CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Yoneyda Villegas stood on the riverbank under the light of a three-quarter moon and looked northward.
"We tried to cross two nights ago," said Villegas, a 32-year-old Venezuelan migrant, in late May, "but they were tough on us – tough, tough."
As she and dozens of other migrants weighed their chances of successfully crossing the dry Rio Grande and giving themselves up to U.S. Border Patrol agents, Texas troops watched them through a blanket of concertina wire.
On that night, Villegas stood at the center of a tug-of-war between President Joe Biden and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over who controls the border – and its political narrative.
With many Americans viewing immigration as a top issue in this fall's hotly contested election, both Republicans and Democrats are vying to claim they are cracking down the hardest.
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Biden unveiled new border restrictions on Tuesday, effectively cutting off the path to asylum between ports of entry, in places like this riverbank in Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas. But along a stretch of this city's urban borderline in late May, Abbott's troops were already trying to physically block asylum-seekers' path north.
"The Biden administration's asylum restrictions already offer such a narrow basis for relief that people have to pass through the eye of a needle," said David Donatti, senior attorney for the ACLU in Texas. "What Texas is doing is just assuring that even those who would have meritorious claims don't ever get the opportunity to present themselves to federal officers."
Migrants allege Texas authorities are unlawfully forcing them back into Mexico between ports of entry, firing pepper balls and using scare tactics. USA TODAY documented the allegations in interviews with more than a dozen migrants in May and numerous hours spent at the border.
The governor's office, Department of Public Safety and Texas Military Department didn't respond to multiple emailed requests for a response to allegations of mistreatment. A Texas Military Department official confirmed Texas troops have recently been trained to deploy pepper balls.
"We saturate the ground," said the official, who is unauthorized to speak publicly. "It’s like climbing through a jalapeno bush. Apparently that is a good, strong deterrent. The immediate goal with the pepper ball-launching is obviously to deter. You want to deter them to the point of them (coming across the border) the right way, through a port of entry, or they go to some other state."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed Biden's asylum restrictions were implemented the day he signed the executive order, but it wasn't clear how migrants of different nationalities will be processed. While the administration has also provided "lawful pathways" for some asylum-seekers, those pathways can take months and leave penniless people vulnerable to criminal elements who rule the Mexican border region.
Asylum-seekers like Villegas are cornered at the U.S.-Mexico border as never before: by Mexican authorities and cartel operatives to the south; by Biden's asylum restrictions and Texas military muscle to the north.
Brian Elmore, an El Paso emergency department doctor and chief medical officer for the Catholic nonprofit Hope Border Institute, recently led a roving clinic among asylum-seekers on the Mexican side of the border.
"I’ve been working for two years in Juarez with migrants and it was the most desperation I have ever seen," said Elmore, who in May treated "concertina wire injuries, a couple of kids with their flesh torn, a broken arm, and a guy with a lower extremity sprain from being pushed back."
"They are hemmed in," he said. "They're just completely vulnerable to predations by the Texas National Guard and the cartel."
Night after night in this area, economic migrants and asylum-seeking men, women and children shuffle down into the dry riverbed. There are fewer families than there were at this time a year ago, but still they come.
They climb up to squeeze through the reams of concertina wire; try to make it past camouflaged Texas troops carrying pepper ball guns; and reach the steel U.S. border wall. Among them, inevitably, are men with wire cutters.
Increased tension, aggression on both sides of the border
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At 2:30 a.m., a drone buzzed overhead as Villegas and other migrants from Venezuela, Honduras and El Salvador considered whether to sleep under the cover of a mesquite tree or make another crossing attempt. The murmur of Texas soldiers chatting in English carried to the south side.
"The idea is that they let us pass without aggression or mistreatment," Villegas said. "For the women carrying their children, it's dangerous. (The soldiers) don't care anymore; they fire pepper balls even if they hit the children. When that happens, we have to go back, because we can't cross this way."
U.S. laws governing the border are contradictory. Crossing between ports of entry is illegal under Title 8, but under the same U.S. code, migrants still retain the right to seek asylum even if they do cross between ports.
Even before Tuesday's executive order, the Biden administration had tried to reconcile the contradictions with an asylum policy passed last year that presumes ineligibility for migrants "who neither avail themselves of a lawful, safe, and orderly pathway to the United States nor seek asylum or other protection in a country through which they travel."
The administration has created new lawful pathways through its CBP One application and humanitarian parole programs, which are available to people of certain nationalities.
Illegal crossings have plummeted at the Southwest border from a year ago, including in El Paso where Border Patrol reported a 29% decline in migrant encounters in April year over year. Border crossings between ports barely budged higher this spring – bucking the usual trend of seasonal spikes.
Abbott launched his $11 billion border strategy, Operation Lone Star, in early 2021, but he didn't send National Guard troops to El Paso until two years later.
The majority-Democrat city had historically viewed the Republican governor's hard-line policies as antithetical to its stance of welcoming immigrants. But after the city declared a state of emergency in December 2022 during the wave of migration that preceded the end of the pandemic-era's Title 42 restrictions, Abbott sent in his troops.
Texas highway troopers and National Guard troops initially provided support to overwhelmed Border Patrol agents. They installed miles of concertina wire and stationed their vehicles every quarter mile or so along El Paso's urban borderline.
Yet, in May, migrants said they're enduring increasingly aggressive tactics by Texas authorities.
"We've suffered abuses," said Gabriela Soteldo, 38, who had spent four days camped on the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande with her husband Ulises Perez, 12-year-old son, her brother, his wife and their baby.
"It's been violent," she said. "That's the truth. We've tried to cross, but they fire pepper balls. It doesn't matter if there are children."
It's not clear why Texas is dominating this stretch of borderline. But observers say the situation in El Paso is unlike the one in Eagle Pass, where the Biden administration is suing Texas over its standoff at Shelby Park.
Federal and state agencies may be working "at odds" but there is still cooperation, said Todd Bensman, a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies and former Texas state trooper.
Texas special response teams "are in the channel hunting down the wire-cutting crews," Bensman said. That's because "if the men and women and children get through the wire and find themselves standing next to troops, they’ll be turned over to Border Patrol, which will just let them in."
Border Patrol agents don't "let people in," but they are required by federal law to apprehend and process anyone who crosses the border unlawfully. Once in custody, migrants may be offered a "voluntary return" to their country; they may be deported or they may be processed to present their asylum claim to an immigration judge.
It's against U.S. law and international treaty to force back into Mexico migrants who aren't from Mexico, attorneys say. Many of those crossing to seek asylum in this region are from Central and South America.
"The United States has an obligation to exercise operational control of the border," Donatti, the ACLU attorney, said. "That means not only to prevent migrants from entering the country but also to ensure that those who are here have the lawful processes afforded to them."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn't respond to multiple emailed requests for comment regarding Texas' operations in El Paso.
Soteldo, Villegas and the other migrants interviewed by USA TODAY all said they made attempts to use the Biden administration's CBP One application to make an appointment to arrive at a port of entry, but either they never received an appointment or grew frustrated and increasingly desperate after months of waiting without work in a no-man's land controlled by Mexican cartels.
The Texas Military Department official said the state's National Guard – along with support from the Iowa, Indiana and Florida guards – have been trained in pepper ball deployment because they've faced large numbers of migrants and perceived threats from the cartel members embedded among them.
The official described a high level of tension, referring to the presence in Mexico of criminal organizations involved in illegal activities from drug running to migrant smuggling.
More:The real migrant bus king of North America isn't the Texas governor. It's Mexico's president.
A harrowing journey
At a migrant shelter in El Paso in May, Elisaul Mora and his 5-year-old daughter waited in a cool cafeteria for a white-bread sandwich and bag of chips. It was a dramatic shift from the day before, when he had held on to the rusted steel border fence, hugging his daughter between his body and the rusted steel bars for hours.
They had made it across the dry river channel, after pushing through a hole in the concertina wire in the same area where Villegas and dozens of other families now waited for their chance.
"We made a small hole in the wire and we crossed, just us," he said. "I saw a patrol vehicle coming and she went running toward the wall and I still hadn't gotten through. I ran after her. The patrol vehicle didn't stop for nothing. I managed to jump and grab her and hold on to the wall."
Mora and other migrants said they believed they had to get past the Texas authorities and touch the border wall in order to seek asylum; that if they did, they were somehow home-free.
Biden's new asylum restrictions are triggered whenever the number of unlawful crossings between ports of entry tops 2,500 – which is nearly every day. It's not clear whether asylum seekers who run the Texas gauntlet will be given the chance to make their claim.
Migrants are now caught between the Texas concertina wire, Biden's new restrictions and the lawlessness of the criminals who control much of the Mexican territory on the other side.
As he sandwiched his daughter against the border wall and held on, Mora said, "The guard put us through a couple of hours of psychology."
Mora said the guard told him, "'Let go. We're going to return you the way you came. We're going to expel you. It doesn't matter that you have a child.' I asked them for water because she hadn't had a drink all day, because I didn't have any money left to buy her anything. And the guard told me, 'We'll give you water if you let go.' And they showed my daughter the bottle.
"They were wearing camouflage as if they were soldiers," he said. "They weren't wearing green. The ones in green are 'migración,' right? They weren't migration."
The night Villegas sat watching the borderline, she decided against crossing. There were two holes in the concertina wire, she knew; but the Texas guards were watching. She pulled up her hoodie against the dampness and curled up on a blanket with other migrants and slept.
The yellow moon set in the south. As daylight broke, birds began chirping in the mesquite tree, briefly masking the sound of wire cutters snipping the concertina wire in the riverbed below.
Contributing: El Paso Times photographer Omar Ornelas and special contributor Aline Corpus.
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
