Almost a month after announcing the end of the “Stay in Mexico” program, activists denounce this Friday a binational crisis on the border of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, where shelters are saturated and uncertainty persists about the future of migrants.
Shelter directors lamented that there are no changes after the notice from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which promised on August 8 to eliminate the Migrant Protection Protocols program (MPP), known as “Stay in Mexico”, which former President Donald Trump installed in 2019.
“Migration will always exist, in this shelter there are 51 migrants from Honduras and Mexico. We are doing expansion work, so that there is a capacity of 200 to 250 people,” Pastor Juan Fierro, director of the Pan de Vida Shelter in Ciudad Juárez, told Efe.
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, celebrated last week the end of the MPP, which requires US asylum seekers to wait for their process in Mexican territory.
“We have never accepted to constitute ourselves as what is known as a third country, as a migrant camp to wait for them to resolve in the United States”, he maintained.
But in Ciudad Juárez the reality contradicts this discourse, as well as in other parts of the border, where this policy has impacted more than 51,000 migrants, according to data from the International Rescue Committee (IRC, in English).
At “no border we will never be prepared for this reality of migration, there are cases of pregnant Haitians and they can’t find a place to seek treatment,” Father Javier Calvillo, director of the Casa del Migrante in Ciudad Juárez, told Efe.
Texas policies permeate Mexico
Activists and shelter directors have also denounced that the Mexican border is suffering the effects of the most restrictive policies implemented by the Texas governor , Greg Abbott.
Calvillo declared that “the immigration issue got out of hand for the Texas authorities”, which now sends undocumented immigrants on buses to New York and other liberal states in the United States to exert pressure.
“The The governor of Texas is a racist and that is why he sends migrants to New York, he is sending them to Joe Biden because of his immigration policy,” he commented.
While Pastor Fierro pointed out that in this migration crisis that the neighboring city of El Paso is experiencing “would be compli If they bring undocumented immigrants to Juárez, since the capacity situation in all the shelters in the region would worsen.”
The saturation reflects the record migratory flow to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted more than 1.7 million people so far this fiscal year 2022, which began last October.
Activists in El Paso raise their voices
Given the considerable increase in migrants, activists in El Paso have questioned Texas policies.
“This Monday around 51 migrants were processed from this place, members of the Division of Management of Texas Emergencies and members of the Texas State Guard carried out the processing,” Aracely Lazcano, spokeswoman for the Center for Homeless People Opportunities, told Efe.
The activists denounce that the building of the center of it s Frontier Agricultural Workers was used to send undocumented immigrants to different parts of the United States.
In the waiting room, the migrants listen to the instructions to go to their new destination.
One of the foreigners who will soon leave this refuge from the American city of El Paso is Nelvin Valderrama, originally from Venezuela.
“To get here I had many setbacks, I crossed one day before the girl from Guatemala drowned in the Rio Grande 22 in August), through Ciudad Juárez”, he said.
He mentioned that he saw cases of people waiting up to two years in Ciudad Juárez to fulfill the American dream and they had to stay in Mexico.
Another of the refugees in this place is Ruiai Ruiz, also from Venezuela.
“From Chiapas (I arrived) to this place, I went through the jungle, very dangerous, There were many dead migrants there, they drowned.”
Despite the obstacles and discrimination, he pointed out that now that he is in the United States, he feels safer than in Mexico, which he accuses of being a country with corruption, human trafficking and kidnappings.
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