36% of migrants detained in April in the United States are Mexican

April again left a record number of illegal crossings on the border between Mexico and the United States. Border authorities had more than 178,000 encounters with migrants, a 3% increase compared to March. 36%, about 65,500, were from Mexican migrants according to figures released this week by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Although the crisis facing the Biden Administration on the border has a strong Central American component, the hot deportations reveal that Mexicans are trying to enter the northern country at a rate not seen in two decades. Since October, more than 323,000 Mexicans have been detained, 44.6% of the foreign population that entered the country illegally.

Laura (fictitious name to protect her identity) fled the state of Michoacán at the end of February, ravaged by drug trafficking violence, with 14 other relatives dedicated to planting avocados. Members of a cartel came to his town. "We lived happily, like normal people, but they got to get everything out of control," he laments. His brother was kidnapped. She reported the incident to the police, who accompanied her for three days until they found him and two neighbors dead. There Laura decided that everyone should flee. The exodus began for those who had not had among their options to migrate. “My family didn't want to come. They said how they were going to leave their land, their home. I told them that life comes first. The land is going to be there ”, he says by phone. Laura hopes, along with others displaced by the violence,the opportunity to seek asylum in the United States.

Laura and her family have little chance of being able to stay in the United States once they make the crossing. This Thursday, Alejandro Mayorkas, President Joe Biden's Secretary of Homeland Security, reminded the Senate that "100%" of families and single adults who enter the country illegally are "subject to the rapid expulsion" allowed by the Title. 42, a public health standard that is serving the new immigration policy Administration as it allows rapid removals while the border is closed due to the coronavirus crisis. The only exception the Government has made is with children alone.

April registered a 5% increase in arrests of Mexicans compared to March.

And the increase is much more surprising, of 260%, if it is compared to March 2018, a month with a high migratory flow that prepared the ground for the caravans that would begin in October of that year.

Border patrol agents had 2,438 encounters with unaccompanied Mexican minors during April.

Since October 2020, the start of the fiscal year, they have been 14,900.

The largest number of apprehensions, however, remains of single adults, with 317,500.

This is 92% of the arrests documented by CBP.

Title 42 was a rule put in place by the Donald Trump administration at the beginning of the pandemic to close the land border to non-essential activities and make asylum petition cases more difficult. Biden has found it helpful in venting the crisis on the southern border. 62% of the 178,000 migrants found in April by border agents were expelled thanks to this rule, according to official figures. But those who arrive without papers at the southern border are expressly returned to Mexico. And many of them try again.

The numbers presented by the immigration authorities show "encounters" and not people, so among the more than 65,500 records of Mexicans detained and expelled in April, there are likely to be people who have tried several times. “People, especially men, cross over, bring them back under Title 42 and try the number of times necessary because there is no penalty for that illegal crossing. This is clear to us because we know that the majority of the people returned under Title 42, at least on this border, are Mexicans, ”explains Soraya Vázquez, from the non-governmental organization Al Otro Lado, from Tijuana.

Vázquez intuits that the arrival of Biden to power with a "message that things would change" in the face of the harshness of Trump's speech with the undocumented may have caused a

on

on Mexican migrants after a year of pandemic.

Although Mexico has never imposed strict quarantines for the coronavirus like other countries, in 2020 the country's GDP fell by 8.5%.

Meanwhile, remittances from Mexicans in the US injected the local economy at record levels.

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