A Talk with Pedro Rios at the San Diego-Tijuana Border

American Friends Service Committee Director Pedro Rios at “Whiskey-8” on the US-Mexico border near San Diego

On the night of February 11, I talked to Pedro Rios, the Director of the American Friends Service Committee’s US/Mexico Border Program. We met inside their aid station along the border wall, two miles west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry in South San Diego.

The “wall” is actually a 30-foot-high fence. Behind the fence, you’ll find an open-air detention facility, dubbed “Whiskey-8” by Border Patrol, which oversees it. Beyond the flat detention area, the land rises sharply, crowned by the primary border fence, which is also 30 feet high. Beyond that, you can see Mexico’s Highway 2. The highway runs east-west from Tijuana’s downtown to its beachside neighborhoods before turning south.

In this squalid detention facility between the fences, asylum-seeking migrants periodically gather, waiting to be detained by Border Patrol. They are often tired and hungry. They have often had to get here by paying Mexican cartels—risking extortion, kidnapping, and sexual assault. Sometimes, in the process of crossing through concertina wire and/or scaling the primary border fence, they get hurt.

The aid station servicing them is a soft-sided, jerry-rigged structure. Since February 2023, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) volunteers have given aid to asylum-seeking migrants who, after getting past the primary fence. Aid distribution is possible because the gaps between the steel fence bollards are four inches wide, just wide enough to pass bottles of water and other items by hand.

As Rios writes on the AFSC site, “In addition to medical care, our humanitarian response team helps people with other necessities. We give food and water to people who may not have eaten in days. We provide dry socks and shoes to people who are soaked after wading through water. We give them a place to charge their phones so they can call their loved ones and let them know they’re OK. And we do what we can to prepare them for the next steps in their journeys.”

Earlier on in the two-year history of this aid station, the AFSC volunteers might encounter hundreds on the other side of the fence, but that number has declined as of late.

When I met up with Rios, he was boiling a pot of water on a gas stove in case migrants showed up. But there wasn’t anyone around when I arrived except us. Actually, this isn’t quite true. We weren’t quite alone because the Border Patrol had vehicles stationed nearby, about 200 meters west of us. We could see the glow of their headlights.  

I began by asking Rios about the current situation on the border in light of the changes taking place at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under the Trump administration. 

This conversation has been edited for both clarity and content. 

RIOS: I would say the arrival of people here at Whiskey-8 has significantly dropped. We're not seeing as many people now as even about a month ago. That could be a combination of things. One reason might be that people are maybe waiting to see what might be happening in terms of policies that are in place. Another reason could be that Mexico has indeed stepped up their patrols with National Guard presence. I have not seen any as I was seeing for a while on the opposite side of the primary border wall. I don't know exactly where they're situated, but I know that they've been conducting some northbound inspections on vehicles at the port of entry, which is a little bit unusual. They don't normally do that. And the people that we have seen here over the past month have not necessarily been Central Americans or South Americans, and certainly not Mexicans. Mexicans do not tend to cross in this area. We've seen people from extra-continental countries. That includes India, Pakistan, Nepal, Turkey, a few from China. There might be a couple of other nationalities represented. The numbers have been, as I mentioned, much lower. So anywhere between a dozen to three dozen people. The time that they're forced to wait in this area could range between 10 minutes to almost three hours. That's been the time span that we've been observing as of late and that's been about it… There was a significant drop in June of 2024 and then from then on, it fluctuated where there was an increase, and then there was a drop in people. That's been the pattern that we've noticed.

INDY CORRESPONDENT:  That’s when Biden signed those executive orders. Did those orders give Border Patrol more on-site authority or something else? 

RIOS: No, it forced people to have to use the CBP One application. [This is the app developed under the Biden administration which allowed migrants to schedule appointments to begin the asylum claim process on their cell phones so they could cross through ports of entry to make those appointments.] If they cross through areas that were not the ports, then they could be subject to a five-year ban on asylum…. From my understanding, when Trump canceled it upon becoming president, there were upwards of about 30,000 people whose appointments were suddenly canceled. We're talking about people who have been waiting for months, and so obviously that's where some at that point, my understanding from some shelters, is that people that were waiting with their CBP One application left, and it's unclear where. But then there were new arrivals, people that were expecting to have their appointments honored, and they were arriving from Mexico City into Tijuana with nowhere to go. And so those shelters were then absorbing those people in order for them to figure out what their next steps would be. 

Stacked panoramic images of US-Mexico border at Whiskey-8

 INDY CORRESPONDENT: I was here in October, 2023 and there seemed to be a surge at that point.

RIOS: Yes. We definitely saw an increase of people crossing beginning in September of 2023 and that continued into through the fall into the winter, and probably around February of 2024 we started seeing a little bit of a of a decrease, but it was a large number of people, and some people were waiting in this area for upwards of about three days during the month of October.

INDY CORRESPONDENT: So this, I guess, is only part of your job. What are some of your other responsibilities?

RIOS: The US-Mexico Border Program focuses on border and immigration issues, and it's been operating in San Diego since 1977. I've been on staff since 2003 and the job of the organization is to be generalists around border issues. We're not attorneys, but we do a lot of advocacy at the local, state, federal level. A lot of that advocacy has to do with holding border agencies accountable, instituting oversight mechanisms, ensuring that there's transparency in how they operate. We also work a lot with community members and provide information about their rights, and that's been ongoing for a long time. But there's been a substantial increase in that work over the past month and a half, since November 2024, it's almost one a day in terms of presentations that we're doing. It just speaks to the need that people have of wanting to know information, wanting to know what the rights are. Because in addition to the work that we're doing here, we're also responding to how ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] conducts its operations in the interior part of San Diego County, and so in that work, the Know Your Rights presentations with community groups, we also do much more extensive workshops on human rights education. It's through that process that we encourage community members to get involved, to participate in their community groups, and to organize themselves in a collective way.

INDY CORRESPONDENT: How did you get involved in this kind of work?

RIOS: I would say it points back to the mid 1990s, when California was considering passing Proposition 187 which was an anti-immigrant initiative at the time, which sought to essentially make people that worked in the service industry—so medical providers, educators, police—an extension of immigration agents. And so the language was something like: if they suspected someone being undocumented, then they would have an obligation to report them to immigration authorities. The proposition passed, just barely, and then the very next day was stopped in the courts. But that really pointed me towards wanting to be active in the community, working on immigrant rights issues. I started doing that as a student at the university that I was attending, and then eventually, when I graduated, I moved to the Bay Area, and I was able to continue that work, first as a volunteer, then in a professional setting. While I was in the Bay Area, I also integrated myself into a master's program, and the degree I received was focused on immigration advocacy and immigration rights. Then when I returned to San Diego, I was fortunate enough to find a job with the American Friends Service Committee.

INDY CORRESPONDENT: You said, “returned to San Diego.” Were you born in this area?

RIOS: I was born here in San Diego, and I grew up here in this area, here in the southern part of the city of San Diego.

INDY CORRESPONDENT: The border’s changed quite a bit since that time.

RIOS: Yeah. It's changed. This area here used to be known as the soccer field, because there were people that would wait on the other side [before high fencing was put in place], and as soon as it became dark, there were groups of migrants that would run down and Border Patrol would chase after them, and then other people would come the other way. And so it was a lot of running and running around. I believe it was the Border Patrol that coined it a soccer field.

INDY CORRESPONDENT:  I was a little surprised to see this aid station still standing here after January 20.

RIOS:  Well, it was more so leading up towards the election, and then it also became a concern leading up towards January 20, whether Border Patrol would permit us to continue being here, because we essentially are on federal land, and we don't necessarily have any sort of written permission to be here. There had been statements by some of the Border Patrol agents that suggested they would remove us. So they would say, "Wait till November." Statements like that. On one occasion, one agent was photographing our vehicle plates and photographing us. There was that sort of what I would say some level of intimidation… I certainly can speak for myself and probably for several volunteers to say that our primary reason for being here is to ensure that people who are migrating are not experiencing hardship as Border Patrol forces them to wait in this location. So because we were able to expose the fact that Border Patrol was not compliant with their standards of how they are supposed to treat people in their custody, then I expected Border Patrol to remove us, and it hasn't happened yet. And we'll see for how long we continue to remain here.

INDY CORRESPONDENT: I’ve seen these little red cards everywhere, KNOW YOUR RIGHTS cards. I saw some at Barrio Logan. I'm not sure if those were once distributed by you or some other organization.

RIOS: There are a lot of people that are ordering them, distributing them, printing them on their own. There's an organization out of San Francisco that literally started those up, maybe like 14-15, years ago and and now they've become very popular, and everyone is ordering from their website, but they actually have a template that you can print out on your own.  So we present those to the community, and the community can use those red cards, and we explain how to use them. There are important, I believe, nuances about … how to tell an officer that you are exercising your right to remain silent, that you do not want to wish to sign in documents, that you do not give them permission to enter your home unless they have a judicial warrant. So those are the types of conversations that we're having with groups of people.

INDY CORRESPONDENT: Do you have any stories about individuals you've encountered recently that you keep thinking about?

RIOS: Over the course of my time here, which would be since September of 2023, and even before that, because we were here beginning, I would say, off and on since February of 2023 … I would say that there are many stories, many interactions that I've had with people here that still resonate with why it has been important for us to be here. I sincerely believe that the volunteers that have been here have saved people's lives. I sincerely believe that had it not been for the volunteers who have been here, that there were people who were ill to the point where they could have lost their lives. 

For me, it's important to recognize that, because though Border Patrol and CBP generally might not like the fact that we're here and that we drew attention to the fact that they were not meeting their national standards, that civil society came in, stepped in, and saved lives. That's the one end. On the other hand, there have been a lot of stories of people who, when they come in here, some people don't even know that they're in the United States and breaking the news to them, which is good news for the most part. They're ecstatic. They're happy. They are crying for joy, and it's wonderful to see that. Who knows what sort of trauma in their migration journey they experienced, and whatever happens next could be another set of unfortunate incidents. But at the very least, being here, receiving water as a very basic staple is an important thing to them. But there are also a lot of tragic stories: people that arrive injured here, people that have arrived with broken ankles, with deep lacerations, because they think up by the concertina wire with people that are arriving bleeding …

I recall the Jamaican father and his little girl. She fell from the wall, struck her head. She seemed to be fine, but I was concerned about the girl having a concussion and explaining to the father what the next steps were, convinced Border Patrol that the child, though she had no visible injuries, that she’d struck her head and needed to be evaluated. And so finally, the Border Patrol agreed and called for an ambulance, and the ambulance came and took them to the hospital. There are so many stories like that.

INDY CORRESPONDENT:  Are there any questions that I didn't ask that I should have?

RIOS: I think it's important to point out that while we are here providing humanitarian aid, and this is a solidarity station, I would like to see us not be here. I would like to get to a point where we can be assured that Border Patrol will be meeting people's humanitarian needs. They place this large, 1000-gallon water tank here, and people don't know that that's water that they can drink. There are no cups provided for them. There are no signs saying that that's water for them to drink. That's a problem. So, I would like to get to a point where there isn't a need for us to be here, that they are again following their standards, ensuring that people aren't being forced to wait here for hours on end. It seems that that has improved, but time will tell. I also think it's important to point out that we really believe that people who are told to wait here are under Border Patrol custody. That's where there's a difference of opinion, where Border Patrol says they are not under custody until we are transporting them out. But I have seen when Border Patrol has brought people in here from various places and tells people to wait, gives them instructions about how to wait where they have to sit along the wall and can't move from there; they have to remove their shoelaces… Those are instructions to me that indicate there's some level of custody that has occurred. And that being the case, then Border Patrol needs to meet its obligations of providing the care that they're obligated to provide, and which they are not doing.