Illegal Migrants Wait at US Encampments Along Border, Former School in San Diego

Women and children are typically moved out of the encampments to processing centers before men, usually within two or three hours, but sometimes they wait days.

A Guatemalan mother and her daughter stand near their tent in Jacumba, Calif., on Oct. 31, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

JACUMBA HOT SPRINGS, Calif.—Near sunset just outside a small town about 70 miles east of San Diego, the distant rumble of a dirt bike and an all-terrain vehicle breaks the faint sound of chatter among illegal immigrants and the wind on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Through narrow slats in the 30-foot-tall steel wall, the migrants in a wind-blown, dusty encampment along the border watch as two masked men—human smugglers known as “coyotes” working for Mexican cartels—drop off their cargo: a woman from Guatemala, her 10-year-old daughter, and a middle-aged Asian man.