“Oh, those are the families!” said Christina Boston, a school principal in the Phoenix area who had been in Mexico for a basketball tournament and a visit with a cousin. She leaned over from the walkway to look. “It breaks my heart.”
On the ground, playtime was in full force. Dana Taylor, 24, in a yellow skirt, had come from Tucson when she heard about the asylum seekers, and toddlers gathered around to hear her read. A few feet away, Leo, 11 months old, was trying desperately to take his first steps.
Near the edge of the group, Edith Peréz, 44, sat by a plaid purse carrying her documents. She pulled out a yellow folder to explain why she had left Central Mexico with much of her family.
She once owned a restaurant-bar, she said. Then a gang came in and demanded payment: An initial sum of 100,000 pesos (about $5,000), plus 20,000 pesos each month. She didn’t make that kind of money and couldn’t pay, and soon two of her sons disappeared.
She closed the bar, rather than try to pay. In April, someone shot and killed her husband.
She pulled his death certificate from the folder. “Cause of death,” she read out loud. “Injuries produced by a projectile shot from a firearm, penetrating the thorax and abdomen.” He was 45. They’d been married for 30 years. “I’m not leaving my country because I want to,” she said. “We are here waiting for whatever God wants for us.”
Soon it was dinner time, and volunteers in embroidered blouses came by with pots of rice and beans. Romelia Guadalupe, 22, scurried off to give her daughter a scrub in a nearby sink. She changed the girl’s clothes and brushed her hair. And then Aylin, 2, began to cry, like any toddler at the end of a long day.
Like dominoes, the other children began to wail. “Don’t cry,” Ms. Guadalupe said. “Don’t cry.”
As darkness set in, the line of people crossing into the United States dropped to a trickle, and the children began to fall asleep. Fluorescent lights flicked on. And one of the mothers, Zaraí Salgado, 32, procured a mop and began to scrub, rubbing away the day’s dirt and grime as if this were now her home.
