Photo credit: the seatle times
Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border have reached a four-year low.
AP reports that, however, days before the US election, in which immigration is a major issue, migrants have continued pouring into Mexico.
Although US authorities are giving much credit to their Mexican counterparts for stemming the flow, organized crime maintains stricter control of who moves into the US than the handful of federal agents and National Guardsmen.
Migrants are kidnapped, and they pay a ransom of $100 for their release. From January to August, immigration agents intercepted more than 150,000 migrants. It is considered a fraction of the flow
The Associated Press interviewed six migrants. They had passed through an initial abduction and were held until they paid. They explained how it works. A Mexican federal official corroborated much of it. They all asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Mexican immigration agents encountered 925,000 undocumented migrants through August of this year, which is well above last year’s annual total and triples the 2021 total. But they’ve only deported 16,500, a fraction of previous years.
Reverend Heyman Vazquez, a priest in Ciudad Hidalgo along the Suchiate River that divides Mexico and Guatemala, sees it daily,
“It’s them (the cartel) that says who passes and who doesn’t. The numbers of migrants that they take every day are big and they do it in front of the authorities,” he said.
On Monday morning, Luis Alonso Valie, a Honduran travelling with his wife and two children, climbed off a raft lashed together with truck inner tubes and boards that had carried them across the Suchiate to Mexico.
They had yet to make it 50 yards toward Ciudad Hidalgo before three men approached on motorcycles to tell them they couldn’t keep walking. But seeing journalists, they left. The family was scared.
In Ciudad Hidalgo’s central plaza, Valle asked for a van to take them the 23 miles to Tapachula, considered the main entry point for southern Mexico. Climbing aboard, the driver whispered that journalists stop recording. “They (organized crime) are going to stop me,” he said.
This is often how migrants arrive at the ranch. Taxi or van drivers working for the cartel take them there and hand them over. They’re forced to sleep on the ground.
Gunmen stop vans and taxis headed to Tapachula and check for the stamps. Those without them are sent back. Migrants said that once they got to Tapachula, they were told to wash them off to avoid trouble with other gangs.
Organized crime’s strict control at Mexico’s southern border tracks with the growing violence generated by the struggle between the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.
In August, the US government expanded access to CBP One, an online portal for scheduling appointments to request asylum at the border south of Chiapas. Mexico requested the move to relieve the pressure migrants felt to travel north to get an appointment.
The Mexican government opened “mobility corridors” to help migrants with CBP One appointment to travel safely from southern Mexico to the US border. The appointments are just a first step, but most applicants can wait out the lengthy process from inside the US.
