Migrant children attend makeshift school on the US-Mexico border

At the southern border of the United States, pandemic restrictions continue to prevent most migrants from filing their asylum claims on US soil, and new arrivals, including many children, wait in camps and shelters for change Politics.

Over the months, an organization has mobilized former teachers among the refugees to teach the children.

The Sidewalk School for Asylum Seeking Children began nearly three years ago as an effort by a Texas couple to contribute to the humanitarian crisis at the border. This month it officially registered as a US non-profit organization and opened its largest school to date.

About 10 teachers are giving classes to some 500 children in three huge tents erected in a precarious camp a few blocks from the bridge that connects Reynosa, in Mexico, with Hidalgo, Texas.

Under one of those tents, Josué Herman Sánchez Mendoza, 36, speaks into a microphone before dozens of students between the ages of 10 and 17, who are attending a social studies class.

Sanchez teaches the virtues that students should embrace: honesty, patience, tolerance, respect, generosity, and willingness.

“If we don't practice our values, our lives will be more difficult,” Sánchez tells students sitting on sheets of polyfoam on the floor.

Sánchez was an academic and researcher at the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History. One day, together with his family, and like his students, he undertook the perilous journey to the United States border.

Sánchez says he paid various traffickers a total of $17,500 to get his family of five across Mexico for a month. They traversed secret jungle trails and congested highways. They spent 72 hours in an overloaded bus and in a truck with 40 other people without a bathroom. They waited five days hiding in one house and five in another.

“It is the children who suffer the most. As an adult, I understand that I am a refugee, but the child does not. A child says 'I'm hungry, I'm cold, I want to take a bath', and the father feels helpless”, says Sánchez.

A month after leaving home, Sánchez and his family crossed the Rio Grande in inflatable rafts and entered the United States. Border Patrol found them, processed them, and sent them to the Hidalgo-Reynosa bridge in late September.

She has lived in the camp ever since, eating food brought in by local churches and helping the school with its daily classes, which began earlier this month.

The school originated in 2019 when Felicia Rangel and Víctor Cavazos, from Brownsville, Texas, began organizing short informal classes on a sidewalk near a campsite in Matamoros, Mexico, 90 kilometers from Reynosa.

The project has since raised more than $300,000 in grants. It serves meals every day at the Reynosa camp, sponsors 11 portable toilets there, and pays rent for some 20 apartments for vulnerable asylum seekers and office spaces across the street from the Reynosa camp.

He also runs four smaller school projects in the area.

Rangel, 45, says he has met four times with Biden administration officials, in person or by video, to answer questions about the situation across the border. Funding has also been requested from the US government for the project, but has not yet materialized.

“There are so many things we do every day to encourage people, to keep their hope alive,” he added.

For many people, hope was running out in the camp with winter looming and no sign from the US to ease the ban on processing asylum claims during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The so-called Title 42, imposed during the Trump administration, has continued under the Biden administration except for unaccompanied minors.

One day after a cold rain drenched the camp and forced the cancellation of classes, Larisa Michel Flories resumed her Spanish classes through a megaphone. She is a former employee of an NGO in Honduras that advises minors at risk of being recruited by criminal gangs, and now lives in the border camp, where hundreds of blankets and clothes hung out to dry after the deluge.

“How was yesterday?” she asked her class excitedly.

“Bad”, responded more than 50 boys.

However, without the school and the rudimentary instruction it provides, the responses would have been worse.

[Reporting by Dylan Baddour]

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