The Venezuelan photographer Alejandro Cegarra took this picture at an improvised asylum seekers’ camp in Matamoros, a city in the north-eastern corner of Mexico, on the south bank of the Rio Grande border with Texas. It is part of a series of pictures that Cegarra has taken of the “second wall”, the legacy of Donald Trump’s agreement with Mexico that refugees are returned across the border to await asylum hearings. The boy holding his head in his hands is from Honduras; the volunteers blowing bubbles are part of Bay Area Border Relief, a humanitarian organisation from San Francisco. Cegarra’s pictures, shortlisted in the documentary category of this year’s Sony world photography awards, shine a light on those thousands of childhoods lost to the escalating aggression of immigration policies.
Having failed to get Mexico to pay for his mythical wall, in 2018 Trump threatened incoming Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador with tariffs on all Mexican goods unless he acceded to the “Remain in Mexico” policy by which asylum seekers would be held south of the border to await US court hearings. President Biden repealed this policy at the beginning of last year but it was reimposed by legal action from the Republican-controlled states of Missouri and Texas.
When Cegarra took this picture, there were more than 75,000 people incarcerated in makeshift camps like this one at Matamoros, waiting for a hearing, and a backlog of more than 1m immigration cases in the American courts. Biden has pledged to have cases heard within 180 days, but on average the delays on asylum hearings are running to just under five years. Those waiting are vulnerable to extortion by people traffickers and drug cartels and brutalisation by local police. By the end of the Trump presidency, the percentage of successful asylum applications stood at 0.1% of all cases. The promised wall exists in brutal legal reality for the children in Matamoros, if not in concrete fact.
The Sony world photography awards 2022 exhibition runs from 13 April to 2 May at Somerset House, London WC2
