Migrants fearful after hundreds arrested
TONALA, Mexico — Central American migrants traveling through southern Mexico toward the U.S. on Tuesday fearfully recalled their frantic escape from police the previous day, scuttling under barbed wire fences into pastures and then spending the night in the woods after hundreds were detained in a raid.
In the Chiapas state town of Tonala, migrants flocked to one of the few places they felt they could be safe — the local Roman Catholic Church — only to start with fear at the sound of a passing ambulance’s siren.
“There are people still lost up in the woods. The woods are very dangerous,” said Arturo Hernandez, a sinewy 59-year-old farmer from Comayagua, Honduras, who fled through the woods with his grandson. “They waited until we were resting and fell upon us, grabbing children and women.”
Mexican immigration authorities said 367 people were detained Monday in what was the largest single raid so far on a migrant caravan since the groups started moving through the country last year. Journalists from The Associated Press saw police target isolated groups at the tail end of a caravan of about 3,000 near Pijijiapan, wrestling migrants into police vehicles for transport and presumably deportation as children wailed.
Now terrified of walking exposed on the highways, some turned in desperation to a tactic that used to be a popular way north, clambering aboard a passing freight train bound for the neighboring state of Tabasco.
Asked about the detentions in a Tuesday morning news conference, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador did not give details on what he referred to as an “incident” but acknowledged that the government is not letting migrants simply go wherever they please. He denied taking a hard line, saying controls are for migrants’ security because human traffickers are allegedly infiltrated among the caravans.
While President Donald Trump has ramped up public pressure on Mexico to do more to stem the flow of Central American migration through its territory, Lopez Obrador repeated previous assertions by officials that his government has not changed its approach toward the caravans and rejected criticism from some that the immigration policy seems unclear or even contradictory.
In recent months Mexico has deported thousands of migrants. It has also issued more than 15,000 humanitarian visas that allow migrants to remain in the country and work.