingly high numbers of asylum seekers.

The past decade has also seen a significant uptick in gang and cartel violence. These groups, from Mexico to Venezuela, don’t only traffic drugs but work hand-in-glove with national police to rig votes, steal oil, and help smuggle people across the border — including those running from the gangs themselves. Known as coyotes or polleros (chicken herders), people smugglers have networks that reach across the US and throughout Latin America. They move people over deserts, across rivers, around the border in boats, and under it through tunnels.

In the last decade, those heading north have also gradually become more aware of their right to claim asylum. The UN Refugee Agency has campaigned widely, handing out pamphlets on the road. Activist groups have also grown and helped organise migrant caravans of people marching northward. Smugglers themselves will also promote the fact that people can claim asylum, offering to take migrants over the border where they can hand themselves into Border Patrol. Overall, migrant smuggling in Mexico is now a huge business, making an estimated $14 billion a year.

Suggested reading

The cruelty of Biden's border policy

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

Back in the US, when the asylum seekers finally get a day in court, most are turned away. This is because asylum laws favour those who are persecuted for being a religious or ethnic minority or for their political views, rather than those fleeing gangsters. According to one recent analysis, the rejection rate was 87% for Hondurans, 86% for Guatemalans, and 85% for Mexicans, while Venezuelans had a much higher success rate of 55%. “Venezuela and Nicaragua present more clear-cut cases of political persecution,” says Patel. But the rejections do not dissuade people from applying, especially when they can wait four years inside the United States for their hearing. Quite the opposite: this delay only encourages more people to come.

Meanwhile, despite Republican perceptions, the Biden administration is currently trying to make it more difficult for asylum seekers. It has, for instance, continued to liberally apply Title 42, with between 60,000 and 100,000 expelled under it every month in 2021 and 2022. And last month, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule that would make “certain noncitizens” ineligible for asylum if they transited third countries before reaching the United States. This could be a game-changer, effectively stopping anyone except neighbouring Mexicans or Canadians from asking for asylum. But it could also get thrown out in court, with advocacy groups arguing it directly contravenes the 1951 law. The Trump administration attempted a similar measure in 2019 and a judge struck it down. “Biden is becoming Expeller-in-Chief,” says Rubén García, who manages a migrant hostel in El Paso.”He is out Trumping Trump.”

More from this author

Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl

By Ioan Grillo

Perhaps the only way to fix this intractable crisis would be for politicians to have an honest debate. Do Americans want to honour the spirit of the Refugee Convention they approved in 1951 and make it function properly? Or do they want to change the law itself ? A choice needs to be made. The alternative — squeezing an already broken system — clearly isn’t working.

It is hard to make sense of such debates on the ground, though, far removed from the corridors of power. Outside a migrant hostel in the city of Tijuana, I meet Jose Luis Aguilar, a 27-year-old from El Salvador who fled his home with his wife and two children after he was shot by gang members. He was unsure how to apply for asylum and the hostel managers had stopped giving out information. “I am just trying to get by day by day,” he told me. “I thank God I survived and I pray we will find a way.”

Such progressive posturing may soon run out of steam: faced with a looming humanitarian crisis, the Democratic mayors of both cities, Eric Adams of New York and Muriel Bowser of D.C., are now begging the federal government for assistance.

Yet perhaps the most surprising element of all this chaos is the way the media have blamed the Right for this crisis. “Cold-Blooded Texas Guv Vows to Dump Asylum Seekers in the Middle of D.C.,” was how the Daily Beast covered the story. “GOP Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to the East Coast,” explained the New York Times. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called Abbott’s policy “shameful” and a “political ploy”.

The migrants themselves, however, are under no illusions about who deserves credit for their arrival in the US. “Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” one migrant told reporters back in March. “He promised the Haitian community he will help them,” a Haitian migrant told Fox News. “I just need [the US] to tell me when we can cross,” a Honduran woman told Politico.

Where did millions of migrants get the idea that Biden had invited them in? From Biden himself, naturally. During the 2020 primary debates, then-candidate Biden said that migrants illegally crossing the border should not be detained, and like nearly every other candidate on the debate stage, he said he would decriminalise illegal border crossing. Millions of migrants were listening, along with the human traffickers who extort, torture, rape and kill them.

More from this author

The media's betrayal of the poor

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

And Biden has more or less followed through as President. From Day One, he stopped construction of a border wall with Mexico, ended President Trump’s travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and dramatically reduced deportations — from more than 267,000 in 2019 to just 59,000 in 2021. The Biden administration also vowed to end Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that allowed migrants to be turned away due to the pandemic, though a federal judge in Louisiana has for now blocked Biden’s attempts to end the policy. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it plans to end another effective Trump-era program, Remain in Mexico, which allowed border agents to turn migrants away and have them wait in Mexico until their removal hearings.”

What’s most peculiar about all this is how the administration’s de facto open-border policy represents a remarkable U-turn on the Left. Until very recently, free-market Republicans were the ones pushing for things like amnesty and easy access to migrant labour, while the Democrats were on the side of limiting immigration. Back in the Nineties, Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress and Democrat Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, wrote that the commission found “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labour force”.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch Brothers proposal,” socialist Senator Bernie Sanders scoffed as recently as 2015. “What Right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.” Fast forward to that 2020 primary debate and Sanders, just like Biden, said he would support decriminalising illegal border crossing.

Suggested reading

Leavers were right about immigration

By Paul Embery

This reversal is especially surprising given that the Democrats’ base — or what used to be their base — agrees more with Bernie 2015 than Bernie 2020. In 2019, a large majority of black and Hispanic Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security to reduce illegal immigration. This shouldn’t be surprising: Illegal immigration has been tied to a 20-60% decrease in black working-class wages. Another recent study suggested that immigration accounts for a third of the decline in the black employment rate over the last 40 years. “Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks.”

Why did the Democrats abandon these voters? Many who support mass immigration do so ostensibly because of the overall effect on GDP, which is positive. But they tend not to ask, positive for whom? As the economist George Borjas has argued, immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. In other words, among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English. For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.

Point this out and you can count on a member of the Squad to call you racist — a ridiculous accusation given who has paid the highest price for mass immigration. “The history of citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said back in 2019. “It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.” When Vice President Kamala Harris told would-be migrants to stay home, Ilhan Omar tweeted: “We should not abandon our values and rights to far-Right white nationalists.”

Suggested reading

Why Hispanics gave up on the Left

By Alex Perez

But these accusations of bigotry hide a class divide that has seen the Democrats choose educated white elites over the working class again and again. Remember that immigrants make up nearly 50% of America’s household servants, 42% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and 35% of grounds maintenance workers. It is these migrants’ employers, not the migrants themselves, who are the target audience for Democrats’ “anti-racist” moralising.

Of course, many of these progressives also have compassion for migrants crossing the border in search of a better life. I do, too. It’s impossible not to feel for people seeking a better life for their children. But what about America’s own struggling workers? Why no compassion for them? Like so much of what passes for political debate in America in 2022, the fight between Governor Abbott and Mayors Adams and Bowser is less about values and more about interests. Big-city Democrats want to flatter the moral vanity of their elite base by rhetorically supporting illegal immigration, but only so long as border states such as Texas and Arizona are the ones who foot the bill.

Moreover, the “compassionate” approach is incentivising truly dangerous behaviours, leading to parents drowning in the Rio Grande with their infants and to children riding La Bestia migrant train and watching as others fall off to their deaths. A third of women who make the trip across the border admit to being sexually abused, and nearly everyone is preyed upon in some way by the powerful cartels that now effectively control the border. Trump may have gone too far with his family separation policy, but his relentless approach to the border ended up preventing a lot of suffering, both to would-be migrants and to American workers. Since the start of 2022, authorities have found 609 bodies on the border, a record high that doesn’t even include those discovered further north in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Some of these deaths made headlines, such as the 50 migrants who perished in the back of an abandoned truck in south Texas earlier this year, or the migrant from Nicaragua who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in May, or the 22-year-old who drowned in April. But most of these tragic and totally preventable deaths go unnoticed.

This is Leftist compassion curdled into cruelty. And it’s not Governor Abbott’s fault — it’s President Biden’s.

Life in Calais is an endless cycle of displacement, followed by disappointment. I arrived here in July 2016. I didn’t have much choice: back in Afghanistan, the insurgent Taliban had put out a warrant for my capture, incensed that I had supported the US military. So I left my family and friends. I fled.

Shortly before I arrived, the notorious ‘Jungle’ had been evacuated following clashes with riot police: thousands of displaced migrants were displaced once again. They have been trying to find shelter in several places in and around the city ever since.

Often they seek refuge in abandoned barracks or wooded areas, finding shelter in makeshift tents covered with tarpaulins. There isn’t much point in building anything sturdier, since the police launch eviction raids every 48 hours. The camps aren’t hard to find: they constantly smell of burning wood, mixed with the odour of waste that the local authorities refuse to collect. When the evictions take place, people do not always have time to collect their personal belongings, leaving the ground littered with blankets, wet clothes, and children’s toys.

Following several large-scale evictions in the past year, the authorities have destroyed the bushes and forests where the displaced were sheltering. Huddled people have been replaced by fences, concrete walls, and surveillance cameras that carry a simple message: you must not return. Much of Calais is like a war zone, with people surviving under the fear of the police, the evictions, and the violence that can arise between the different communities. It is difficult to access food, water, and medical services. And then winter sets in; every day, rain and wind flood and destroy makeshift shelters and lives.

Most of the people waiting here have fled countries scarred by war. Among the 1,500 people here are Afghans, Sudanese, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kuwaitis. Most of them are single men, but there are also families with children and single women. All of them see at the 30km expanse that separates Calais from England as a source of hope.

They all have different reasons for wanting to get across. Some have family waiting over there; some are left with little choice by the Dublin Regulation system, which could send them back the way they came. Given that the UK is no longer bound by the regulation, the beaches of Kent seem an enticing prospect.

For those wary of crossing in the winter months, there are some accommodation options in Calais — the Centres d’Accueil et d’Examen des Situations (CAES) are partly financed by the British authorities. But they are not particularly suitable for those people who only intend to pass through. They are in towns far from Calais without public transport — not ideal if you want to try a boat-crossing and need to be available immediately if the weather is good.

When I arrived in Calais, I didn’t know where I wanted to go: perhaps to the UK, or even Germany. The decision was made for me. Within a few months, I met an Afghan friend in exile who invited me to stay with him in his flat in Toulouse, while a friend of a friend helped me negotiate the asylum process and secure accommodation in Paris. Within two years, I had refugee status, and frequently returned to Calais to document the migrant crisis with my camera.

Every visit is more difficult; every story is more haunting. Since September last year, the prefecture has issued more than a dozen decrees to prevent organisations not mandated by the state from distributing water and food in the Calais town centre. When, last October, a hundred volunteers tried to prevent an eviction from a camp in Calais in a peaceful manner, the police responded with tear gas.

But it’s not just the police who have created this tragedy. The main funder of the aid providers in Calais, Choose Love, has actually hindered their work in recent months. In May, it forbade the NGOs it funds from distributing leaflets that provide basic “safety at sea” lifesaving information. Organisations were told they had to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” promising not to “carry out activities which risk breaching [UK immigration] law” — or risk having their funding pulled. Last month, Choose Love announced its withdrawal from Northern France, presumably under pressure from the Home Office.

Choose love, they say, as long as you’re not in Calais.

The tragedy continues to unfurl in Calais. Without support from the French Government or British NGOs, the situation has become increasingly desperate. Although the Franco-British border has always been deadly — at least 336 deaths since 1999 — the last few months have been particularly grim. On 24 November, 27 displaced people, including children, drowned while trying to cross the Channel.

The week before, I had met several shipwrecked victims in Grande-Synthe, a town about 20km from Calais. Kazhall Ahmad was from Iraqi Kurdistan and was alone with her three children. She was exhausted; the police had evicted their camp that morning without allowing them to collect their belongings, and she had spent the past month desperately searching for water for her children. Despite their grim situation, the children were hopeful for their lives in England, dreaming of becoming barbers or art teachers. Whether they get there is a different question.

The shocking drowning in November of so many — the worst the Channel has seen since records began in 2014 — turned the spotlight back on Calais. It was the first time I had seen so many journalists in the area. The displaced people I spoke to took heart from this, hopeful that the media attention and the shock it has caused among politicians could make things better.

But if the past years have taught me anything, it’s that when it comes to meaningful action, don’t hold your breath. Over the past month, both French and British politicians have talked up the existence of legal routes and opportunities for visas. But this is nothing more than a distraction. Freedom of movement is a right for Western white people, not for those who are displaced like me.

On both sides of the Channel, governments accuse smugglers of being entirely to blame for the deaths of innocent people. In truth, it’s mostly the lack of legal and safe access routes to the United Kingdom that contributes to the development of these smuggling networks. The smugglers are a key part of the problem: they use people’s distress to make money; they put people in danger by overloading the boats; they lie to people about the crossing being safe; and when migrants refuse to take the boat, they are threatened and abused.

Such facts are inconvenient, though. It’s far easier for the French government to invest thousands upon thousands of euros strengthening border control systems and deploying a Frontex aircraft over the Channel. This militarisation of the border serves no purpose. It will not deter people from trying to cross. They have no other choice; they will continue to pass, but in a more dangerous and clandestine way.

And the smugglers will win, those who are displaced will lose, and the political class will look the other way.