photos from the edge 25 - THE VERSATRONEX STRIKE

photos from the edge 25 - THE VERSATRONEX STRIKE
The first strike by production workers in a Silicon Valley factory, 1992-3
Photographs by David Bacon

 

In mid-February of 1993 the last workers at the Versatronex plant in Sunnyvale filed out of the plant's door for the last time, and the factory closed.  But many electronics workers in Silicon Valley remember Versatronex as the first plant where production workers went on strike, and the first plant where a strike won recognition for their union.
    
"It's a little sad, but we said at the beginning that if the company was going to close, let them close," said Sandra Gomez, who lost her job at the end of the Versatronex strike.  "But as long as the plant was open, we were going to fight for our rights."
    
Factories like Versatronex are a startling contrast to the hi-tech public image.  More stable and better-paying production jobs in the valley's large plants practically disappeared, while contractors like Versatronex competed for business from big companies by cutting wages and conditions.

Disclosure:  David Bacon was the lead organizer for the United Electrical Workers during the strike and organizing drive



Part one, the strike begins
October 16, 1992

Workers at Versatronex called in the union after they had already organized themselves to protest their conditions, and as they were preparing to stop work to demand changes.  When the company heard rumors of the stoppage, they held a meeting to head off the planned action.  One of the workers active in the organizing effort, Joselito Muñoz, stood up in the meeting and declared to company supervisors that "Se acabo el tiempo de esclavitud," which translated means "The time of slavery is over."  Muñoz was fired two days later, and on October 16 Verstronex workers went on strike to win his job back. 

 
Part two, workers set up the strike committee and begin picketing
October 17-24, 1992

"I went to every meeting before the strike started," she remembers, "but I was kind of young, and I didn't know what to expect.  Even though I spoke on television after the strike started, I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing.  But I learned a lot in those first days, and now I feel very strongly that we have to stand up for ourselves.  Even if we lose our jobs here, we will keep on fighting for our rights wherever we work." - striker Sandra Gomez

 
Part three, after two weeks the company still won't talk to the workers, but they refuse to give up their demands
October 27, 1992

Conditions at Versatronex gave credence to the accusation  that a high tech image masked a reality of sweatshop conditions.  Sergio Mendoza worked in the "coil room," making electrical coils for IBM computers for seven years.  The work process involved dipping the coils into chemical baths, and drying them off in ovens.  "They never told us the names or the dangers of the chemicals we worked with," he recalls.  "Sometimes the vapors were so strong that our noses would begin to bleed.  Women who cleaned parts with solvents had deep cracks in the skin on the end of their fingers."  The company filed declarations with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District that it discharged 3400 pounds of ethylene dichloride, a known carcinogen, into the atmosphere in 1991.  Nevertheless, Versatronex workers allege that there was no ventilation system or scrubbers for discharges within or outside the plant.

 
Part four, the janitors union and community supporters rally at the plant in protest and try to speak to Versatronex' owners
October 29 and 30, 1992

According to Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View, "there's a pretty clear trend over the long term" in increasing employment in contract assembly plants in Silicon Valley, "especially among companies which make computers.  Major companies like Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computer have contracted out most of their production, and rely on companies like Solectron [a large contract assembly company.]  This leads to deteriorating conditions for assemblers, since contract assemblers certainly don't pay what a company like IBM does." 

 
Part five, strikers brought their children to the picket line every day
October 31, 1992

Strikers were fighting for their families, so it only made sense to show the world the children who were paying the price of the low wages and insecure jobs of their parents.  With virtually no income during the strike, parents had no childcare, and came together at the picket line to share caring for the kids.  The children, seeing their parents acting in this new way, wanted to support them and understood what they were fighting for.

 
Part six, strikers mount a hunger strike in front of Versatronex' biggest customer, Digital Microwave Corp.
November 12 - 20, 1992

Another large customer who had their boards assembled at Versatronex was Digital Microwave Corp., a manufacturer of equipment for telecommunications networks. At the high point of the 6-week Versatronex strike, 10 women strikers went on a hunger strike outside DMC's glittering offices.  For four days they fasted to dramatize their effort to hold that manufacturer responsible for their working conditions.  Male strikers supported them by setting up tents and living around the clock on the sidewalk outside DMC's front door.  Word of their action spread like an electric current through the valley's Mexican and immigrant communities.
    
"We went on a hunger strike against Digital Microwave Corporation because they send work to Versatronex, and then they close their eyes to the conditions we work in," explained hunger striker Margarita Aguilera.  "And after our strike started, DMC sent even more work into the Versatronex plant."  At the end of the fast, DMC made public a letter written to Versatronex management which said that, although it didn't intend to intervene in the labor dispute, "you should be aware that we are actively seeking alternative suppliers to fill our needs.  If we find such suppliers, it may well be that we will transfer our needs to those resources on a permanent basis."

Part seven, workers end the strike, and petition for a union election
December 1, 1992

Versatronex workers ended their strike on November 25, after the National Labor Relations Board issued a formal complaint, the equivalent of an indictment, against the company for illegally firing Muñoz.  The day after they went back to work, workers filed a petition with the NLRB for a union election at the plant.  Then, as the union and the company were negotiating over arrangements for the election and accusations of retaliation against strikers, the company announced that it would close the factory permanently.  The announcement was made the day before Christmas.  Community supporters distributed hams and turkeys to the workers as they left the factory.

 
Part eight, Silicon Valley's immigrant workers march to demand labor rights
December 19, 1992

During the Christmas holidays, workers employed by Versatronex, USM and Litton marched through crowds of shoppers in downtown San Jose.  They noisily protested declining conditions for the immigrants who make up the bulk of the workforce employed by Silicon Valley contractors.  Their protest highlighted a new development in the home of high technology - militant and angry demonstrations by workers from the valley's factories. 

The three groups joined forces because they are all immigrants, and are all employed by contractors who do business with the area's large companies.  USM workers were mostly Korean immigrants, who lost their jobs when the owner suddenly closed the factory's doors, owing workers two months in back wages.  Supported by San Jose's Korean Resource Center, they organized protests against Silicon Valley Bank, whom they held liable for their lost wages because the bank took control of USM's assets.  

Litton janitors, also immigrants, are mostly Mexican.  They worked for a union janitorial contractor, and some had worked in the Litton buildings for over 10 years.  Litton brought in a new, non-union contractor, who employed a new workforce at lower wages and conditions. The janitors were represented by Service Employees Local 1877, and were drawn from the same immigrant workforce employed on the production lines in the electronics plants.  A year ago Local 1877 made an important organizing breakthrough when it forced Apple Computer, and later Hewlett-Packard Corporation, to sign agreements using union janitorial contractors. 

photos from the edge 24 - DOES TRUMP HATE SOMALIS, OR DOES HE FEAR THEM?

photos from the edge 24
DOES TRUMP HATE SOMALIS, OR DOES HE FEAR THEM?
Lewiston, Maine, March 2018
Photos by David Bacon

LEWISTON, MAINE:  It's clear that Trump hates Somalis.  In his first administration he included Somalia as one of his "shithole" countries, and tried to prohibit its people from coming to the U.S. "They come from hell," he said just the other day. "We don't want them in our country."  

Trump singled out courageous Congress Member Ilhan Omar (again) and called her "garbage."  Omar, with great dignity, responded only to say she thought his attention "creepy," as indeed it is.  But his hatred of Somalis is also revealing. 

Trump is afraid, and he has reason to be.  Since they started coming to the U.S. in the wake of the destabilization of their country in the 1990s, Somalis have become one of the most politically engaged immigrant communities in this country.  In Minnesota it's not just Ilhan Omar.  The state now has three members of its legislature who were born in Somalia.

Trump accuses them of "taking over" Minnesota, as though they'd somehow managed to produce votes by magic. But anyone can see that what Trump really has is a bad case of fear.  Given the state's size (5.8 million) and the community's size (43,000), it's clear that far more votes come from non-Somalis than Somalis. 

The other state where Somalis are getting elected is the whitest state in the country - Maine.  Deqa Dhalac was elected to the South Portland City Council in 2018, and in 2021 the other councilors chose her as mayor.  Now she's in the state legislature, along with two other Somalis.  1.4 million people live in Maine; only 6000 of them were either born in Somalia, or have Somali parents.

What scares Trump is that white people are voting for Somalis in large numbers, because they have good political skills.  They speak about the basic class interests that motivate most working class people to the polls.  Dhalac's program includes responding to climate change (Portland is on Maine's coast), affordable housing, and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

The experience of Somalis has not been a history of easy acceptance, though.  In nearby Lewiston, another Maine city where many have settled, they organized a mosque when they decided to make the city home.  But in 2006 someone threw a pig's head into it.  

The mayor of Lewiston announced in 2002 that Somalis should stop coming.  That made white supremacy an acceptable attitude, and 32 people demonstrated to support the mayor.  Another 4000 counter-protested, however, and  Dhalac announced to them, "I am a Muslim, Black immigrant woman, and I'm not going anywhere."  Fifteen years later she was on the South Portland City Council.

In Rockland, fifty miles from Lewiston, the city council responded to Trump's anti-immigrant insults and threats by adopting, 4-1, an ordinance telling its police not to cooperate with ICE.  Immigrant rights activists and immigrant communities are fighting for a similar bill, LD 1971, in the state legislature.

But Trump's "garbage" insult is frightening.  During his first term, after he'd demonized and tried to ban immigrants from African and Middle Eastern countries, someone shot into the mosque.  Many Somalis are in the U.S. with Temporary Protected Status, which Trump ended for other nationalities.  They worry they could be next.  Still, the local imam Saleh Mahamud says, "This is my country. My children were born here. And we are not going anywhere else."

These photographs show the old mill buildings of Lewiston's past, the slum apartments where Somalis lived when they first arrived, and a few community members in front of their new stores and businesses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ferduz, a Somali woman, walks down Main Street, where Somali stores have taken the place of boarded-up storefronts.

Fozia Guirreh, a Somali woman, on Main Street,

Charmarke, a Somali woman, and her son Youssouf on Main Street 

  Mohamed Ali Ibrahim is a leader of the Somali community

 

TODAY'S LABOR MOVEMENT NEEDS A RADICAL VISION

TODAY'S LABOR MOVEMENT NEEDS A RADICAL VISION
By David Bacon
Labornotes - December 02, 2025 
https://labornotes.org/2025/12/todays-labor-movement-needs-bigger-vision

 
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Lillian Galedo among the marchers  protesting plans to stage mass immigration raids in San Francisco and Oakland. Photo: David Bacon

It is time for the labor movement to use its organization and resources to fight to stop this wave of repression. As part of that effort, labor needs to propose a freedom agenda for immigrants that will really give people rights and an equal status with other workers on the job, and their neighbors in their own communities. 

[This article is part of a Labor Notes roundtable series: How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Against Trump 2.0? We will be publishing more contributions here and in our magazine in the months ahead. Click here to read the rest of the series.-Editors]


During the Cold War, many of the people with a radical vision of the world were driven out of our labor movement. Today, as unions search for answers about how to begin growing again, and regain the power workers need to defend themselves, the question of social vision has become very important. What is our vision in labor? What are the issues that we confront today that form a more radical vision for our era?

The labor movement needs a freedom agenda. When Zohran Mamdani spoke after his primary election victory in New York City, he declared, "We can be free and we can be fed." Mamdani is telling our unions and workers that we can reject the old politics of agreeing to war abroad and repression at home, in the hopes that at least some workers will gain.

PEACE ECONOMY

We don't have to go back to the CIO and the radicalism of the 1930s to find voices in labor calling for a radical break from the past. 

In the 1980s, while Reagan was President, William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists, told his members, thousands of whom worked in arms plants, that they would gain more from peace than from war. Under union pressure in 1992, Congress even passed a bill calling for redirecting a small part of military spending into conversion for a peacetime economy.

One big part of that program is peace. Another is reordering our economic priorities. 

Right now working class people have to fight just to stay in the cities. They're being driven out, and this has a disproportionate impact on workers of color. Unions and central labor councils need to look at economic development, and issues of housing and job creation. That would start to give us something we lack, a compelling vision. 

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

Since 2006 millions of people have gone into the streets on May Day. The marches in 2006 were the largest outpourings since the 1930s, when our modern labor movement was born. In one of the best things our labor movement has done, we began raising the expectations of immigrants when we passed the resolution in Los Angeles in 1999 changing labor's position on immigration. 

We put forward a radical new program: amnesty, ending employer sanctions, reunification of families, protecting the rights of all people, especially the right to organize. That came as a result of an upsurge of organizing among immigrant workers themselves, and support from unions ranging from the United Electrical Workers to the Carpenters. 

Congress, however, has since moved to criminalize work and migration, and proposed huge guest worker programs. States have passed bills that are even worse. 

Mississippi, for instance, made it a state felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with prison terms of up to ten years. Florida has made it a crime to give an undocumented person a ride to a hospital. And administrations from Bush to Trump have implemented by executive order the enforcement and guest worker measures they couldn't get through Congress.

LABOR'S SILENCE

When Democrats campaigned against Trump by accusing him of sabotaging an immigration bill that would have put billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, they prepared the way for Trump's onslaught once he was elected. Labor, which should have prepared our own members for the fight to come, stayed silent. 

In the wave of raids that have followed, hundreds of our own members have been taken, not just for deportation, but on bogus criminal charges or simply swept off the streets by masked agents. Unorganized workers have been terrorized by the raids-a gift to employers as workers are pressured to give up any hope of a union or a higher wage.

Some unions today are part of the network fighting to protect workers and communities from immigration raids. SEIU California leader David Huerta faces misdemeanor federal charges after opposing ICE during a raid in Los Angeles' garment district. 

It is time for the labor movement to use its organization and resources to fight to stop this wave of repression. As part of that effort, labor needs to propose a freedom agenda for immigrants that will really give people rights and an equal status with other workers on the job, and their neighbors in their own communities. 

DEFEND CIVIL RIGHTS

In the past, the possibility of fighting for our ideals-what we really want-has been undermined by beltway deal making. We have to be consistent in our politics. 

Labor needs an outspoken policy that defends the civil rights of all sections of U.S. society, and is willing to take on an open fight to protect them. If Trump's raids and terror campaigns scare unions into silence, few workers will feel confident in risking their jobs (and freedom) to join them. 

Yet people far beyond unions will defend labor rights if they are part of a broader civil rights agenda, and if the labor movement is willing to go to bat with community organizations for it. 

JOBS FOR ALL

A new direction on civil rights requires linking immigrant rights to a real jobs program and full employment economy. It demands affirmative action that can come to grips with the devastation in communities of color, especially African-American communities. 

And none of that can be done without challenging Trump's war policies, but equally the war policies that have come from Democratic administrations. 

CLIMATE JUSTICE

Today part of a freedom agenda is not only conversion from military production, but conversion from fossil fuel dependence. 

Jeff Johnson, past president of the Washington State Labor Council, drew the connection between labor support for climate conversion legislation and social justice. "I knew we had to educate my members, so that they would understand that we can't support more fossil fuel exploration," he told me. "We have an existential crisis that is social, political and racial, in addition to climate. And we know that the impact of climate change will hit those communities who had the least to do with causing it."

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

At the heart of any radical vision for our era is globalization-the way unions approach the operation of capitalism on an international scale. 

When the old Cold War leadership of the AFL-CIO was defeated in 1996, I heard incoming AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer (later President) Richard Trumka say unions should find partners in other countries in order to face common employers. At the time it represented a big change-that unions would cooperate with anyone willing to fight against our common employers. It rejected by implication the anti-communist ideology that put us on the side of employers and U.S. foreign policy, and that shamed us before the world. 

Three decades later, however, this idea is no longer radical enough. It's an example of pragmatic solidarity, although it was, at the time, a good first step out of that Cold
War past. 

What's missing is a response from the labor movement to U.S. foreign policy. International solidarity involves more than multinational corporations. There is no doubt that military corporations benefit from selling the bombs that Israel uses in its Gaza genocide, but political support from Trump, and Biden before him, for Israel is more than just an effort to defend their profits. 

Corporate globalization and military intervention are intertwined, and in the labor movement there's not enough discussion about their relationship. That's why we got manipulated in the response to 9/11, and by justifications for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Unions in the rest of the world are not simply asking us whether we will stand with them against General Electric, General Motors, or Mitsubishi. They want to know: Will you take action to oppose the Gaza genocide and arms shipments? What is your stand about aggressive wars or coups? 

U.S. corporations operating in a country like Mexico or El Salvador are, in some ways, opportunistic. They're taking advantage of an existing economic system, and trying to make it function to produce profits. They exploit the difference in wages from country to country for instance, and require concessions from governments for setting up factories in their countries. 

But what causes poverty in a country like El Salvador? What drives a worker into a factory that, in the United States, we call a sweatshop? What role does U.S. policy play in creating that system of poverty?

In our union movement, we need that kind of discussion. We turn education into simply a technical matter about techniques for grievance-handling and collective bargaining. We don't really work with our members to develop a framework to answer these questions. So our movement becomes ineffective in fighting about the issues of war and peace, globalization, and their consequences, like immigration. 

EDUCATE THE MEMBERS

When the AFL-CIO campaigned in Washington against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for instance, labor lobbyists went up to Capitol Hill and tried to mobilize pressure on Congress to defeat it. But what was missing was education at the base of the labor movement. 

Had we educated and mobilized our members against the Contra war and the counterinsurgency wars in El Salvador and Guatemala (and certainly many of us tried to do that), U.S. workers would have understood CAFTA more clearly a decade later. 

The root of this problem is a kind of American pragmatism that disparages education. We need to demand more from those who make the decisions and control the purse strings in our unions. 

Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving production, defending the standard of living of workers around the world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion in a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Mexico as it does to the nonunion worker down the street.

That's why the debate over the Iraq War at the AFL-CIO convention was so important. From the point when it became clear that the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq, union activists began organizing a national network to oppose it through U.S. Labor Against the War. What started as a collection of small groups, in a handful of unions, became a coalition of unions representing over a million members, the product of grassroots action at the bottom of the U.S. labor movement, not a directive from the top. 

That experience was put to work when the genocide began in Gaza, as national and local unions and activists organized the National Labor Network for a Ceasefire. When the United Auto Workers endorsed its call, the union also set up a divestment and just transition working group, "to study the history of Israel and Palestine, the union's economic ties to the conflict, and to explore how to achieve a just transition for U.S. workers from war to peace." 

Opposing intervention and war means fighting for the self-interest of our members. It means being able to identify that self-interest with the interest of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The same money that pays for bombs for the Israeli government is money that doesn't get spent on schools here at home. We can't have a full-employment economy in the U.S. without peace. 

The arguments by political centrists in the Democratic Party that we must choose to fight only about workers' immediate economic interests, and stay silent about Gaza or racism, hides the connections workers have to make to challenge the sources of their own poverty and the attacks against them. As veteran organizer Stewart Acuff says, "While economic justice must run through everything our movement does, we cannot deemphasize any strand of injustice." 

Union members are not ignorant of this basic fact. In fact, they are becoming more sophisticated, and better at understanding the way global issues, from war to trade, affect the lives of people in the streets of U.S. cities. But the percentage of union members is declining, and the organization they need to put that understanding into practice is getting smaller. Deeper political awareness alone will not create a larger labor movement.

NEED A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Just after World War II , unions represented 35 percent of U.S. workers. It's no coincidence that the McCarthy years when the Cold War came to dominate the politics of unions was the moment when that strength began to decline. 

By 1975, after the Vietnam War, union membership had dropped to 26 percent. Today only 9.9 percent of all workers, and 5.9 percent in the private sector, are union members. 

Declining numbers translate into a decline in political power and economic leverage. California (with one-sixth of all union members) and New York (with one-eighth) have higher union density than any others. But even there, labor is facing an all-out war for political survival.

While the percentage of organized workers has declined, unions have made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old business unionism. If these ideas are developed and extended, they provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding them more deeply in working-class communities. But it's a huge job. Raising the percentage of organized workers in the United States from just 10 to 11 percent would mean organizing over a million people. Only a social movement can organize people on this scale. 

In addition to examining structural reforms that can make unions more effective and concentrate their power, the labor movement needs a program that will inspire people to organize on their own, one which is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant argument that any proposal that can't get through Congress is not worth fighting for. 

A BROADER VISION

The labor movement has to become a movement that inspires people with a broader vision of social justice. Our standard of living is declining. Workers often have to choose between paying their rent or their mortgage or having health care. There's something fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society, and unions have to be courageous enough to say it.

Working families need a decent wage, but they also need the promise of a better world. For as long as we've had unions, workers have shown they'll struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But it takes a radical social vision to inspire the wave of commitment, idealism, and activity.

The 1920s were filled with company unions, the violence of strikebreakers, and a lack of legal rights for workers. A decade later, those obstacles were swept away. 

An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the Depression and left-wing activism, forced (relative) corporate acceptance of the labor movement for the first time in the country's history. 

There are changes taking place in our unions and communities that can be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then the obstacles unions face today can become historical relics as quickly as did those of an earlier era.


David Bacon is a labor journalist and photographer, former factory worker and union organizer, and author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro, and other books.

POVERTY AND DEPORTEES ON THE STREETS IN TIJUANA

POVERTY AND DEPORTEES ON THE STREETS IN TIJUANA
By David Bacon
With photos and an interview with Laura Velasco
Dollars and Sense, November/December
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/poverty-and-deportees-on-the-streets-in-tijuana/

 

A deportee among the homeless people living on the street, lined up for food at a distribution center in downtown Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico.

In the U.S. media, even in progressive media, we pay very little attention to what happens to most people when they're deported, or when they choose self-deportation as a result of fear. Most people who are deported or who self-deport go home to communities far south of the border. But the people who are just dumped through the border gate and have no home to go to find themselves in cities like Tijuana, Mexico. For many years deportees from the United States have lived on the street or in the concrete Tijuana River channel. 

A year ago, the city's refuges were packed with families from places as far away as Venezuela and Haiti. These days, that wave of people from countries besides Mexico has dissipated. People know that Trump has closed the border. These photographs show the cavernous halls in shelters where migrants set up their tents. Today shelter residents are often families from southern Mexico, fleeing the violence. Others are still here because they cannot go home. These photographs also show deportees mixed with other street dwellers, eating at a sidewalk meal distribution site. This is a terrible reality for many people.

These photographs try to document the lives of people on the ground in Tijuana. To give them a deeper context I interviewed Laura Velasco, an investigator and professor at Tijuana's Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Velasco has researched the situation of deportees and migrants in the city for many years, and has written several books about them. Thanks also to Michelle Lerach and Yolanda Walther-Meade for their help.

Since U.S. policy is in great part responsible for the fact that migrants are here at all, it is our responsibility to look at what's happening to them and take Mexican reality into account. Mexico, with far fewer resources than the united States, has made much greater efforts to treat migrants as human beings. As the photographs and Velasco's analysis show, the situation for deportees and self-deportees in Tijuana is mixed-people ripped from their lives at home, trying to survive as best they can. -David Bacon

 

Refugees at a casa de refugio, or sanctuary home, administered by the Templo Embajadores de Jesus in Tijuana. The casas are for refugees from other countries or parts of Mexico where people have fled violence or poverty. Some are deportees from the United States. 

David Bacon: Has the Trump administration's wave of immigration enforcement-the deportations and self-deportations-had an impact in Tijuana and in the border cities?

Laura Velasco: The number of people coming into Tijuana since January has dropped significantly. People are being deported directly to their places of origin, or are being sent to Mexico City. They are not leaving them at the border, to prevent them from re-entering the United States. The Mexican government has arranged with the United States to receive Mexican deportees far from the border, particularly at airports in and around Mexico City, and the government talks about the large numbers of deportees they're receiving at the airports, but not at the border.
 
Foreigners are sometimes also received there, before they return to their countries of origin. In addition, since [the administration of former President Manuel] López Obrador, the Mexican government has also had a policy of preventing foreigners from arriving at the border. 

I have many doubts about his figures, but [President Donald] Trump says that since he became president, they have deported a million people, or forced people to self-deport. Of course they are from all countries, but many are Mexican. Nevertheless, there is only a small flow of deportees through the border gates. In January we were preparing for deportations we expected would be massive, but they weren't. Instead, only 20 or 50 people have been arriving every day. They set up a shelter run by the army, which was very well organized, but there were few deportees.

 

A young woman rests in her bunk at the casa uses American flags for privacy. 


DB: When I was in Tijuana recently, I saw that the number of people in the shelters has gone down.

LV: There are far fewer people in shelters in Tijuana now. Before the beginning of January, there were far more. Today in the shelters, most of the people are internally displaced Mexicans. They're not foreigners. Most came from Michoacan and Guerrero, but Michoacan is the source for most here in Tijuana. 

They leave home because of all the criminal violence, the forced recruitment of young people, and the disappearance of family members. Some have told us that organized criminals charged them for the privilege of working. For every hour worked in the lemon harvest, for instance, they had to make a payment. These are very poor people who had nothing, and the gangs just took it from them.

Displaced people basically depend on shelters. Families need food and the time to make decisions about what they're going to do, whether they return to their place of origin or stay. Their family networks also help, especially money from relatives in the United States, who send them money for their tickets, for food, to pay for a hotel for a few days or the first few days of rent.

Nevertheless, fewer internally displaced people are arriving in Tijuana because the possibility of entering the United States has been shut off. People who have been displaced and would come to the border and think about crossing now have to face not only the threat of deportation but also imprisonment. That has discouraged many people.

People who have returned from the United States speak about terrible prison conditions, and their stories have spread widely. There's much less incentive to cross the border and enter as an undocumented immigrant, since you can not only be deported but might also be thrown in jail. In that sense, we can say that the U.S. policy of intimidation has worked.

At the same time, the number of Mexican workers brought to the United States on H-2A and H-2B visas has increased enormously. Last year the State Department issued over 300,000 visas for agricultural workers alone. So on the one hand, Mexican workers who have a life and home in United States are deported, while on the other, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers are imported under this exploitative labor program. 

 

 

 

Children at the casa de refugio administered by the Templo Embajadores de Jesus in Tijuana. 


DB: In one of the shelters for unaccompanied youth, I talked with two brothers from Haiti who'd been there for two years, and a young woman from Guatemala who'd been there for months. What happened to the people who were living in the shelters before?

LV: Some people we talked with recently have been in shelters for three or four years. Young people especially can't leave the shelter, and their emotional situation and quality of life is not good. For the people who have been waiting to cross, the situation is very difficult now. The program that allowed people to apply for asylum, especially young people, and then leave detention on parole, has been closed. Even those who were on the path to asylum are more or less trapped in Tijuana because Trump's policy will not allow anyone to enter now, even the young people who before perhaps had a hope of finding their family in the United States. Waiting without hope, really. 

That has stranded many people who were on the path to regularization through asylum, and some have sought to settle and live in Tijuana. Perhaps some still think that at some point things will change, that the border will reopen and they will be able to cross. But others have found a job, and a place to live. You can see women on the streets selling merchandise, fresh fruit or weavings and clothing. They are families who have settled in Tijuana and are staying. 

Many have left the shelters because there they often have no autonomy, no privacy, and no ability to organize their time. They can't make noise, they can't listen to music, they can't cook their food. If they have children, the children have to stop being free. It is a very hard life of discipline.

So even though they can barely manage, leaving the shelters allows them to have freedom, to be able to sleep whenever they want, to get up whenever they want, to listen to music, to have their children make noise. The transition from the shelters to becoming independent, staying in the city-it's a change in quality of life. Even though they're living in very poor housing and have very precarious jobs, they see it as a step forward.

Some shelters are less restrictive. The Embajadores shelter in Scorpion Canyon, in the photographs, has very comprehensive services, including a school. It's a much more community-based model than many others that just provide food and shelter. There's more community integration, and a different way of relating to the migrants. It's a model that emerged from local civil society.

 

 

Mexicans deported into Tijuana often have no home in Mexico and nowhere to go. Without money many live on the streets and stave off hunger through a food distribution center downtown organized by Tijuana Sin Hambre.  Ricardo Ponce pours food into a container (upper photo) and Araceli Claro prepares food (lower photo) at the distribution center. 


DB: For many years I've taken photographs and talked with deportees living on the streets and in the river channel. But recently it seems the number of people sleeping outside has grown. 

LV: There have always been people living on the sidewalks in Tijuana, and we don't have measurements or numbers that tell us exactly whether that number is increasing. But the mayor suddenly came to our research center a few months ago, asking us for help, because the number of people sleeping on the street in the downtown area had increased dramatically, and many were using drugs. 

Some deported people use the programs that provide food to people on the street. A lot are homeless people, and families who live in Tijuana. On the border there is supposedly less extreme poverty, at least in the media coverage, but we meet families who get meals at the food distribution sites because they don't have enough money to eat. 

Rents here have increased a lot. Many of our students come from the south of the country and try to find housing here on the border in Tijuana with a modest scholarship. In the past they could live well with that scholarship. Now they can't. They tell us the rents are very high, about $200 for a room and $500 for a two-bedroom apartment. Rent that high didn't exist before.

Our rents are rising because of the real estate crisis in California, where the rents right across the border are much higher. Because of that, the number of people who cross to work in the United States has increased a lot. And because they can pay more, the rents here go up, and more people wind up on the street.

But there are also homeless people who choose to come to live in Tijuana. For a long time, we've seen a kind of reverse migration, crossing the border from north to south. Many homeless people in California come here to Mexico because here they can live with less. Many people who are threatened with deportation come to Tijuana because they can no longer pay the rents in California. 

Upper photo: Clyson Jeanlaurent and his brother Manielsonluc Juanlaurent at the YMCA shelter in Tijuana, which houses unaccompanied young people from other countries or parts of Mexico where people have fled violence or poverty. They came from Haiti two years ago and hope to join their family in Texas. 
Lower photo: Margelis Rodriguez and her niece Sofia Orellana who came here from Venezuela are staying at a casa de refugio in Tijuana administered by Movimiento Juventud 2000. 


DB: What support are migrants in Tijuana receiving from the government now?

LV: Claudia Sheinbaum, our president, talks about her vision of supporting migrants through the consulates, with shelters, and reintegrating them by finding them employment. These are good goals, but they're often not coordinated with the state and local governments. There's a lot of disorganization, even though there are good intentions.

Sometimes, as we saw in one recent case, local governments can be a big obstacle. The director of the Migrant Institute here, José Luis Pérez Canchola, worked for the municipal and state administrations. Canchola has been a left political activist for many years and was a founder of MORENA [Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, Mexico's dominant political party]. He was fired, despite Sheinbaum's vision. When Trump first came into office he went to the border crossing, where many foreign migrants had assembled, waiting for the border to open. They'd heard the United States was going to let them in, and of course instead it closed the border. There were many children and families in the street with nowhere to go, and Canchola tried to convince them to leave. The city government accused him of trying to pressure it and fired him. 

Sometimes the consulates in the United States give people threatened with deportation help and legal advice, but once they're here in Mexico they get much less attention. There is a program to give returnees a little money, a phone card, and a kind of ID. The ID is important for those who are deported, since without one there's often a problem with the police. The government created one shelter here, but it wasn't really necessary. There are a lot of shelters in Tijuana, so it was practically empty.


Note: Thanks to Laura Velasco and also Michelle Lerach and Yolanda Walther-Meade for their help. 

Daniel Ortega and Irma Cortez fled the violence of the cartels in their home state of Michoacan.



Cesar Walsh Delgado grew up in Buffalo, New York, but never became a U.S. citizen.