When Luis López was lost in Panama's Darien Gap last year with his pregnant wife, their two children and her grandmother, he often knelt in the mud to beg God not to abandon them.
While the Biden administration has touted the new policy as a way to stabilize the border region and discourage illegal migration, thousands of people“The border and what happens at the border is not the cause of the problem associated with immigration, it’s a symptom of a system broken in many ways,” said El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who has assisted the López family since they arrived at the shelter on diocesan grounds last September.
After the threats expanded to his sister, his ex-wife and their two children, López sold his truck company and set off through Colombia and then Central America. A smuggler who took their entire savings in exchange for ferrying them by boat to avoid the Darien Gap instead led them straight into it. “The children were screaming, ‘Mom, my dad!'” Oriana Marcano, 29, recalled. “My only solution was to get down on my knees — 'My God, don’t take him from me.’”
Two hours later, Marcano went into labor and was taken to the hospital. López was left behind, with no money and no certainty the family would be allowed to stay beyond the night. The man who had promised to sponsor them in the U.S. —“And I met this gentleman dressed in black, with white hair, who told me ‘Be calm, don’t worry,' in his tentative Spanish,” López recalled.
El Paso shelter leaders are unsure how many people will arrive in the coming weeks: how many will be released by U.S. authorities, how many will be deported, how many are still walking through Central America, desperate for a way into the U.S.
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