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At US-Mexico Border, Africans Join Diversifying Migrant Community

Victoria Macchi

   VOA's Ramon Taylor contributed to this report.

   SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS --It took Julia and her two daughters five years to
   get from Kassai, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to a cot on the
   floor of a migrant shelter in Laredo, Texas, on a Sunday night in
   August 2019.

   First, it was four years in Angola. She saved money, she says, by
   working as a hairdresser.

   They flew to Ecuador. Took a bus and boat to Colombia. They spent 14
   days crossing through Panama's Darien Gap, lost part of the time in the
   dense jungle. Three weeks in Panama, then three more in Costa Rica
   while Julia recuperated from an illness. Then Nicaragua. Honduras.
   Guatemala.

   Finally, after a month of waiting in Acuña, on the U.S.-Mexico border,
   they stuck their feet in the sandy dirt along the southern bank of the
   Rio Grande. They were alone, and didn't know how to swim.

   "We prayed first, then we got into the water," Julia recalled. "My
   daughter was crying."

   "'Mom, I can't'¦'"Julia remembers her pleading in chest-high water.

   Halfway across, she says, U.S. soldiers -- possibly border agents --
   shouted to them: "'Come, give us your hands.'"

   "I did," Julia recalls, "and they took us out."

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