A group of migrants from Haiti, who are sleeping in a temporary camp on the street, marched in Mexico City on Monday to demand work permits and facilities that allow them to live in decent conditions.
At least twenty Haitians, mostly men, protested from the Giordano Bruno square where hundreds of them have been sleeping for months, to the government offices in Mexico City.
The few protesters, the organizers argued, is because, if everyone leaves the square, they fear that the authorities will dismantle the camp, in addition to the fact that the officials only assigned two traffic officers to guarantee safety in the march.
“Many Haitian brothers are sick in the camp, the situation is difficult, and there is no rapprochement from any of the three levels of government,” explained Wilner Metelus, president of the Citizens’ Committee in Defense of Naturalized and Afro-Americans ( CCDNAM).
“Many have not eaten for days, without water to bathe and want to stay in Mexico, they cannot enter the United States,” he added.
The objective of their stay in Mexico, for the majority of Haitian migrants, is to work and save money to start a new life or bring their relatives to the country.
“I am on the street, suffering, and among my Haitian companions there are children and pregnant women sleeping in the street. It is a difficult situation and that is why we are here, we want documents to work and help families”, indicated Micherson Zeus.
Despite the fact that the square was evacuated two months ago and the migrants were transferred to a government shelter, the temporary closure of this has once again filled the square with Haitian migrants.
In it, several hundred people currently survive, many of them in family groups with minors, in an agglomeration of tents that extend even through the surrounding streets.
The camp is strategically located a few meters from the offices of the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (Comar), an institution with which most of them have a pending appointment to evaluate their asylum application and, eventually, obtain a permit that allowed to work in the country.
Micherson, despite having been in Mexico for nearly two months, does not have an appointment at the Comar until June 16. Others, like Baptiste Wilguens, 29, until the 7th of the same month.
“When you don’t have papers (to work) they can do anything for you, but with them you are independent, rent a house, eat, bathe. The most important thing is to help my family,” explained Baptiste, who fled Haiti due to insecurity, but had to leave his three-year-old son and his wife behind.
Haitians are the nationality that has submitted the most asylum applications so far this year to the Comar, about 18,860, but the NGO International Rescue Committee (IRC) denounced that only 5% of the cases are resolved positively.
With information from EFE
Keep reading:
- Trump vows to eliminate US birthright citizenship if re-elected president
- Marcelo Ebrand will meet in Florida with Mexicans to confront anti-immigration positions of the Republican Party
- Authorities capture 174 migrants who were traveling crowded in a truck in southern Mexico