Migrants dumped in Monterrey
MONTERREY, Mexico — The bus carrying dozens of Central Americans from the Texas border arrived in this northern Mexican city late at night and pulled up next to the station. Men and women disembarked with children in their arms or staggering sleepily by their sides, looked around fearfully and wondered what to do.
They had thought they were being taken to a shelter where they could live, look for work and go to school. Instead they found themselves in a bustling metropolis of over 4 million, dropped off on a street across from sleazy nightclubs and cabarets with signs advertising for “dancers.”
The Associated Press witnessed several such busloads in recent days carrying at least 450 Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans from Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, to Monterrey, where they are left to fend for themselves with no support on housing, work or schooling for children, who appear to make up about half the group.
Mexico has received some 20,000 asylum seekers returned to await U.S. immigration court dates under the program colloquially known as “remain in Mexico.” But there had been no sign of such largescale moving of people away from the border before now, after the program expanded to Nuevo Laredo in violence and cartelplagued Tamaulipas, a state where the U.S. State Department warns against all travel due to kidnappings and other crime.
In response to a request for comment, the National Immigration Institute, or INM for its initials in Spanish, said in a twoparagraph statement that the agency cooperates with consular authorities and all levels of government to attend to returnees. It said Mexico abides by international law and is working to upgrade shelters and immigration facilities “to improve the conditions in which migrants await their processes in national territory.”
Maximiliano Reyes, deputy foreign relations secretary, acknowledged last week that migrants were being removed from Nuevo Laredo and said it was for their own safety.
Unlike asylum seekers who wait in line for months to file claims in the U.S. and are then sent back, all those taken to Monterrey said they had crossed illegally and spent several days in U.S. detention centers before being returned with a court date.They were told that going to Mexico or continued detention were the only options.