Options shrink for Haitian migrants straddling border
DEL RIO, TEXAS » Options narrowed Tuesday for thousands of Haitian migrants straddling the MexicoTexas border as the United States government ramped up expulsion flights to Haiti, and Mexico began flying and busing some away from the border.
Dozens of migrants upset about being deported to Haiti tried to rush back into a plane that landed Tuesday afternoon in Port-au-Prince as they yelled at authorities. A security guard closed the plane door in time as some deportees began throwing rocks and shoes at the plane. Several of them lost their belongings in the scuffle as police arrived. The group was disembarking from one of three flights scheduled for the day.
More than 6,000 Haitians and other migrants had been removed from an encampment at Del Rio, Texas, U.S. officials said Monday as they defended a strong response that included immediately expelling migrants to their impoverished Caribbean country and faced criticism for using horse patrols to stop them from entering the town.
That was enough for some Haitian migrants to return to Mexico, while others struggled to decide on which side of the border to take their chances.
Jean Claudio Charles, 34, his wife and their 1-year-old son were stretching at dawn on Tuesday after sleeping on cardboard in a park by the river with 300 others who chose to return to Mexico from the U.S. side, some for fear of being deported and others because of a lack of food.
Charles said he did not want to leave the area, which is gradually becoming a new camp on the Mexican side, for fear of arrests.
“They are grabbing people, they bother us, especially Haitians because they identify us by skin,” he said.
But thousands of people remain at the camp in Texas. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, during a visit to Del Rio on Tuesday, said the county’s top official told him the most recent tally was about 8,600 migrants who remain there. He continued to slam the Biden administration and expressed skepticism the area would be cleared soon.
“They have shown no capability of being able to process all of these migrants by the end of the week,” Abbott said. “The only thing they have shown is an incapability of dealing with this crisis, candidly in a way where they pretend it doesn’t even
exist. We’re here to tell you, it exists, it’s total chaos, and the Biden administration, they need to up their game big time.”
About six dozen officers with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons were in place Tuesday near Del Rio, according to three people familiar with the matter. The officers are mainly assisting U.S. Customs and Border Protection with transporting the migrants on Bureau of Prisons buses between detention facilities and from the Del Rio bridge, the people said. The people could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
On Monday, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded it was
a “challenging and heartbreaking situation,” but he issued a stark warning: “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned. Your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life.”
Mexico’s Foreign Relations Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, said Tuesday he had spoken with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about the Haitians’ situation. Ebrard said most of the Haitians already had refugee status in Chile or Brazil and most weren’t seeking it in Mexico.
“What they are asking for is to be allowed to pass freely through Mexico to the United States,” Ebrard said.
Mexico has also begun
flying and busing migrants from Ciudad Acuña to southern Mexico to relieve pressure on that stretch of border, according to two Mexican federal officials who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
One of the officials said three busloads of migrants left Acuña on Tuesday morning for Piedras Negras, about 55 miles down the border, where they boarded a flight to the southern city of Villahermosa in the state of Tabasco.
The other official said there was a flight Monday from the northern city of Monterrey to the southern city of Tapachula near the Guatemala border. Tapachula is home to the largest immigrant detention center
in Latin America. The flight carried about 100 migrants who had been picked up around the bus station in Monterrey, a hub for various routes north to the U.S. border.
The second official said the plan was to move to Tapachula all Haitians who had already solicited asylum in Mexico, since Tapachula is where most of them would have applied and they can only legally remain in Mexico while their case is processed if they stay in the south.
The Haitian migrants who are already in Mexico’s detention centers and have not requested asylum will be the first to be flown directly to Haiti once Mexico begins those flights, according to the official.