Mexico overhauls migrant handling
TAPACHULA, Mexico — Benjamin Villalta, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan, couldn’t believe that a Mexican immigration office would open in the middle of the night to give him and some 40 other migrants one-year humanitarian visas allowing them to move about Mexico and work.
“They took our information and at most we waited half an hour,” said the excited Villalta.
It was a radical change from his first contact with Mexican authorities in early November, when they detained him and then dumped him at a remote border crossing with Guatemala. Undeterred, he caught up with a migrant caravan that had left Tapachula, spent three weeks walking with them and then took the government’s offer of a bus ride to another city and a humanitarian visa.
Such an option would have been a fantasy before and is now part of a major overhaul of how Mexico is handling migrants at its southern border. It came just days before the United States and Mexico announced Thursday a deal to reimplement under court order a Trump-era policy known as “Remain in Mexico” at Mexico’s northern border that forced asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico.
Both sets of policies seek to alleviate immigration pressures on the two governments. Mexico is trying to relieve growing frustration among migrants whom the government has contained in Tapachula. Remain in Mexico, swiftly suspended by President Joe Biden when he took office, was intended by the previous administration to deter asylum seekers by making them wait in Mexico’s dangerous northern border cities.
The dilemma of how to cope with the migrant caravans departing Tapachula pushed Mexico to find alternatives.
After more than two years of a containment policy that kept migrants stuck in the south, far from the U.S. border, Tapachula — a sweltering city of some 350,000 — was overwhelmed with tens of thousands of migrants. They have been crowded in parks and plazas, many complaining they couldn’t find work.
The new plan is to move migrants to other states across Mexico and give them humanitarian visas to let them work legally for a year, according to the National Immigration Institute.
The effects of that policy change remain unclear, especially since many of the migrants still aspire to make it to the United States.
In recent days, some 3,000 people, mostly Haitians, have camped under trees and in the parking lot of Tapachula’s soccer stadium. They wait for buses that the Mexican government will use to ferry migrants to other cities and hope for the humanitarian visas, but don’t know when the buses will arrive or where they’ll go.
“I want to go to another city to look for work,” said Haitian migrant Edwine Varin as she and her husband and son sought shade under a sheet at the stadium. “If I don’t work, how am I going to pay rent? How am I going to buy food, clothes for the kids?”
A Venezuelan migrant who would only give his name as Jeferson said he had just arrived to Tapachula with his mother. “We were coming by on the bus because we were going to turn ourselves in to immigration and we saw all the people,” Jeferson said. An Associated Press journalist saw them board a government bus later that day, though where it was headed was unclear.
With little information, migrants have attempted to organize themselves, but it’s not always successful. Some have blocked roads to demand the government send more buses. The immigration institute has not said how many migrants have been given the humanitarian visas or bused elsewhere.
As part of the deal to reimplement Remain in Mexico, the U.S. will vaccinate asylum seekers enrolled in the program and help pay for efforts to shelter them in Mexico.
Mexico’s own asylum system has been swamped by requests as some migrants see it as a more attainable alternative to the United States. This year, Mexico has received more than 123,000 applications for asylum, compared with about 70,000 in 2019, according to government data released Wednesday.