Tag Archives: Mexican border

Another 49 Central Americans from caravan cross U.S. border

People traveling with a caravan of migrants from Central America line up for eat at a camp near the San Ysidro checkpoint, after U.S. border authorities allowed the first small group of women and children entry from Mexico on Monday night, in Tijuana, Mexico May 1, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

By Delphine Schrank

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) – Forty-nine Central Americans from a migrant caravan that angered President Donald Trump crossed into the United States to seek asylum on Wednesday morning, while dozens more woke to a rainy, cold third day camped outside a U.S. port of entry.

The 49 migrants, including a first group of mostly women, children and transgender people who had been waiting at the U.S. gate for about 15 hours, were let through by midday, according to the group’s organizers, raising the total number of migrants who had crossed to 74.

Since Monday, border officials have allowed only a trickle at a time to cross the U.S. border, saying that the busy San Ysidro crossing to San Diego is saturated and the rest must wait their turn.

More than 100 members of the caravan, most from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, have been camped in a square near the entrance of the San Ysidro pedestrian bridge that leads from Mexico to the United States, waiting for their turn to enter the facility.

A group of people travelling with a caravan of migrants from Central America line up to eat at a camp near the San Ysidro checkpoint, after U.S. border authorities allowed the first small group of women and children entry from Mexico overnight, in Tijuana, Mexico May 1, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

A group of people travelling with a caravan of migrants from Central America line up to eat at a camp near the San Ysidro checkpoint, after U.S. border authorities allowed the first small group of women and children entry from Mexico overnight, in Tijuana, Mexico May 1, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

At least 28 migrants who made it into the United States on Wednesday had been next on the list. Late Tuesday they had anxiously filed through the walkway to the U.S. gate.

Two by two, some walked up to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer standing in the gate to ask if they might pass through.

First to try was a man and his small nephew, a football under his arm; then a mother and child; then a women with her grandsons.

Turned away, they bedded down in a small space pressed up against metal bars separating them from the United States, bundled against the cold under blankets and sheets of tarpaulin tenting.

No one knew when, or how many of them, would next be allowed through.

Among them was Reina Isabel Rodriguez, who had fled Honduras with her grandsons. Throughout the caravan’s 2,000-mile (3,220-km) odyssey from southern Mexico, the possibility that U.S. officials might reject her plea for asylum, and of being separated from the boys for not being their biological parent, had never seemed so real.

“I’m scared, I’m so scared, I don’t want to be sent home,” she said, tears streaming down her face. Christopher, 11, watched her with anguish, and Anderson, 7, sat at her feet, his head drooping, a toy robot in his lap.

Rodriguez was among the many migrants of the caravan who told Reuters they were forced from their homes by Central America’s brutal Mara street gangs, along with other life-threatening situations.

Trump’s administration, however, cites a more than tenfold rise in asylum claims in the past seven years, growing numbers of families and children and a shift to more Central Americans as signs that people are fraudulently taking advantage of the system.

Trump wants to tighten U.S. law to make it harder for people to claim asylum. For now though, despite his orders to keep such migrant caravans out of the country, international and U.S. law obliges the government to listen to people’s stories and decide whether they deserve shelter.

The U.S. Department of Justice said on Monday it launched prosecutions against 11 “suspected” caravan members on charges of crossing the border illegally.

About half of them are represented by the federal public defender in San Diego, according to the office’s chief trial attorney, Shereen Charlick, including three women who had planned to present themselves and their children to make asylum claims at the official border port of entry.

Long lines at the entry point led the women and their children to try crossing a few miles away, she said, where they were apprehended by immigration authorities. Defense lawyers are trying to track down the location of their children, Charlick said.

She said some of the mothers apprehended are no longer with their children, and that lawyers in the office are trying to figure out how they were separated.

Nicole Ramos, an attorney advising caravan members in Mexico, said she did not believe the individuals facing U.S. criminal charges were part of the caravan group.

“Quite a few people have claimed to be part of the caravan, including a sizable contingent of Guatemalan men who were never part,” Ramos said.

(Reporting by Delphine Schrank, editing by Robert Birsel and Jonathan Oatis)

Senate Republican leader embraces Trump immigration plan

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., February 6, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Republicans on Tuesday turned up the heat on Democrats seeking protections for young “Dreamer” immigrants as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell embraced President Donald Trump’s demands for broad changes to the country’s immigration policies.

In announcing his support for legislation that would help immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children, McConnell also threw his weight behind building a U.S.-Mexico border wall and sharply curtailing visas for the parents and siblings of immigrants living in the United States legally.

“This proposal has my support and during this week of fair debate I believe it deserves support of every senator who’s ready to move beyond making points and actually making a law,” McConnell, a Republican, said in a speech on the Senate floor.

Even some Republicans, however, have expressed skepticism that such broad, fundamental changes in U.S. immigration law can pass the Senate by the Thursday deadline that No. 2 Republican Senator John Cornyn urged late on Monday.

Also on Monday, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who is leading the charge for Dreamers, told reporters that he thought early Senate votes on immigration legislation would begin with “expansive” measures that will fail to win the 60 votes needed to clear procedural hurdles.

Then, Durbin said, senators will be forced to move “toward the center with a moderate approach.”

But at least for now, Republicans were holding a tough line. Republican Senator Tom Cotton, interviewed on Fox News, said Trump’s immigration plan “is not an opening bid for negotiations. It’s a best and final offer.”

That ran counter to statements Trump has made in recent days, including early on Tuesday in which he said in a tweet that “Negotiations on DACA have begun.”

DACA is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Democratic former President Barack Obama initiated in 2012 and which has allowed around 700,000 Dreamers to legally study and work in the United States temporarily. Last September, Trump announced he would terminate the program on March 5.

During testimony before the Senate Budget Committee on Monday, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said he thought that a deal on immigration legislation will be reached “and that we have full funding on the (border) wall” of $18 billion over two years.

Durbin and other Democrats have talked of the possibility of a bill that provides for a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and additional border security, which could include the construction of more border fencing and other high-tech tools to deter illegal immigrants.

(Reporting By Richard Cowan, additional reporting by Katanga Johnson; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jonathan Oatis)

Mexico boosts support for its migrants in the U.S.

A Mexican migrant talks to a family member through the border fence between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, United States, after a bi-national Mass in support of migrants in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico,

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s foreign ministry announced fresh steps on Wednesday to provide support to Mexican citizens living in the United States following the victory in last week’s U.S. presidential election by Donald Trump, who has promised to crack down on immigrants in the country illegally.

The ministry said it was acting to help Mexicans avoid fraud and abuses in the United States. It said it would expand the availability of mobile consulate services to reach more migrants in their communities, establish a 24-hour telephone line for questions about immigration, and provide more appointments for migrants to get passports, birth certificates and consular identification cards.

The ministry also said Mexico will “strengthen dialogue” with U.S. state and local authorities to protect its citizens, and added that migrants in the United States should “avoid any conflict situation” and stay out of trouble with the law.

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, said in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday that his administration would focus on deporting immigrants with criminal records. Trump said during the campaign he would deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally.

During the campaign, Trump also promised to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border with Mexico paying for it, accused Mexico of sending rapists and drug runners into the United States and threatened to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8 has shaken Mexico, pushing the beleaguered peso to record lows and forcing the government into crisis mode as it seeks to protect bilateral trade.

(Reporting by Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein and Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. seeks Latin American help amid rise in Asian, African migrants

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection

By Julia Edwards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Washington is seeking closer coordination with several Latin American countries to tackle a jump in migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East who it believes are trying to reach the United States from the south on an arduous route by plane, boat and through jungle on foot.

U.S. agents deployed to an immigration facility on Mexico’s southern border have vetted the more than 640 migrants from countries outside the Americas who have been detained at the center since October 2015, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents reviewed by Reuters.

The migrants often fly to Brazil, obtain fake passports there, and are smuggled to Panama before heading through Central America to Mexico’s porous southern border, according to transcripts of 14 interviews conducted at the center and other internal briefing documents seen by Reuters.

The U.S. agents’ findings come as Mexican immigration data show 6,342 Asian, African and Middle Eastern migrants were apprehended trying to enter Mexico in the first six months of this year. That was up from 4,261 in all of 2015, and 1,831 in 2014.

U.S. border apprehensions point to the same trend. Between October 2015 and May 2016, U.S. agents apprehended 5,350 African and Asian migrants at the U.S. Southwest border. That’s up from 6,126 in all of fiscal year 2015 and 4,172 in all of fiscal year 2014.

U.S. concerns about potential security risks from migrants using the unusual and circuitous southern route have been growing in recent years, following a string of Islamic State-inspired attacks in the West and the surge in Syrian refugees fleeing that country’s civil war.

Five Syrian nationals detained in Honduras last November were part of a wider group of seven Syrians who acquired forged passports in Brazil and then went by land to Argentina on their way north, a U.S. government source familiar with that case said. There was no evidence to suggest the men were militants.

“The reality is that the vast majority of the people that Mexico encounters that are extra-continental will eventually end up on our border,” a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official said.

At the detention camp in Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents have been training their Mexican counterparts on interview techniques, and using U.S. criminal databases to investigate detainees, according to internal documents seen by Reuters.

Two to three U.S. agents have been stationed there since at least October, according to the documents and U.S. officials. Mexican officials have previously acknowledged the presence of U.S. agents at Mexico’s southern border, but few details of the cooperation have been reported.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol began a pilot program for a similar operation in Panama earlier this fiscal year, according to an internal memo sent in May that has not previously been reported. Homeland Security officials told Reuters that Panama requested U.S. training. A spokesman for Panama’s National Migration Service said Panama accepted an offer from the U.S. embassy for training on subjects like “defense techniques” and “management of persons.”

U.S. proponents of the program have pushed for a greater U.S. footprint to build a “comprehensive intelligence picture” of migration patterns across the Colombia-Panama border, according to the memo sent in May.

Panama is leading the effort in Central America to detain illegal migrants, DHS assistant secretary for international affairs Alan Bersin told a House committee in March, but it stymied by lack of detention space and the difficulty of deporting migrants to countries with whom they have no diplomatic ties. As a result, most are released after 30 days.

Bersin acknowledged the rise in migrants from outside the Americas and the potential security threat they pose.

“While many citizens of these countries migrate for economic reasons or because they are fleeing persecution in their home countries, this group may include migrants who are affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, intelligence agencies, and organized criminal syndicates,” Bersin told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

DHS has deployed additional “mentor” teams throughout South and Central America to professionalize immigration authorities and gain intelligence about potentially threatening migrants, said DHS officials, who declined to specify which countries host U.S. agents.

Another DHS official said the agency is asking Brazil through diplomatic channels to put a stop to fake passport manufacturing. Brazilian officials did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, a unit of DHS, is “actively working to enhance regional collaboration with border and customs authorities from Mexico all the way down to Argentina,” a DHS official said.

ON FOOT IN THE JUNGLE

The apprehension documents from the Tapachula center show how migrants are willing and able to pay thousands of dollars to obtain flights and fake passports and then make grueling journeys on buses, boats and on foot.

It was not clear how many of those apprehended at the center were deported, claimed asylum or simply released.

Several of the 14 migrants — in testimony given from May 18-23 this year — said they paid more than $10,000 to smugglers, walked for days through jungles, and were temporarily detained by various countries before being stopped in Tapachula.

Six of the men — who included Pakistanis, Syrians and Afghans– had obtained fake passports, claiming to be from Israel, Morocco, Belgium or Britain.

In Panama, several of the men said they were kept in a migration detention camp for about a month. From Panama, the migrants described traveling in larger groups, sometimes as many as 50 men.

One Pakistani national — whose identity U.S. officials asked not to be revealed because he is still under investigation — told U.S. and Mexican officials that he paid a smuggler in Pakistan $9,000 to be smuggled to Brazil where he received a fake Belgian passport.

In Brazil, he paid $4,000 to a woman to be taken on bus, boat and on foot through across Colombia and into Panama.

He said he was detained in Panama but then released. From there, a smuggler from Lebanon took the man and 35 other migrants of different nationalities to Honduras, where he said he was robbed of all of his belongings.

His family wired him more money from Pakistan and the man was able to pay $40 to be smuggled into Guatemala. He paid $5 to be taken by raft into Mexico. There he got a taxi, which was halted by authorities who took him to the Tapachula center.

SENSITIVE TOPIC FOR MEXICO

Accepting U.S. help on immigration issues is politically sensitive for Mexico, said Adam Isacson, a security and border policy analyst at The Washington Office on Latin America, a non-profit human rights advocacy group.

“But the Mexicans have quietly been open to the equipment and training they have received,” he said.

A CBP spokesman said the agency deployed to Tapachula at the Mexican government’s request. Mexico’s immigration agency is the Instituto Nacional de Migracion (INM).

“CBP personnel train INM officers in the collection of biometric information, and review and share biometric information on people of interest,” the spokesman said.

INM declined Reuters’ request for comment and access to the Tapachula facility.

In testimony before the Mexican Senate on Aug. 3, Mexico’s chief immigration officer Ardelio Vargas Fosado said his agency was aware of the influx of migrants from outside the Americas. But the lack of diplomatic relationships between Mexico and many African countries has made it difficult to deport those apprehended, he said.

Under law, U.S. agents cannot arrest or deport migrants from other countries, but as foreign-based trainers, they can gather intelligence on who may be headed for the U.S. border.

Isacson said most of the migrants taking the Latin American path northward are seeking economic opportunity in the United States. But DHS is focused on security risks.

“The Tapachula area is along a permeable border. DHS views it as one of the areas where a terrorist group that wants to do harm on U.S. soil would be most likely to come in,” he said.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards, Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington, Frank Jack Daniel, Enrique Andres Pretel and Joanna Bernstein in Mexico; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Stuart Grudgings)

Mexico buckles under migrant surge to U.S.

A resident walks by a section of the border fence between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Tijuana

By Gabriel Stargardter and Julia Edwards

TAPACHULA, Mexico/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mexico is struggling to stem the flow of Central American migrants traveling to the United States ahead of the U.S. presidential election, causing major concern in Washington, which is weighing sending more agents to help.

In 2014, Mexico moved to strengthen its southern border when a surge in child migrants from Central America sparked a political crisis in the United States.

Last year, Mexico detained over 190,000 migrants, more than double the number in 2012.

But official data examined by Reuters shows that fewer migrants have been captured in Mexico this year even as the number caught on the U.S. border has soared.

The slowdown in detentions on Mexican soil is frustrating U.S. officials who feel that Mexico could be doing more, according to a source familiar with internal briefings on the topic at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Illegal immigration is stoking a fierce debate ahead of the U.S. election on Nov. 8 with Republican candidate Donald Trump vowing to deport millions of people and build a wall along the Mexican border if elected president.

Mexico says its National Migration Institute (INM), which regulates migration in the country, is already working flat out to contain the problem, but it has a fraction of the resources that U.S. agencies have.

“We’re at the limit of our resources,” Humberto Roque Villanueva, Mexico’s deputy interior minister responsible for migration, told Reuters.

The number of families stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border jumped 122 percent between October 2015 and April 2016 from the same period a year earlier, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The number of detained “unaccompanied minors” – children traveling without relatives – was 74 percent higher. Most of the Central Americans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Despite those increases, fewer migrants are being caught as they move through Mexico. Over the same period, Mexico detained and deported about 5 percent fewer people than in 2014/15. So far this year, 3.5 percent fewer unaccompanied minors have been stopped.

The DHS is considering sending more agents south to train Mexican officials on how to track human traffickers and stop migrants crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border, according to an internal briefing document obtained by Reuters.

U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, who sits on the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said DHS officials told him they hope to help Mexico strengthen its southern border.

“When you’re constantly working at full speed and don’t have all the resources because your primary mission is to fight the drug cartels, yeah, you’re going to be stretched,” Cuellar said.

DHS spokesman Daniel Hetlage declined to say whether it aimed to send more officers to work with the INM, but said the DHS and CBP have an “excellent” relationship with the INM and Mexico’s government.

Roque Villanueva attributed the migrant surge to people finding new routes past checkpoints. He said he was unaware of any U.S. plan to send reinforcements, and that there are already U.S. agents at Mexico’s southern border, albeit only for training.

LEAKY BORDER

In 2014, Mexico launched the “Plan Frontera Sur” to tighten border controls, register migrants and stop them using the perilous network of trains known as “La Bestia”, or “The Beast”.

But migrants quickly adapted.

Elisabel Enriquez, Guatemala’s vice-consul in Tapachula, said migrant smugglers now rent trucks and shuttling migrants from southern Mexico all the way to the U.S. border over 2,000 km away for up to $8,000 per person.

Two such trucks were stopped in recent weeks, she said, one stuffed with about 115 migrants and the other about 60.

Some migrants immediately apply for asylum on arrival in Mexico. Once granted a refugee visa, they can travel through Mexico without fear of being deported, said Irmgard Pund, who runs the local Belen migrant shelter.

So far this year, asylum applications with Mexican refugee agency COMAR are up over 150 percent compared with 2015, and could reach 10,000 by the end of the year, said Perrine Leclerc, head of the Tapachula field office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The rise in families heading north is partly due to a 2015 U.S federal court decision limiting the time mothers and children can be held in detention, which has created the mistaken impression they can stay in the United States, U.S. officials say.

A regional drought in Central America has also increased pressure to leave, while some migrants are trying to cross ahead of the election in case Trump wins and follows through on his campaign promises, making it more difficult for them in the future.

Compared to their U.S. counterparts, Mexico’s migration authorities get by on a shoestring. The INM spent 4.14 billion pesos ($228.37 million) in 2015, less than 2 percent of the CBP’s budget request for 2016.

The United States has tripled its border force under President Barack Obama to 60,000 staff, while the INM has 5,383 employees.

Roque Villanueva said the fall in the price of oil, which funds about a fifth of Mexico’s federal budget, makes it even harder to put new resources into the INM.

Nonetheless, he said Mexico and the United States would continue to work closely together as Washington has plenty of reasons for wanting a robust southern Mexican border.

“The Americans are not so worried by how many Central Americans get through, but rather about making sure nobody with even the slightest chance of being a terrorist does,” he said.

($1 = 18.1287 pesos)

(Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Kieran Murray and Ross Colvin)