The day after Title 42 the hottest border on the planet boils with the same intensity as in previous days. The feasibility of the turning point that Washington seeks with the reactivation of Title 8 and all the measures that accompany it, some in alliance with Mexico, is still unknown.. At the moment, the US agents continued the administrative processing of the hundreds and hundreds of emigrants who managed to jump to the other side during the “now or never” of the last few days..

Uncertainty reigns on both sides of the border, heightened by the fact that a Florida judge has suspended the authorities' strategy, which sought to release groups and families of emigrants to remain in US territory while their future was decided.. The facilities of the Border Patrol (CBP) are at the limit before the arrival of thousands of emigrants.

The dilemma for the thousands who remain on the Mexican side and for the many thousands who advance from the south is different from yesterday. In Tapachula, on the southern border with Guatemala, emigrants protested because the Mexican authorities have stopped granting permits to continue their journey north. The National Institute of Migration has also closed its 33 shelters.

In Ciudad Juárez and other border cities with the US, such as Matamoros or Tijuana, emigrants already know that if they are caught trying to cross the gigantic wall they will be deported, even that they will not be able to travel to the United States for five years.. Some have decided to persist in the attempt, with the coyotes (“migration intermediaries”, as the experts call them), hungrier than ever.

“They are asking for $5,500 to cross through Sonoyta (the border with Lukeville, in Arizona). You pay half now and the other half when you arrive in the city of your choice in Texas. Impossible for me, we haven't eaten for two days,” says Guatemalan farmer Apolinario Morán Escalante, 32, as soon as he gets off the Beast, the train that crosses Mexico from south to north and that has torn to pieces so many bodies during decades of migration.. Along the way part of the emigrants got off the railway after reaching different agreements with the coyotes and “polleros”.

The other option that Washington offers to immigrants seeking asylum is to use the CBP One App, which provides a date and time for an appointment with US agents, who will give the initial approval, or not, to your application.. Complaints about its malfunction are constant, despite the fact that it has become the only hope for what has come this far..

“The problem is much more complicated and unfortunately with technology the bureaucratic incapacity of the immigration system cannot be solved,” María Puerta Riera, a professor of American government in Florida, clarifies to EL MUNDO. “Asking that same system to expedite hundreds of thousands of defensive asylum applications, which is the one at the border, is an aspiration disconnected from reality.. You just have to see the bottleneck of administrative asylums, those that occur within the territory, where applicants for political asylum must wait years for their interviews. Work permits take up to a year,” concludes the political scientist.

“I want to enter through the front door (appointment from the App and subsequent granting of asylum),” says Rafael Briceño, 33, despite everything, after having obtained the appointment for next week after “seven months in this odyssey.”.

The Venezuelan shoemaker from Ciudad Bolívar, on the border with Brazil, has already lived through the bitter experience of expulsion. “One goes with a mission, with a purpose, and has the certainty and agility to cross the border. I threw myself down the mountain and there I was caught by immigration in El Paso, Texas. I was in prison for 17 days and they started the process. They took me out in handcuffs the other day on a plane directly to Tijuana (1,200 kilometers away).. Of the hundreds that were there, only twenty were allowed to continue to the US, the rest were expelled. But I can't give up, I have to keep fighting to support my family,” he told this newspaper..

The shoemaker patiently waits for the evangelical pastors of a temple located very close to the railway station to distribute dinner every night to Venezuelans, Haitians and Central Americans.. Rafael has a theory, amassed over time and with his experience at the border: the chances of staying on the other side to fulfill the “American dream” are 50% for all who arrive here.. No statistical data supports his thesis.