| Migrants from across the region have again filled camps in northern Mexico, where criminals and traffickers prey upon them.  Photograph by Alejandro Cegarra “Little by little, the sight of white vans carrying people without shoelaces became more common.” In a stunning dispatch, Stephania Taladrid follows the story of Dolores, a fifty-year-old woman who attempted to cross the U.S. border last year. Instead of making it across, Dolores ended up at a temporary camp in Reynosa, Mexico, where nearly three thousand people, including families with young children, sleep under tents or tarps, or even on the bare ground. Many of them, like Dolores, were apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents and expelled based on a policy called Title 42, an obscure public-health order enacted by the Trump Administration at the start of the pandemic and continued by the Biden White House. As the migrants await court proceedings, they have become the unwitting subjects in a series of governmental maneuvers between the U.S. and Mexico that span several years. There is a cruel circularity to these migrants’ perilous journeys: they fled their home towns, owing to violence or poverty, only to arrive at dilapidated camps reigned over by a new set of local gangs, where they are “robbed, tortured, raped, and kidnapped.” Read “The Continued Calamity at the Border.” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | 
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