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Matamoros
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Natasha: Migrant Protection Protocol Survivor Story #3

When your choices are persecution, solitary confinement, or going underground, ‘protection’ is prevarication

The border encampment in Matamoros that had become a makeshift community for thousands has now been emptied of the final 700, or so, souls still living there when Biden announced the end of MPP. But not all 700 camp inhabitants, like Perla, have been allowed to cross. Roughly 70 individuals with “complex cases” remain in […]

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Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #2: Perla

Fleeing political persecution only to be persecuted by politics at the US border, this front-line worker finally gets her day in court

Perla has been a professional pharmacist for 22 years. Even as a political refugee living in a tent meant for weekend camping, trapped by circumstance and a cruel immigration policy, the Nicaraguan grandmother managed to ply her trade and make herself useful to the thousands of other refugees halted at the US border by the […]

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Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #1: Gabriel

This businessman and his family survived the trek north only to be trapped in Mexico by Trump’s cruel America. Will they now get to cross?

When Gabriel and his family pitched their tent in the Matamoros refugee camp, they thought it would be for a few months. They were broke, exhausted, and confused. They decided they could endure the indignity of living in the mud on the banks of the Rio Bravo at least until their first asylum hearing. When […]

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Redneck Revolutionary

How a red-state rebel turned off Rush Limbaugh and became the volunteer sanitation engineer and everyday hero for a refugee camp

Whatever I was expecting, Brendon Tucker was not it. A young man with a big presence in the Brownsville/Matamoros humanitarian community, he’s the Angry Tías favorite nephew and Team Brownsville’s prodigal son; the backbone of GRM and the right and left hands of Resource Center Matamoros (RCM). While only 25, his journey here is fascinating, for Tucker was brought up on a diet of right-wing media and racist bile.

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My Coworker Lives in a Tent

The American Dream turned nightmare on the Mexican border

I met Nathan Boddy and his wife, Dr. Johanna Dreiling, on a recent trip to Matamoros, Mexico, on the border with Brownsville, Texas. I was there to report on the surge of grassroots volunteers responding to the crisis in the absence of a government or major NGO response. Dr. Johanna was working at the camp […]

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Grassroots aid workers bring hope and healing across the border

Volunteers deliver relief where major NGOs fear to tread

In the absence of big NGOs, volunteers regularly cross into one of Mexico’s most dangerous cartel zones to support asylum seekers stranded there by U.S. policy.

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