Police derail ‘The Beast’

FEDERAL POLICE and immigration agents had waited silently in the brush alongside the tracks for at least hour, visible only by the glint of their powerful flashlights.

As the train known as ‘‘The Beast’’ stopped, the area was flooded with spotlights as agents pounced, shouting: ‘‘Federal police! Give up! You’re surrounded!’’

About a dozen men, some literally spitting with anger and desperation, were led off the track, agents’ hand on the backs of their necks, and taken to waiting vans for processing and deportation. Agents helped a lone female migrant to reach their van. ‘‘ Don’t touch me,’’ she snarled.

The scene yesterday would have been unheard of in Mexico during the decades in which Central American migrants were allowed to freely hop freight trains to reach the US border. But the raid is part of a crackdown that has sharply reduced the number of women and children trying to make their way to the US, where they turn themselves in to the Border Patrol – an exodus that caused what US leaders call a crisis at the border.

Fewer than 15 migrants were detained yesterday on a train that once carried 600 to 1000 migrants at a time. It seemed – at least temporarily – like the end of an era for the train the migrants dubbed ‘‘ La Bestia’’ because of all the travellers who had been maimed or killed trying to hitch a ride.