Crime menaces migrants on Mexico border as Tijuana declares crisis

November 24, 2018  02H:39  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Renee Celeste and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and Reuters, TIJUANA, Mexico

TIJUANA, Mexico - Unaccompanied minors and other vulnerable migrants risk falling victim to crime in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, where thousands of Central Americans from caravans may be stuck for months as authorities tighten up asylum rules, advocates say.

Some 4,600 migrants from the bedraggled caravans whose advance has angered U.S. President Donald Trump are camped out with blankets and little food in an overcrowded stadium in Tijuana, whose mayor has declared a “humanitarian crisis.”

Trump has sent troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, authorized the use of lethal force and threatened to shut down the frontier entirely if the migrant caravans are not stopped.

Among the Central Americans, many of whom are Hondurans fleeing violence and poverty in the struggling region, are about 80 minors between the ages of 10 and 17, according to migrants rights groups.

Josue, a 15-year-old Honduran in Tijuana, said that during a previous attempt to cross into the United States last year he was kidnapped and badly beaten in Mexico by drug traffickers claiming to be from the notorious Zetas gang.

“I ended up in the hospital, I don’t know how, because I arrived there half-dead,” he said, declining to give his second name.

Once he was well enough, authorities deported him, he said.

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Reuters was not able to independently corroborate details of his story. Mexico’s immigration institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the case.

Tijuana was rated by Mexican think tank Seguridad Justicia y Paz as the fifth most violent city in the world in 2017, with a higher murder rate than the Central American cities from which the migrants are escaping.

Juan Manuel Gastelum, Tijuana’s mayor, said late on Thursday that the city was facing a humanitarian crisis and that supporting the migrants was costing more than 500,000 pesos ($25,000) a day. He urged international agencies to help Tijuana.

WAITING LIST

Activists fear the Central Americans could be stranded for a long time in the city, where some protests against the presence of the caravan have broken out.

In May, citing a lack of processing space at the same crossing, U.S. immigration officials stalled a previous caravan that also drew Trump’s anger. Eventually, they began letting in a trickle of people from the group.

To manage flows of asylum claimants, Mexican and U.S. authorities have in recent years maintained a waiting list. Lawyers and human rights group Amnesty International have said such measures slow the process.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement sent to us at Reuters that the San Ysidro Port of Entry, which connects Tijuana to San Diego in California, could process up to 100 people per day and that it was working with Mexico to manage the flow.

Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said it protects the rights of all foreigners and was “respectful of immigration policy implemented by other countries.”

Stalled for days, migrants from the caravan have been signing onto the waiting list. They include gay and transgender teenagers.

Erika Pinheiro, director of litigation at Al Otro Lado, an immigration legal advocacy group, last week told a Californian court under oath that “LGBT children cannot safely stay in Mexico. They are at risk of violence and persecution.”

Tijuana has just one shelter for migrant children, which subsists with the help of civic organizations.

“Young people are definitely the most vulnerable in this type of movement,” said Mynor Contreras, who runs the local YMCA. “We’ve never received so many in such a short time.”

Tension and frustration at the U.S.-Mexico border

If the children cannot enter the United States, they risk being deported from Mexico. That can spell big trouble.

“I don’t want to die,” said 16-year-old Justin, who related how his life was threatened last month for not paying a “war tax” that gangsters charged for his small used-clothing business in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. “That day I told my mother to give me her blessing and I left,” he said, crying.

BREAKING: Central Americans stalled at U.S.-Mexico border

November 18, 2018  08H:30  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Renee Celeste and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and Reuters, MEXICALI, Mexico

MEXICALI, Mexico - Hundreds of migrants from a caravan of Central Americans were stalled at the U.S.-Mexico border on Saturday, where a handful said they welcomed recent Mexican offers of employment in the face of a hostile U.S. reception.

Private security guards stand guard in front of the border fence between Mexico and United States, in Tijuana, Mexico November 16, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

The Mexican government last week reiterated job offers to the migrants, saying that those who obtained legal status could occupy thousands of vacancies, most of them in the country’s “maquiladoras,” doing factory work.

Since arriving at the border last week, they have been denied entry through the gates linking Mexico to the United States.

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Dozens of the mostly Hondurans waited in lines to bathe and washed clothes sullied from 2,600 miles of relentless travel.

Several members of the caravan, which left the crime-wracked city of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on Oct. 13, told us at Reuters that they would be willing to stay put in Mexico rather than face rejection across the border.

“If we had work, we would stay. This has been very tiring,” said Orbelina Orellana, a 26-year-old Honduran mother of three, waiting at the Alfa and Omega shelter in the city of Mexicali, which borders Calexico, California.

“I cry a lot to not be able to feed them as I’d like,” Orellana said of her children. “I just want an opportunity.”

Briefly stalled by Mexican riot police on a highway crossing between two southern Mexican states late last month, a dozen migrants told us at Reuters that they rejected such offers, preferring to try their luck in the United States.

But on Saturday, some said that thinking had changed.

“We had the idea to cross to the United States, but they told us it will be nearly impossible,” said Mayra Gonzalez, 32, traveling with her two children. “We cannot starve as we wait to find out if they’ll give us asylum. Better to work, by the grace of God, here in Mexico.”

A migrant from Honduras, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America to the United States, prepares to get on a bus bound for Mexicali at a makeshift camp in Navojoa, Mexico November 17, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

In a sharp reversal of longstanding U.S. policy, President Donald Trump’s administration last week began enforcing new rules that curtail asylum rights for anyone who arrives without documents at the U.S. border.

Trump earlier this month deployed almost 6,000 troops along the long U.S. border with Mexico.

    As they wound north through Mexico, the migrants were helped along by local authorities and residents who offered food, clothing and even free rides on daily treks that averaged 30 miles a day, much of it on foot.

But that welcome became noticeably frostier as the caravan reached the border.

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In Tijuana, a city long accustomed to a population of migrants in transit, deportees and U.S. pleasure-seekers, a clutch of local residents last week threw rocks at the migrants, telling them to go home.

But some said the Central Americans could help boost the local economy.

“We are not against migration,” Ulises Araiza, President of the Association of Human Resources of Industry in Tijuana, told us at Reuters.

“We know the situation that these people face in their country. But we also favor order so as to integrate them into the labor sector, because only in Tijuana do we have a demand in the maquiladora industry for 5,000 people.”

Nearly 1,800 families separated at U.S.-Mexico border in 17 months through February

June 9, 2018  06H:32  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Suzanne Gould, Renee Celeste, and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and Reuters, WASHINGTON/SAN YSIDRO (CALIFORNIA)

WASHINGTON/SAN YSIDRO (CALIFORNIA) - Nearly 1,800 immigrant families were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border from October 2016 through February of this year, according to a senior government official, as President Donald Trump implemented stricter border enforcement policies. 

FILE PHOTO: Undocumented immigrants just released from detention through "catch and release" immigration policy stand at a bus station before being taken to the Catholic Charities relief center in McAllen, Texas, U.S., April 11, 2018. REUTERS/Loren Elliott/File Photo

The numbers are the first comprehensive disclosure by the administration of how many families have been affected by the policies. Previously, the only numbers provided by federal officials on family separations covered a single two-week period in May.

The government official, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, said he could not provide up-to-date statistics, but acknowledged the number of separations had risen sharply in recent weeks, largely because of new administration policies.

In May, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a ‘zero tolerance’ policy in which all those apprehended entering the United States illegally would be criminally charged, which generally leads to children being separated from their parents.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official testified last month to Congress that between May 6 and May 19, 658 children were separated from 638 parents because of the stepped-up prosecutions. That brings the total of officially acknowledged separations to more than 2,400, though that does not include recent weeks or the period from March 1 to May 6.

Immigration and child advocates, Democratic lawmakers and the United Nations have all condemned the practice of separating families at the border, but the administration has defended its actions saying it is protecting children and making clear that illegal border crossers will be prosecuted regardless of their family circumstances.

    In most of the 1,768 cases of families separated by border agents between October 2016 and February, children were removed from parents for medical reasons or because of security concerns, the official said, citing examples such as parents needing hospitalization or officials discovering the parent had a criminal record either in the United States or in their home country.

In 237 cases, the official said, children were removed because border agents suspected adults were falsely posing as the parents of minors in their charge.

FILE PHOTO: After being detained and released by law enforcement, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras and his son pass the time before beginning a bus journey to Louisiana at the Catholic Charities relief center in McAllen, Texas, U.S., April 6, 2018. REUTERS/Loren Elliott/File Photo

The period for which statistics were provided included the final three months of the Obama administration in 2016, but the official could not say whether any of the separations occurred then.

‘PUBLIC INTEREST’

    The practice of separating families has not been systematically tracked until now, the official said, and the figures given to us at Reuters had to be compiled manually.  

    “Why weren’t we pulling these statistics before? Because it wasn’t a big enough phenomenon that had public interest,” the official said. “Now it’s increasing and it’s of public interest.”

    The bulk of the separations involved Central Americans, who make up the majority of families crossing the southwest border. Some were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally, while others crossed illegally and then presented themselves to border patrol agents asking for asylum because they feared returning home.

    Immigrants can also go to an official port of entry to request asylum before crossing the border. The official said separations in such circumstances are rare, but that the numbers are not tracked separately.

    The official noted that the number of separations from October 2016 to February this year represented less than 2 percent of the 106,700 family units arrested along the southwest border during that same period.

    ‘THE MOST DRACONIAN THING’

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the government on behalf of a Congolese asylum seeker who turned herself in to border guards in California only to have her 7-year-old daughter taken from her and housed in government custody more than 2,000 miles away in Chicago for months.

    The government said in legal papers that it took the child into custody because it could not corroborate the two were related. The ACLU argued the question could have been quickly resolved by a DNA test, which was only done much later.

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    Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney representing the woman and other parents in similar situations, said the Trump administration is using allegations of fraud and security concerns to justify a policy that is actually aimed not at protecting children but at deterring future border crossers.

    “Taking a child away from their parent and interfering with the basic constitutional right to family unity, that’s about the most draconian thing you can do and it needs the most compelling reason possible,” Gelernt said. “Deterrence is a policy measure that uses these children as pawns and violates the basic fundamental notion of what’s in the child’s best interest.”

The official said some families were separated because human smugglers had tried to game the system by placing children with unrelated adults, hoping the adults would fare better if caught.

    Only a few immigration detention centers have the capacity to house parents and children together, so families caught at the border have often been freed to await court hearings while living in the United States.

On Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with 26 other Democrats and two independents introduced a bill that would put new limits on federal law enforcement’s ability to separate immigrant children from their families unless a court decides that would be best for the child.

The bill specifically states that a minor cannot be removed from a parent or legal guardian “solely for the policy goal of deterring individuals from migrating to the United States.”