Then and Now at the Southern Border
What happened to one Texas segment when the White House changed hands
By Todd Bensman on April 3, 2025
empty border area
A version of this piece was published at The American Mind.
JUAREZ, Mexico — On New Year’s Eve 2020, as President-Elect Joe Biden was at home in Delaware celebrating his imminent move into the White House, a mob of some 300 Cubans stormed out of Juarez, Mexico, in a mad bonzai charge over the international bridge toward El Paso, Texas.
They swept past Mexican border guards, leapt pell-mell the wrong way over Mexican pay turnstiles, and sprinted for America in a crisscrossing stampede through traffic over the bridge lanes.
But alas, the outgoing Donald Trump was still in office, and his U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mobile Field Force, already riot-ready and waiting behind heavy concrete blocks tipped by concertina wire, stopped the migrant charge cold. Bunched up behind the barricades, the foiled mob loosed a telling chant:
“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”
“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter.
“There is an expectation. There is hope and there is enthusiasm in those who believe that, with the change of administration, will come new measures and that they will immediately enter and there will be new conditions that will allow them to request asylum,” Enrique Valenzuela, head of the Chihuahua State Council for Population and Migration told a Mexican newspaper that night.
https://cis.org/Bensman/Then-and-Now-Southern-Border
