A 20-bed field hospital at a migrant camp near Matamoros has been approved for setup by American and Mexican officials after weeks of negotiating permission requests from Global Response Management (GRM), the medical aid organization that spearheaded the effort. The hospital plans to begin receiving patients on May 1.
GRM first proposed the field hospital at the beginning of March, when it began to plan for the impending coronavirus pandemic. Andrea Leiner, a nurse practitioner and the director of strategic planning for GRM, said the organization knew it was a question of when, and not if, the virus would arrive in the camp. “There is nothing to indicate that it won’t become a problem,” Leiner told the Observer.
Since October, the organization has been providing medical aid to the nearly 2,000 migrants waiting at the foot of the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros. Most of the camp’s residents have traveled to the U.S. port of entry in hopes of seeking asylum in the U.S. or are waiting in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) for their immigration cases to be heard in U.S. courts. After the camp began growing quickly last fall, GRM began to coordinate with other U.S. and Mexican aid organizations and volunteers, including Team Brownsville, Angry Tias and Abuelas of the RGV, and Resource Center Matamoros, as well as local religious leaders, to pool resources to serve the needs of the migrants in the makeshift encampment on the Rio Grande riverbed. When local officials told GRM that Matamoros had only 10 respirators in its hospitals and emergency rooms in the area would begin to admit only life-threatening emergencies, GRM began to make its own emergency management plans for the camp.
