Mexico moving migrants from border to relieve pressure

MEXICO CITY — Mexico is flying migrants south away from the U.S. border and busing new arrivals away from its boundary with Guatemala to relieve pressure on its border cities.

In the week since Washington dropped pandemic-era restrictions on seeking asylum at its border, U.S. authorities report a dramatic drop in illegal crossing attempts. In Mexico, officials are generally trying to keep migrants south away from that border, a strategy that could reduce crossing temporarily, but experts say is not sustainable.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that in the week since the policy change, Border Patrol averaged 4,000 encounters a day with people crossing between ports of entry. That was down dramatically from the more than 10,000 daily average immediately before.

Between the migrants who rushed to cross the border in the days before the U.S. policy change and Mexico’s efforts to move others to the country’s interior, shelters in northern border cities currently find themselves below capacity.

In southern Mexico, however, shelters for migrants are full and the government is busing hundreds of migrants more than 200 miles north to relieve pressure in Tapachula near Guatemala. The government has also said it deployed hundreds of additional National Guard troops to the south last week.

On Friday night, Mexico’s immigration agency was offering migrants camped in the center of Mexico City — most of them Haitians — to fly them to Huixtla, a city near Tapachula, to lodge them and expedite the processing of documents, said Alma Rubí Pérez, a representative of the immigration agency in the country’s capital.

Segismundo Doguín, Mexico’s top immigration official in the border state of Tamaulipas, across from Texas, said last week that the government would fly as many migrants away from border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros as necessary.

The transfers were “lateral movements to other parts of the country” where there were not so many migrants, Doguín said. He called them “voluntary humanitarian transfers.”

The Associated Press confirmed Mexican flights from Matamoros, Reynosa and Piedras Negras carrying migrants to the interior over the past week. A Mexican federal official, who was not authorized to speak publicly but agreed to discuss the matter if not quoted by name, said approximately 300 migrants were being transferred south each day.

Among them were at least some of the 1,100 migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba that the U.S. returned to Mexico in the week since the policy change.