More buses of exhausted people in a caravan of Central American asylum seekers reached the U.S. border Thursday as migrants crowded Tijuana streets and looked on as officials fortified the border with razor wire and heavily armed agents stood guard.
With U.S. border inspectors at the main crossing into San Diego processing only about 100 asylum claims a day, it could take weeks if not months to process the thousands in the caravan that departed from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, more than a month ago.
Tijuana's robust network of shelters was already stretched to the limit, having squeezed in double their capacity or more as families slept on the floor on mats and gathered on streets.
Others endured the evening chill to sleep at an oceanfront park with a view of San Diego office towers and heavily armed U.S. Border Patrol agents on the other side of a steel-bollard fence.
Migrants from poor Central American countries -mostly Hondurans- moving towards the United States in hopes of a better life, are seen near the U.S. border in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, on November 13, 2018 Credit: Guillermo Arias/AFP
To claim asylum in San Diego, migrants enter their names in a tattered notebook held together by duct tape and managed by the migrants in a plaza outside the entry to the main border crossing.
On Thursday, migrants who registered six weeks ago were getting their names called. The waiting list has grown to more than 3,000 names and stands to become much longer with the caravans.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has deployed some 5,800 military troops to border in Texas, Arizona and California.
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