“Dreams, despair and death – a migrant’s journey. A year of covering the immigration crisis”

The El Paso Times’ Omar Ornelas immersed himself in documenting the complexities of the mass migration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023. 

Ornelas is one of only two local photographers on staff. His project started locally in Texas but grew as he continued to find himself in a place to tell the stories of those migrating. He witnessed migrants’ perilous journeys across the Rio Grande and through harsh deserts. He attended services for a child who died and traced migrant journeys from Guatemala to Mexico, all while documenting these people’s struggles and tragedies with empathy. Ornelas took the time and energy to be with migrants as they made these difficult journeys so he could capture critical moments, like when he photographed a woman weeping at an ambulance door after 40 men trapped inside a Mexican migrant detention center died.

He earned the trust of migrants willing to share the emotional and physical tolls of their pursuit of a better life. Those relationships were also the basis for a separate local reporting series, “‘La pérdida – The loss’: Deadly disaster at El Paso, Juárez border.” That series aimed to humanize the fatalities at the border and explore the reasons behind the deaths, providing a counterpoint to divisive immigration debates and stereotypes.

Article by: Abbi Ross