When Mag and I first met, all I heard was a shout.
As I walked up to Albergue Assabil, the first shelter for Muslim migrants on the U.S./Mexico border, he yelled in my direction asking why I was there.
The 33-year-old Mag (short for Magomed, a Russianized form of Muhammad) was leaning on a white pick-up truck in a black hoodie and matching sweatpants sporting a full, more-than-fist-length reddish beard with a slight white streak running down the side. He had been in Mexico since December 2024. Originally from Dagestan, a federal republic of Russia located in the North Caucasus region, he was on the road for two years since leaving his family back home for reasons he consistently referred to as “complicated.”
He arrived in Tijuana just before the border shut down completely in January 2025. He’s been stuck there since.
Now he spends his afternoons at the shelter, a few blocks from the rust-colored bollard fencing that marks the U.S./Mexico border, close enough to the wall to see the drag roads that Border Patrol trucks use to police the 50-to-100-foot no man’s land known as the “zone of enforcement” between the barriers on the Mexican side and those in the U.S.
Even with that view, so close and yet so far to his goal of living in Los Angeles, Mag is, by his own reckoning, waiting for one thing: November.
The 2026 U.S. midterm elections are still weeks away, but Mag — like many other migrants waiting in Mexico — has pinned his hope for a different life onto a single date on a calendar.
Like most at Assabil, and thousands more scattered across cities like Tijuana, Tapachula, and Mexico City, Muslim migrants who arrived in the last two years have adopted a shared shorthand for the future.
They are, as Mag put it to me, “waiting on November.”
But as Mag himself would admit, waiting may not be enough – and the democracy he hopes will self-correct and open a pathway for his presence may leave him and many others like him disappointed come December.