Hundreds of migrants, especially Haitians, have arrived in recent days in the city of Nuevo Laredo, which borders Texas and has a high incidence of organized crime, and have put the shelters in this town in Mexico that applied on Monday in a delicate situation. help to care for them.
Since the last week of April, “We have witnessed the arrival of hundreds of migrants in our city,” Enrique Sánchez Martínez, bishop of the Diocese of Nuevo Laredo, said at a press conference on Monday.
“For us it is new because here is the last place they arrive due to the circumstances of our border, of our city, which are sometimes adverse for migrants, they are difficult for them,” added the bishop. “But since they opened the doors in the United States to receive asylum applications, well, many of them came in large groups.”
Nuevo Laredo is the stronghold of the Northeast cartel, split of the former Zetas and an organized crime group that has one of its main businesses in migrant smuggling. Due to the violence and dangers of the locality, migrants—both those who cross with smugglers and those who do so on their own—often cross at other points.
However, this situation apparently changed in recent days, according to the bishop. The Haitians arrived in “large numbers” and joined asylum seekers who have been waiting up to a year in the city’s shelters to process their cases with US authorities.
Last year around 14,000 Haitians arrived at another remote place on the border with Texas, Ciudad Acuña, almost in the blink of an eye, setting up a huge camp on US territory and causing a complicated situation in the two neighboring countries.
On this occasion, only in the shelter of the Catholic Church of Nuevo Laredo, the Casa del Migrante Nazareth, there are about 200 migrants of different nationalities, who are joined by 200 more who come to sleep in the parking lot.
Another large number is left out “because they don’t fit,” said Bishop Sánchez Martínez, which is why a new space with tents is being set up to serve more people, which he has already described as a new “humanitarian crisis.”
The United States has not changed its immigration laws, but the Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP) began to apply in Nuevo Laredo a measure that allows “emergency entry for humanitarian reasons” and that was what, religious trial, apparently attracted new migrants.
As Marvi Ajic, director of Casa Nazareth, explained to The Associated Press, on Saturday, April 16, in the middle of Holy Week, the Mexican authorities informed them that they would begin to receive asylum seekers who had been stranded in the city for months on a daily basis, a petition that Ajic had done since February before the US consulate.
Ajic explained that they were asked for a migrant list almost in a matter of minutes. “Then (Mexican) Migration organized itself with the shelters and the modality was to send the people who had been waiting for a long time without any filter, whoever it was,” regardless of nationality or situation.
Apparently word got out and that’s when they started arriving Haitians.
Winston Demeille, a Haitian who is now in Tijuana – the border with California – and hopes to reach the United States, confirmed that he had heard from friends that it was easier to cross through the Mexican state of Tamaulipas and he did not know whether to move or not.
The director of Casa Nazareth in Nuevo Laredo reminded migrants that the processes for political asylum applications in the United States “are not yet open” and that they should not “expose their families by thinking that writing on some list can guarantee them be prosecuted” in the pilot project that was opened in this city. “And if they have the ability to access these emergency entry processes, they are at no cost to anyone,” he stressed.
Various civil society organizations and even UN agencies have warned on other occasions of how organized crime spreads false information for its own purposes and for migrants to move to one place or another.
Bishop Sánchez Martínez did not rule on whether this is what may be happening on this occasion.
Tens of Haitian migrants They have also arrived in other parts of Tamaulipas in recent days.
The start of the processing of asylum seekers through Nuevo Laredo for reasons of urgency coincided with the crisis that arose on the same border during Easter when the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, imposed unusual checks on trucks at several crossings —which temporarily blocked some bridges — with the aim of pressuring the authorities of the Mexican border states to increase their fight against illegal migration.
Abbott, who will seek re-election in November, has made immigration control one of his main slogans.
The United States immigration authorities detained migrants on the border with Mexico more than 220,000 times during March —according to CBP figures—, the largest record in the last two decades, with which the issue has a significant electoral impact in a year. in which that country holds midterm elections.
In addition, the United States plans to eliminate at the end of May the immediate expulsions that were launched at the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, something that could further encourage the irregular migratory flow.
Under this sanitary measure, tens of thousands of migrants have been returned in these two years, although with the current Biden government, six out of ten foreigners who arrived illegally under other immigration regulations were also processed.