Expat Covid deaths surge
THE calls keep coming. A farmworker from Oaxaca dead in Florida. A construction worker from Zacatecas in Los Angeles. A housekeeper from Puebla in New York.
For more than a year, Mexican consulates across the US have catalogued the toll the coronavirus has taken on America’s migrant workforce, one desperate phone conversation at a time.
Thousands of Mexicans in the US, most of them undocumented immigrants deemed “essential workers” by state labour departments, have died of Covid-19. By one measure, the community’s death rate soared nearly 70%.
Even in death, their immigration status haunted them. That’s where the Mexican diplomats came in: it was their job to repatriate the bodies of the pandemic dead.
It was a task that ended up consuming vast parts of the government. At one point, Mexico dispatched a military jet to retrieve hundreds of urns.
But more often, it was a quiet, sad exercise - unlike any the country’s diplomats were used to. A young consular officer in Florida, for example, boarded a flight to Mexico City with several urns as hand luggage. A veteran envoy in California found herself trying to help bury one of her own employees.
And, sometimes, Mexican families grew tired of waiting for their government to act and took things into their own hands. Some started fund-raisers to pay the $4 000 (R58 480) it normally costs to repatriate a body. Others smuggled coffins across the border.
While millions of Americans are now getting vaccinated, undocumented migrants are still struggling to sign up for their own inoculations.
In some cases that’s because pharmacies require IDs to make appointments. In others, it’s because the migrants worry that going to a vaccination site could lead to deportation. As a result, they’re still dying disproportionately of Covid-19, and the Mexican consulates are still receiving calls.
Sebastián Benítez’s mother got sick last April and her condition deteriorated quickly. He knew he needed to start thinking about where she wanted to be buried. He remembered something she had said about wanting to return to her native village, San Pedro Calantla in the state of Puebla. Burial was a sentiment immortalised in the country’s iconic song México Lindo y Querido, an immigrant’s hymn.
Benítez’s mother migrated from Puebla to New York in 1993. She raised two US citizen sons and eventually became a permanent resident herself. But it was her village that she considered home.
In the days after she died, Benítez became single-minded in his focus in getting her body back to Puebla. The Mexican consulate in New York told him her remains would need to be cremated – something Benítez and many Mexicans consider abhorrent. “So I basically took things into my own hands.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Mexico’s government struggled to navigate a web of public health regulations and individual airline rules that made repatriating bodies nearly impossible.
Diplomats were overwhelmed with calls. “These were people who, if they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid,” said Juan Sabines, the Mexican consul-general in Orlando. “So they kept working, and they got sick.”
Mexico received 7 434 requests to repatriate the bodies of migrants last year, up from 4 410 in 2019 – an increase of 68%.
In Mexico City, officials battled to figure out how to keep up with the expatriate death toll.
In July, the foreign ministry contacted the military. Could they use an air force supply aircraft to bring the dead home?
The plane arrived at the Mexico City airport on the night of July 11 carrying 245 urns. The Mexican government called the mission “unprecedented”.
The demand to repatriate Covid-19 bodies has continued into this year.
And Milenio, one of the country’s major papers has published a guide: “What to do if a relative dies of Covid in the US and you want to transport them to Mexico.”