Matamoros: America's Waiting Room

I visited Matamoros on Mexico’s north-eastern shoulder in 2023 while working with a charity delivering aid to migrants living in encampments along the Rio Grande. At the time, the camp was packed with families, children and young adults - thousands of people stuck in limbo, waiting for a chance to cross into Texas.

Crossing south from the US, the city emerged in faded colour: run-down shops, tired Coca-Cola signs, bruised vehicles and a skyline stitched together by sagging electricity wires.

We stopped at a supermarket to stock up. Plans for spaghetti bolognese were soon scuppered when it became clear that tinned meat had run out. Opting for a nautical alternative, we loaded the car boots with pasta, tomato sauce and tinned tuna - seven hundred of each.

To reach the camp, we veered onto a dirt track. Tents appeared sporadically at first, then multiplied until we were subsumed into a dense community of makeshift homes, their nylon walls brushing up against one another. Movement here followed a learned choreography: ducking under washing lines, stepping over ropes, looping around tents in a haze of smoke from open fires.

At the camp’s epicentre, we exited the cars. The air was thick with the smell of rubbish bags and portable toilets. Flies danced around my face as I tried to swallow both the smell and the guilt that came with recoiling from it.

Many holas later, a long queue had formed, its orderliness signalling how familiar people were with food distributions. Jake, a weekend volunteer, manned one car, handing out pasta. I worked from the next with car Jean, who coordinated the trips. She placed a tin of sauce on top of a tin of tuna, passed it to me, and I passed it on - again and again and again.

It was diapers and baby wipes that ran out first, quietly marking the number of children growing up in this camp.

One young boy reached the front of the line. Jake asked him, in Spanish, where his mother was. “She can’t come right now,” he replied. After a bout of vomiting and diarrhoea, she was too weak to leave the tent.

With the resources we had, our help amounted to fishy spag bol and advice on hydration and rest. Humanitarianism at its most provisional.

An astounding amount of effort goes into coordinating these trips. And yet the prevailing feeling amongst volunteers is one of total uselessness.

But as I moped, a repetitive series of gestures and phrases emerged from the queue.  

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Jean – fellow tin distributor - asked.

“No,” I said, increasingly sweaty and confused.

“They’re blessing you,” she replied. “For your kindness.”

Their gratitude felt disproportionate and undeserved. But it also revealed what I should have recognised immediately; the value of a single meal in a place like this.

A previous charity had received a muted reception after bringing in hygiene and sanitary kits alone. People just wanted food.

You could see why. As cooking fires flared across the camp, the tents briefly resembled a very ordinary household scene: mothers cooking, fathers tinkering, children tugging at clothes impatiently before opening their messy mouths for aeroplane spoonfuls of pasta.

The food provided a moment of vitality for the camp. It was enough to meet the hunger of the day, but powerless against the weight of all the days that followed.

And the days are a strange, elastic thing here. Later, some of the camp residents gathered around our car to chat. They felt frustrated and uncertain about how long they would be in the camp for – a timeline defined in part by software.

Appointments for the processing of asylum claims are released through a new app. It opens each day at 10am, but only for a few minutes. There is another catch: the app tracks location, and appointments can only be accessed from within a designated border radius. You cannot even attempt to secure a place until you are already in a city like Matamoros.

And so people wait - sometimes for months. Hotel rooms are far beyond reach. The tents become semi-permanent, each morning bringing a brief surge of anticipation followed by the same quiet disappointment as the window closes and nothing appears on the screen.

Life in the meantime is governed by logistics and threat. Keeping phones charged. Finding food and water. Staying alert to what moves through the camp after dark. When I asked asylum seekers about the greatest threats to their health along the journey, stress and anxiety were mentioned first, almost without hesitation. Close behind came the violence that shadows the route north: cartel extortion, kidnapping, and for many women, sexual assault. These dangers were spoken of plainly, as facts to be navigated rather than traumas to be processed.

They are not unique to Matamoros. The city is just one stop among many, but it carries a peculiar weight.

After all, can a city called Matamoros ever not feel hostile?

Matamoros literally translates as “Moor-slayer” or “killer of Moors”, a phrase rooted in Spain’s medieval wars and carried into the New World. Born of conquest, this place continues to be defined by sanctified violence and division.

Today, cultural festivals attempt to soften that legacy, gesturing towards cross-border kinship with the United States.

Yet the influence of a border cannot be downplayed. It is a towering political infrastructure. Beneath it, cartel activity runs riot and asylum seekers are left suspended in a daily limbo - neither able to move forward nor safely remain in place.

When I was last there, Médecins Sans Frontières operated from modest clinics in the camps. In October 2025, however, MSF ended its eight-year presence in the city’s migrant camps. It had been a medical resource, but also a vital means of documenting injury, sexual violence, and the harms of U.S. policies that forced people to wait in dangerous conditions.

Taken together with declining numbers crossing the Darién Gap, there is reason to believe that the migratory corridor I studied during my masters is becoming less travelled. But migration is rarely stopped. It is redirected. Pressure does not disappear; it is displaced.

Many of those I met in the encampment and later in the welcome centre in Texas were Venezuelan, fleeing economic collapse and political repression. Now, as U.S.-Venezuela relations harden once again under President Trump, their futures - at home, in transit, and in the United States - feel increasingly uncertain. What happens next, whether it’s miliary escalation, economic pressure, or foreign incursion, will undoubtedly reshape movement across the region, deepening bottlenecks and prolonging the kind of limbo I witnessed in Matamoros.

Matamoros is not an exception. It is a prototype and others are already taking shape.