Several dozen Haitian migrants held their third day of protest on Thursday asking Mexican authorities to regularize their situation, which caused a confrontation with police officers.
"Here in Mexico City we don’t have a job and we have to support our families, but we don’t have documents. We are protesting until the authorities give us papers"one of the approximately 30 migrants told the media.
They protested in front of the building of the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (Comar) and asked to be attended by a representative of the institution and also of the National Migration Institute.
The Haitians blocked the entrance to the facilities and tried to enter the building, at which point agents from the Ministry of Citizen Security intervened.
Then there were moments of tension with clashes between the police and the migrants, who threw some sticks and buckets, but the clash soon ceased because Comar personnel assured them that they would be treated.
The protesters insisted on the urgency that the authorities attend to their situation, since many have been in the Mexican capital for months and cannot find a job that allows them to pay the rent of a place to live or cover the needs of their families.
"We want to live here in Mexico and that is why we need a temporary card. We ask for a migration commission to solve our cases, we want legal documents for us", they added.
Nearly 13,000 irregular migrants, mostly from Haiti, were stranded in September in a makeshift camp under the international bridge that connects Del Río (Texas) with Mexico’s Ciudad Acuña, in Coahuila.
The Haitians come from Brazil and Chile after the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported in August the expansion of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, an announcement that the traffickers misrepresented, according to the Tuesday the foreign minister of Mexico, Marcelo Ebrard.
Given the difficulties, some decided to go to Mexico City to try to remain legally in the Latin American country.
However, so far they are still waiting for a positive response from the Mexican authorities.
The region is experiencing a record migratory flow to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection Office detected more than 1.7 million undocumented immigrants on the border with Mexico in fiscal year 2021, which ended on September 30.
While Mexico has intercepted more than 252,000 undocumented migrants from January to November and deported more than 100,000 in the same period, according to the Migration Policy Unit of the country’s Ministry of the Interior.
The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance received a record 131,488 refugee applications in 2021.
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