Mexico slowly processes migrants from caravan
Many apply for asylum, get 45-day visitor permits
CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — Mexican authorities for a second straight day Saturday refused mass entry to a caravan of Central American migrants held up at the border with Guatemala, but began accepting small groups for asylum processing and gave out some 45-day visitor permits that would theoretically allow recipients time to reach the United States.
Seeking to maintain order after a chaotic Friday in which thousands rushed across the border bridge only to be halted by a phalanx of officers in riot gear, authorities began handing out numbers for people to be processed in a strategy seen before at U.S. border posts when large numbers of migrants show up there.
Once they were processed, migrants were bused to an open-air, metal-roofed fairground in the nearby city of Tapachula, where the Red Cross set up small blue tents on the concrete floor. Easily 3,000 people or more the previous day, the crowd on the bridge thinned out noticeably.
But the slow pace frustrated those stuck on the bridge, where conditions were hot and cramped, and some pleaded at the main gate: “Please let us in, we want to work!” Behind it, workers erected tall steel riot barriers to channel people in an orderly fashion.
Each time a small side gate opened to allow small groups in for processing, there was a crush of bodies as migrants desperately pushed forward.
Scarleth Cruz hoisted a crying, sweat-soaked baby girl above the crowd, crying out: “This girl is suffocating.”
Cruz was among the many who appeared willing to accept any kind of migratory relief Mexico might offer. Cruz, 20, said she was going to ask for political asylum because of threats and repression she faced back in Honduras from President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s governing party.
“Why would I want to go to the United States if I’m going to be persecuted” there as well, she said.
Mexico’s Interior Department said in a statement that it had received 640 refugee requests by Hondurans at the border crossing. It released photos of migrants getting off buses at a shelter and receiving food and medical attention.
At least a half-dozen migrants fainted amid the heat, and a steady stream abandoned the bridge to cross the Suchiate River by swimming, fording its shallows with the aid of ropes or floating in groups of about 10 on rickety rafts.
None was detained within sight of observers despite the presence of police lining the bridge.
Some migrants tore open a fence on the Guatemala side of the bridge and threw two young children, perhaps age 6 or 7, and their mother into the muddy waters about 40 feet below. They were rafted to safety on the Mexican bank.
Some on the bank yelled warnings to migrants on the bridge not to get on buses organized by Mexican authorities, claiming it was a ruse to deport them. There was no evidence of anyone being deported through such trickery, but the warnings made plenty leery of boarding, like Fidelina Vasquez, a grandmother traveling with her daughter and 2-year-old grandson.
A Mexican migration official who declined to give his name because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly said that between Friday and Saturday, authorities had deported by bus about 500 people who voluntarily decided to return.
Migrants have commonly cited widespread poverty and gang violence in Honduras, one of the world’s deadliest nations by homicide rate, as their reasons for joining the caravan.
“One cannot live back there,” Vasquez said, standing next to the main border gate.
Hector Aguilar, a 49-yearold sales manager who worked as a taxi driver in Honduras’ Yoro province to feed his four children, said he had to pay the two main gangs there protection money in order to work.
“On Thursdays I paid the 18th Street gang, and on Saturdays the MS-13,” Aguilar said. “Three hundred lempiras per day” — about $12.50, a significant amount in low-wage Honduras.
At the gate, Mexican workers handed food and water to the migrants. Through the bars, a doctor gave medical attention to a woman who feared her young son was running a fever.
Some migrants returned to Tecun Uman on the Guatemalan side to buy food and supplies. Local women brought water for the migrants to bathe.
The caravan had elicited a series of angry tweets and warnings from President Donald Trump early last week, but Mexico’s no-nonsense handling of the migrants at it southern border seems to have satisfied him more recently.