‘No money, nowhere to stay’: asylum seekers wait as Trump’s border restrictions drag on

As a controversial Covid-era immigration policy undergoes review, many asylees languish in limbo in Mexico

Until 2015, the small Mexican town of Sonoyta, Sonora, scarcely figured in the migration landscape of the US-Mexico border, but then migration from Central America and other parts of Latin America began to climb.

In March 2020, when former US president Donald Trump implemented the public health rule Title 42, citing the pandemic as reasoning for shutting down ports of entry to asylum requests at the border, more families began to arrive in the small agricultural town of 17,000 with nowhere to go.