Sent to wait in Mexico, migrants ‘like chickens among wolves’
U.S. policy leaves thousands stranded, living in fear of gangs
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — Sandra Galeano’s monthslong attempt at a better life for her family ended in a broiling parking lot of this gang-besieged border city.
“I want to go home and will never come back,” said Galeano, 38, of Honduras, her calm murmur giving way to a whimper. “My dream has ended.”
Like thousands of other men, women and children from Central America and beyond, Galeano and her 5-year-son, Diego, crossed the Rio Grande this month in search of asylum and at least a brief chance to work in the United States.
Instead, U.S. border guards jailed them for a few days, issued them distant dates for a hearing by an immigration judge and sent them walking across an international bridge into Nuevo Laredo. Mexican immigration officers left them in the parking lot.
Now they must fend for themselves in a dangerous city where gangs prowl the streets for vulnerable migrants to extort for cash. Kidnappings and assaults are so commonplace that Mexico is busing stranded migrants to safer places in the interior.
Under a program dubbed Remain in Mexico, the Trump administration since January has sent more than 20,000 asylumseekers back across the border to await their court hearings. Unlike other harsh strategies aimed at deterring migration, the policy has survived court challenges and is expanding across the border.
Since last month, more than 3,000 migrants have been returned to Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, teeming industrial cities that long have been bastions of some of Mexico’s most powerful and violent criminal gangs.
Tamaulipas, where both cities are located, stands as one of five
Mexican states that the U.S. government warns Americans to never visit. A travel advisory from the State Department cites enhanced risks of murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, extortion and sexual assault to justify the warning.
Those risks were underscored by the reported Aug. 3 abduction of Aarón Méndez, director of Casa Amar, a migrant shelter in downtown Nuevo Laredo. He was taken by armed men after he prevented them from seizing for ransom several Cubans staying at the shelter. Colleagues say Méndez has not been heard from since and that no ransom demands have been made.
Migrants last week told of being abducted on the streets or at the city’s main bus station, sometimes held for days in gang safe houses as ransom demands were placed to family members at home or in the U.S.
“I thought I knew about insecurity, but this place is on a whole other level,” said Jesús Marín, 29, a former police officer from the Venezuelan oil city of Maracaibo who arrived at Casa Amar last week, intending to seek U.S. asylum. “We are like chickens among wolves.”
Largely because of that insecurity, the Mexican government recently began busing migrants from the border to Monterrey, about 140 miles to the south, and even to Chiapas, some 1,100 miles away on the Guatemalan border. But the buses haven’t kept up with the flow of those being returned by the U.S., forcing many into Nuevo Laredo’s handful of shelters, cheap hotels or rented rooms.
The First Baptist Church in the city center, which has long operated a free soup kitchen for indigent locals and migrants alike, gave lodging to some 60 migrants who were suddenly expelled from the immigration agency parking lot Wednesday night.
“The government should be dealing with this, not us,” said Pastor Jose Diego Robles, 62. “We don’t have the budget for this.”
Long-term deterrent?
Some good Samaritans have transported migrants fleeing the border to Monterrey and other cities to avoid the kidnapping gangs trolling the bus terminal, they said.
“They are trapped here,” said Lorenzo Ortiz, 53, a Baptist minister from Laredo who has been aiding migrants here with food and transportation for three years. “They are trying to go back home because they know they are going to be kidnapped here and their families are going to be extorted.”
“This is chaos,” Ortiz said.
Unwashed, homeless and terrified of the gangsters prowling for migrant prey, Galeano and scores of others slept last week on the bare concrete. They spent their waking hours seeking shade as afternoon temperatures in the parking lot ticked toward 110 degrees.
With many fearing to venture into Nuevo Laredo’s streets, the migrants remain dependent on food and water provided by Ortiz and other volunteers.
While employment in border factories remains unavailable, shelter operators say, many migrants have found temporary work at construction sites, in warehouses or in stores, where pay averages $10 a day or less.
Some migrants here said they plan to move deeper into Mexico to find work and return for their shot at asylum. Many others, such as Galeano, say they’ve given up completely.
“There is no way to get in, so I want to go home,” Roberto Saso, 37, a Salvadoran farmer traveling with his 12-year-old son, said of his disappearing hopes of asylum. “It’s very dangerous here. If they aren’t going to let us in, send us all the way back.”
Despite the frustration among migrants and their desire to return home, the long-term deterrent effect of Remain in Mexico remains to be seen.
Since Mexico agreed in June to step up its own enforcement efforts, thousands of migrants have also been detained along the country’s southern border. An agreement reached last month with Guatemala’s outgoing president to keep asylum-seekers there as they await interviews has been thrown into doubt by the presidentelect, who says the country isn’t prepared to handle large numbers of asylumseekers.
More than 42,500 people traveling as families were detained in July, about half the number that U.S. border agents processed in May, the peak month of the 2019 fiscal year. Total detentions of unauthorized migrants are still on track to reach more than a million by the end of the fiscal year in September, the most since the early years of the century.
“It’s likely that the Trump administration finally hit on a way of discouraging at least some illegal immigration flows, but it may not be sustainable over time,” said Andrew Selee, an expert on Mexico and president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., research center.
Many of the migrants being returned through Nuevo Laredo crossed into Texas near McAllen as a family unit — at least one adult and one child — most of them on rafts operated by the gangs that control the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande.
As have thousands before them, the migrants intentionally surrendered to the Border Patrol, expecting to be released into the U.S. to await a court hearing. Many said they had never heard of the Remain in Mexico policy, officially named the Migrant Protection Protocols, before setting out for the Rio Grande weeks or months ago.
Kidnapped at a bank
The borders’ hazards are legend along the migrants’ trail. Some said last week that they would never have come if they had known they’d have to await their hearings in Mexico.
“We begged them not to send us back here. We are so afraid,” said Edith, 36, a Honduran who crossed the Rio Grande with her 14year-old daughter Aug. 7, was detained for five days in McAllen and then sent back to Mexico on Monday.
Edith, who asked that her last name be withheld for her safety, and two other Honduran women said they were kidnapped together Tuesday after unsuccessfully trying to withdraw money that had been wired to them by relatives at a downtown bank branch.
The women said they were taken to a house in Nuevo Laredo, where they were warned that they had to have a gang-given password to walk freely in the city. They were photographed; their names and identification recorded in a ledger. At least 20 other people, some of them young children, were being held in the house, Edith said, some for days.
“They said, ‘We control everything here, and you need a code to walk around the city,’ ” said Miriam, another of the kidnapped women. “They let us go because we didn’t have our children with us and we were all crying.”
Now hunkered in one of the city’s few shelters, the women and their children rarely leave the compound’s walls for fear of being abducted again. With temperatures soaring above 100 degrees every afternoon, the families huddled with others in the shade of a few trees in the shelter’s block-sized lot, sleeping at night on thin mats placed on the concrete.
While those gathered debate the merits of giving up or holding out for an immigration hearing, several argued that migration will continue, despite the increasing hardships. Edith offers a quick lesson in the compelling economics.
She was heading for Michigan, where a Honduran friend said she could join her working at a restaurant paying $9 an hour. Edith said a short day’s shift at that wage pays 10 times what she can earn in a 12-hour workday back in Honduras.
“That’s why we are doing this,” she said, “and why others will come.”