Juarez dining scene gets Cuban touch amid migrant surge

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JUAREZ, Mexico – Cuban migrants waiting their turn to seek asylum in the U.S. are finding some comfort at Little Habana, a restaurant serving homestyle Cuban food in this city on the border next to El Paso, Texas. Cristina Ibarra was operating a Mexican food restaurant called El Mariachi when she noticed the growing demand for Cuban food. She hired migrants who knew the authentic way to make the different dishes and opened Little Habana on Ramón Corona street downtown. The Cuban workers are grateful for an opportunity to earn enough to pay for their basic needs as they wait to hear from the U.S. about their asylum status.

ICE leaves crowd of migrants stranded in Downtown El Paso for Christmas; community rises to respond with compassion

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EL PASO – Here’s a sense of the scene Sunday evening at the Greyhound bus station about two hours after ICE dropped off more than 150 destitute, scared and confused Central American asylum seekers. Mothers traveling alone with small children clinging to them. Fathers traveling with children who are never more than inches away from each other. Over and over they ask to use my phone. They have phone numbers memorized, or scrawled on worn scraps of paper for family or contacts in the U.S. I dial South Carolina, then New Jersey, Tennessee, California.

El Pasoans rush to respond with compassion as ICE leaves migrants in the streets

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EL PASO – Chaos loomed when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents dropped about 100 Central American migrants at the Greyhound station of this border city without notice Friday night. The families were in a strange city, many with little money and limited ability to contact loved ones for help. Then they were helped by angels. Ruben Garcia, the founder and director of the Annunciation House program that has housed and fed migrants for more than 40 years, knew since Wednesday that ICE planned to begin a new policy of essentially dumping migrants on border city streets. The migrants had been detained for several days in what are supposed to be short-term holding cells along the border in El Paso, and border authorities are struggling to cope with a fresh surge of Central American families coming to the United States to flee poverty, violence and corruption in their home countries.

Juarez has become a limbo for Central American migrants who decided to delay plans to cross into U.S

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By Veronica Martinez

For years Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Ciudad Juarez, has been a haven and a crossing point for immigrants coming from the south, but the uncertainty of new immigration policies under the Trump presidency is convincing some of them to remain at the border indefinitely. In 2015  the shelter received 5,600 immigrants. Last year the number increased to more than 9,000, officials said. Ana Lizeth Bonilla, 28, sways back a stroller back and forth watching her two year-old son, Jose Luis, as he sleeps. “Now, we’re just waiting for her,” the pregnant woman says as her arm rests on her baby bump.