Mexico town says it will receive migrants returned from U.S.

MEXICO CITY — The border city of Nuevo Laredo is to begin receiving migrants returned from the United States as early as this week to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims wind their way through U.S. courts, Mexican officials said Monday.

Mexico and Washington agreed to expand the program often referred to as “remain in Mexico,” during earlier talks that headed off threatened U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods.

The expansion is expected to take place at three points along the border, and Nuevo Laredo Mayor Enrique Rivas confirmed that his city across from Laredo, Texas, is one of them. Located in the crimeplagued state of Tamaulipas, it could receive up to 150-200 asylum seekers daily beginning Friday.

Previous rollouts of the program at two points along the California-Mexico border and at Ciudad Juarez-El Paso on the Texas border began in much smaller numbers than that and gradually increased. Nuevo Laredo officials said Mexico’s government has not yet said how many their city will receive.

“It is a humanitarian issue that we will be attending to within the measure of our capacities,” Rivas said. “The federal government must take responsibility for being the ones who took this decision [to accept the program’s expansion]. We will continue knocking on doors to find resources. The municipal government is overwhelmed.”

Observers have expressed concern about the possible implementation of the program in Tamaulipas, where drug cartels control swaths of territory and have been known to prey on vulnerable migrants.

The State Department bars U.S. government employees from most travel in Tamaulipas and warns American citizens against all travel to the state because of kidnapping and other crimes. It is one of just five of Mexico’s 31 states currently under a level-four travel warning, the State Department’s most severe.