MATAMOROS, MEXICO – At its height, more than 3,000 asylum seekers lived in the tent city in Matamoros, on the shores of the Rio Grande—a stone’s throw from another life in the United States. The encampment first began to take shape in 2019, just a few tents in a plaza abutting Gateway International Bridge, as the newly implemented Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) took effect. Also known as Remain in Mexico, this Trump administration policy required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings, sometimes for months or years.
In border cities like Matamoros or Reynosa, criminal cartels thrive, their hold amplified by an increasingly militarized border that migrants cannot easily cross. They prey on those migrants, confident that they can extract American dollars that the migrants’ relatives in the U.S. can wire—to pay the cartels to release the migrants they’ve taken hostage. Melvin, an asylum seeker who spoke to the Prospect from a shared apartment in Matamoros, said he was kidnapped in Matamoros and held for six days until his father sent money from Maryland.
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