Officials: All migrants are gone from Texas border camp

“The option was to go to a place where there aren’t a lot of people and there request documents to be legal in Mexico,” he said.

Asked about the situation in Ciudad Acuña on Friday, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said, “we don’t want Mexico to be a migrant camp, we want the problem to be addressed fully.”

At the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition in Del Rio, migrants stepped off a white Border Patrol van on Friday, many smiling and looking relieved to have been released into the U.S. Some carried sleeping babies. A toddler walked behind her mother wrapped in a silver heat blanket.

A man who’d driven almost 1,500 miles from Toledo, Ohio, hoping to pick up a friend and her family wore a neon yellow vest and quietly scanned the line of Haitian migrants. Dave, who didn’t want to share his last name, didn’t see them in this group.

“I feel like my friend is worth my time to come down and help,” he said, explaining that he wore the vest so his friend — a nurse whom he’d met on a humanitarian trip to Haiti over a decade ago — would be able to spot him in the crowd when she arrived with her husband and 3-year-old daughter.

“I just see it as an opportunity to serve somebody,” said Dave, who considers himself a Trump supporter but hates how politicized the immigration issue has become. “We have so much.”

Lozano, the Del Rio mayor, said the international bridge won't reopen until Sunday night at the earliest, while officials ensure nobody is hiding in the brush along the Rio Grande and to finish cleanup. Officials also want to be sure no other large groups of migrants are making their way to the Del Rio area who might decide to set up a similar camp, he said.

Lozano said there were no deaths during the time the camp was occupied and that 10 babies were born to migrant mothers, either at the camp or in Del Rio’s hospital.

“It took an urban village at this scale to help prevent any loss of life and actually welcome the births of children here,” Lozano said.

The government has no plans to stop expelling some migrants on public health grounds despite pressure from Democratic lawmakers, who say Haitian migrants are being sent back to a troubled country that some left more than a decade ago.

The Trump administration enacted the policy, called Title 42, in March 2020 to justify restrictive immigration policies in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The Biden administration has used it to justify the deportation of Haitian migrants.

A federal judge late last week ruled that the rule was improper and gave the government two weeks to halt it, but the Biden administration appealed.

Officials said the U.S. State Department is in talks with Brazil and Chile to allow some Haitians who previously resided there to return, but it’s complicated because some of them no longer have legal status there.

The Biden administration's special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, submitted a letter of resignation on Thursday protesting the “inhumane” large-scale expulsions of Haitian migrants.

Foote, who was appointed in July, wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying he was stepping down immediately “with deep disappointment and apologies to those seeking crucial changes,” and said some of his policy recommendations had been ignored.

State Department spokesman Ned Price disputed Foote’s assertions, saying his proposals had been “fully considered in a rigorous and transparent policy process.”

The humanitarian group UNICEF also condemned the expulsions, saying Thursday that initial estimates show more than two out of three migrants expelled to Haiti are women and children, including newborns.

“Haiti is reeling from the triple tragedy of natural disasters, gang violence and the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director, who said those sent back without adequate protection “find themselves even more vulnerable to violence, poverty and displacement — factors that drove them to migrate in the first place.”

And Civil Rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, who toured the camp on Thursday, vowed to “stand with our people and make sure asylum is treated in one way and one manner.”