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If Walls Could Speak:
Immigration Along the Southern Border

Ada Trillo

www.adatrillo.com/

They have traveled for many exhausting days, fleeing economic deprivation, violence, and corruption - some paying a tremendous price for their efforts. Now they wait, struggling to survive, their future behind ever-darkening clouds.

In 2019, the United States implemented a program known as the “Migrant Protection

Protocols.” Under this policy, more than 56,000 asylum-seekers have been sent back across the border and forced to wait in Mexico’s northern border cities as their asylum cases are decided in US courts – a process that usually takes months or years to complete.

This project is a glimpse into the besieged hopes, harsh uncertainties, and blunt realities—but also the enduring dignity—of Central American asylum-seekers were forced into a cruel and dangerous waiting game by the "Remain in Mexico" policy. The individuals and families in these photographs have experienced unthinkable traumas and faced impossible decisions.

Like the routes that many have traveled to get were, rape, kidnapping, and extortion of vulnerable individuals are daily occurrences for migrants in Mexico’s border cities. Stuck in limbo, some migrants return home, and others make do in Mexico’s overcrowded shelters or on the street.


I hope that viewers here in the United States can begin to understand the odysseys.

Many have undertaken to provide a brighter future for themselves and their children – only to be mistreated along one of the most dangerous places in North America.