Morgan Smith is a freelance photographer and writer living in New Mexico. For the last decade, he has been traveling to the US-Mexico border to document conditions there and assist a number of humanitarian organizations. A majority of his trips have been to Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso, Texas. Juárez is frequently considered the most dangerous city in the world.

 

Despite Juárez' corruption and violence, Smith works to show a different side of the city, one characterized by individuals who struggle to alleviate its grinding poverty, often in heroic circumstances. In issue 14, High Desert Journal featured a number of Smith’s photographs, and we are happy to do so again. 

 

In this issue, Smith’s focus is on migrants from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Fleeing the violence, corruption, and poverty in their home countries, these individuals and families have made the grueling and dangerous trip north where they now await asylum hearings with US officials in the hope that they will be able to begin new lives in the United States. Because of the lack of facilities, some have chosen to camp, often for weeks, on a narrow side street next to the international bridge. 

 

Smith explains:

 

“These families would turn themselves in to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the border where they were given a number for an initial asylum hearing. They would then wait in border cities like Juárez until they were called for that hearing. If they passed their initial hearing, previously they would be allowed to enter the US and stay with family members or sponsors until their final judicial. Former President Trump changed this with his Remain in Mexico program, an extraordinarily harsh and dangerous process, though this has now been reversed by the Biden administration.

 

“The key advocate for migrants in Juárez is Padre Javier Calvillo, the director of La Casa del Migrante, a large facility that can accommodate up to 500 migrants. In late 2018, we began bringing him much-needed food and clothing, as well as interviewing migrants and documenting their struggles. Hearing their stories was always emotionally grueling, particularly as the asylum rules got tighter and tighter, the waits longer and longer, and the chance of achieving asylum status more and more remote. These are people who have left their home countries; paid exorbitant sums to “coyotes” who have promised to get them to the US where, they claim, entry will be easy; made grueling trips of at least 2,000 miles; and are then stuck in a strange and dangerous city, like Juárez, with no support other than what leaders like Padre Javier can provide.”