MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico is flying migrants south from the US border and busing newcomers away from the border with Guatemala in a bid to ease pressure on its border towns.
In the week since Washington lifted pandemic-era asylum-seeking restrictions on its border, US authorities are reporting a dramatic drop in illegal border-crossing attempts. In Mexico, authorities generally try to keep migrants south of this border. This strategy could temporarily reduce border crossings, but experts say it is not sustainable.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that in the week since the policy change, border patrol has experienced an average of 4,000 encounters per day with people transiting between ports of entry. That was a dramatic drop from the average of more than 10,000 daily moving averages immediately prior.
With so many migrants crossing the border in the days before the U.S. policy change and Mexico’s efforts to relocate others inland, shelters in northern border towns are currently underutilized.
In southern Mexico, however, migrant shelters are full and the government is sending hundreds of migrants on buses more than 200 miles north to ease the pressure in Tapachula, near Guatemala. The government has also said it deployed hundreds of additional National Guard troops to the south last week.
On Friday night, Mexico’s immigration service offered migrants camped in central Mexico City — most of them Haitians — to fly them to Huixtla, a town near Tapachula, for accommodation and expedited document processing , said Alma Rubí Pérez, an immigration official in the country’s capital.
Segismundo Doguín, Mexico’s top immigration official in the border state of Tamaulipas across from Texas, said last week the government will fly as many migrants as needed out of the border towns of Reynosa and Matamoros.
The transfers were “cross movements to other parts of the country” where there weren’t as many migrants, Doguín said. He called them “voluntary humanitarian transfers”.
The Associated Press confirmed that over the past week, Mexican flights from Matamoros, Reynosa and Piedras Negras were carrying migrants inland. A Mexican federal official, who was not authorized to speak publicly but agreed to discuss the matter if not quoted by name, said about 300 migrants were being brought into the south every day.
Among them were at least some of the 1,100 migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba the US had sent back to Mexico in the week since the policy change.
“So the northern portion of the migrant route is somewhat depleted, but the southern and central portions remain extremely crowded and are constantly filling up,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight and close observer of the border at WOLA. a Washington-based human rights organization. “Obviously, that’s a balance that can’t last long.”
Mexico has shifted migrants south in the past when there were concerns about the capacity of northern border towns, but this time there are additional factors.
While the country’s shelters for migrants in the south are full, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute has closed its smaller detention centers for migrants across the country and conducted a review of its large ones, after 40 migrants died in a fire at a small detention center in the border city of Ciudad Juarez in March.
The federal official said Mexico’s largest immigrant detention centers are mostly empty. Two other federal officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest detention center, was empty.
Tonatiuh Guillén, former head of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, said Mexico’s actions are contradictory: on the one hand, it has told the United States it will curb migrants in the south, but on the other it has detained fewer people.
One morning this week, several hundred migrants waited on the outskirts of the southern city of Tapachula for government buses that would take them to Tuxtla Gutierrez, some 230 miles north.
Guillén said the document Mexico is now issuing to some migrants in Tuxtla Gutierrez — an expulsion order that gives migrants days or a few weeks to leave the country — leaves them with no other options, making it harder for them to seek international protection to search.
Edwin Flores from Guatemala had been trying to get to the US on his own, but when he heard about the government buses from Tapachula he decided to give it a try.
“They didn’t tell us exactly what authorization they’re going to give us, just that we have to continue the paperwork there in Tuxtla Gutierrez,” Flores said. Other migrants said they arrived there but did not receive any document.
“We’ve heard on the news about all the legislative changes they’ve made and the massive deportations from the United States,” Flores said. Nothing has changed in his plans, “because the goal is to arrive and see for yourself what happens.”
He said he wanted to make an appointment with US authorities to file his asylum application. He said he was a private security guard in Guatemala and that gangs had tried to recruit him as their eyes on the streets.
On Wednesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Mexico said it was concerned about pressure on migrant shelters in southern Mexico and Mexico City. “In addition to those arriving from the south, some shelters have already taken in Venezuelans deported from the United States,” the agency said on Twitter.
A Venezuelan, who gave only his first name Pedro to avoid consequences, said this week he entered the US illegally just before the policy change last week but was brought back to Mexico in Piedras Negras.
“They put us on a bus, gave us a snack and took us to the airport,” said the 43-year-old, who previously obtained legal residency in Mexico. He was speaking from a migrant home called “The 72” in Tenosique near the Guatemalan border. “They left us in an industrial area of Villahermosa. There they let us go and I came here defeated.”
With all the movement, migrants are an easy target. Gangs have kidnapped them from the streets of border towns and entire busloads of north-central Mexico.
This week, a busload of migrants disappeared near the border of San Luis Potosi and Nuevo Leon states. The migrants said a drug cartel abducted them when their bus stopped at a gas station. They had traveled from the southern state of Chiapas.
Officials at the bus company first reported the hijacking on Tuesday, telling local media that they had received demands for $1,500 a piece to free the migrants.
In the days following her kidnapping, 49 people were found – including Hondurans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Salvadorans and Brazilians – but authorities weren’t exactly sure how many of them had originally been on the bus.
“In whose hands are the people who migrate?” asked Alejandra Conde, who works at The 72 migrant home in Tenosique, one of the largest in southeastern Mexico. It was “like a Machiavellian strategy between authorities and organized crime”.
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Clemente reported from Tapachula, Mexico. Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman of Mexico City contributed to this report.