On US-Mexican border, the rules change, but human impulses don't

So much has happened so fast, Joyce Hamilton says, that she has to double-check exactly when her small role in the 2018 border crisis began.

Checking her calendar in a park across the street from the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville earlier this week, her guess is close: 15 days ago.

There had been nothing in the news then, and no one had been talking about it until she heard from a friend of a friend that asylum-seekers were lined up on the bridge connecting Reynosa, Mexico with Hidalgo, Texas – a few miles south of McAllen.

At first she was surprised, says Ms. Hamilton, a retired educator who lives in Harlingen – then eager to learn what supplies the asylum-seekers needed.

Ever since the Trump