By Maria Verza and Edgar H. Clemente - The Associated Press
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Airplane transfers from northern to southern Mexico. Bus movements between cities in the south. Migrants who advance, others who want to return. Crowded hostels. Empty immigration facilities.
With the end of Title 42, the health rule that allowed U.S. authorities to expeditiously expel asylum seekers under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic, attempts to illegally cross the U.S. southern border have been substantially reduced. But Mexico's migration landscape is uncertain, with thousands of people moving through territories plagued by criminal organizations and no clear information about authorities' plans.
Haitian migrants camp out at Giordano Bruno Square in Mexico City, Thursday, May 18, 2023.Marco Ugarte/AP
According to data provided Friday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the last week there were about 4,000 daily interceptions of migrants on average, compared to 10,000 the previous days. In total, 1,100 Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans were returned to Mexico during the week.
Faced with this situation, the Mexican government has begun to transfer migrants from border cities in the north and south of the country to places in the interior to relieve pressure.
The Associated Press confirmed that dozens of people were flown in from the northern cities of Piedras Negras, Reynosa and Matamoros. There were also bus transfers from Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, to the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) inland.
[How Migrants Are Rethinking Their Journey to the U.S. After the End of Title 42]
On Friday night, the National Institute of Migration (INM) offered the migrants camped in the center of the capital, most of them Haitians, to transfer them to Huixtla, a town near Tapachula, to accommodate them there and expedite the delivery of documents, the INM delegate in Mexico City, Alma Rubí Pérez, told the press.
His counterpart in the border state of Tamaulipas, Segismundo Doguín, said last week that these were "lateral movements to other areas of the country" of a "humanitarian" and "voluntary" nature, so that people seeking asylum in the United States through the CBPOne application can do so from less crowded cities.
Who is not eligible to apply for asylum in the U.S. under Title 8? A lawyer clarifies it
May 18, 202302:10
In a telephone interview with the AP, Doguin said the first plane from Matamoros left last Friday, the same day Title 42 expired, and assured that Mexican authorities will proceed to make all the necessary transfers both from that city and from Reynosa.
Earlier this week, about 300 migrants were flown in from northern Mexico, a Mexican federal official told the AP on condition of anonymity. Most of the flights, he said, went to Villahermosa, in the southeastern state of Tabasco, a point from which appointments cannot be made with CBPOne.
A Venezuelan who was arrived by plane from Piedras Negras, next to the border with Texas, to Villahermosa, said he was left in the industrial zone of the city. "There they released us and I came here defeated," he explained from the La 72 shelter in Tenosique, also in the southeast, after asking to be identified only by his first name, Pedro.
[Mother of Girl Killed in Border Patrol Custody Says She Warned of Girl's Heart Problems]
The 43-year-old man achieved legal residency in Mexico, but in May he decided to cross illegally into the United States just before the rules changed and was returned. Now he doesn't know whether to look for work in Mexico or return to Colombia, where his family is.
Movements similar to the current ones were carried out during the Donald Trump Administration, when it implemented Title 42.
Tonatiuh Guillén, a sociologist and former head of Mexico's migration agency, told the AP that the United States is now criminalizing illegal crossings even though it opened some regular entry routes — and that "hostility" toward migrants continues in Mexico.
Parents reject initiative to enable schools as a migrant shelter in New York
May 17, 202301:42
For its part, the Mexican government is giving "two different messages: a message of strength and a message of relaxation", since on the one hand more containment was announced but fewer people are being detained.
As a result of the fire at Ciudad Juárez's immigration facilities in March that left 40 migrants dead, the INM closed its small detention centers across the country and ordered a review of large ones.
As confirmed to the AP by the aforementioned federal authority, all are practically without migrants. The country's largest, in Tapachula, remained empty Friday, two other federal officials in that city confirmed.
[The UN estimates that 400,000 migrants will cross the Darien jungle in 2023]
However, shelters run by civil organizations in the capital and the south of the country are overcrowded, a situation that worries the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), he said Wednesday on his Twitter account. In Mexico City, some are at 800% capacity, some thirty migrant defense organizations said in a statement.
In the north, they are emptier because of transferees and because many migrants rushed across the border in the days before the policy change.
"The northern part of the migration route has emptied a bit, but the southern and central parts are still filling up all the time," said Adam Isacson, a close border observer at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). "It's obviously a balance that can't be maintained for a long time," he added.
'They Take You Out, They Handcuff You': U.S. Deports Thousands After End of Title 42 While Migrant Camps Look Deserted
May 15, 202302:25
In addition, the documents that Mexico is now offering more quickly are no longer those that allowed temporary transit but expulsion orders.
"We don't know what to do"
This week, several hundred migrants waited one day in Tapachula for government buses that would take them to Tuxtla Gutierrez. "They have not specified anything about what permission they are going to give us, only that we have to continue with the process of the papers there," explained Guatemalan Edwin Flores. Upon arriving there, many received "exit offices," documents that, according to Guillén, are "invitations to leave the country" that complicate the possibility of requesting international protection.
Others don't get even that. "Migration at no time gave us any documents. It was all a hoax," Venezuelan Juan Camilo Mena, who boarded one of those buses this week, told the AP via message. According to their version, when they arrived in Tuxtla they were told to continue on their own way. "We really don't know what to do," he lamented.
[U.S. and Canada reach agreement to return asylum seekers intercepted at common border]
For the former head of the INM, with so many people mobilizing, "the big winners are the human traffickers," who control the clandestine crossings and can extort or kidnap.
In recent weeks the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has confirmed mass kidnappings of migrants in the center-north of the country, groups of 50 or 100 migrants who were reported to have disappeared.
One of those responsible for the La 72 shelter, Alejandra Conde, said that only on Wednesday seven kidnapping victims arrived who did not even want to file a complaint.
"In whose hands are the people on the move?" asked Conde. It's like "a Machiavellian strategy between the authorities and organized crime," he added.