By The newspaper
03 May 2024, 01:42 AM EDT
Officers from the Public Security and Mobility Directorate of Chicoloapan in the State of Mexico found at least 208 migrants of different nationalities from Latin American and Asian countries who were in a warehouse and had been abandoned.
Through an anonymous complaint, the migrants were rescued from the place where they were abandoned. According to the authorities, they identified that there were 10 minors, 28 women and 170 men, from Afghanistan, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Iran, Nepal, Palestine, Dominican Republic, Syria and Venezuela.
They got off buses and put them in the warehouse
Chicoloapan police said that some witnesses commented that the migrants got off several trucks and were taken to the warehouse located in the Santa Cecilia neighborhood. Then the people who left them there left.
The migrants were waiting for the traffickers, also called ‘polleros’, who would look for them and then continue their journey to the Mexico-United States border, some of them in their attempt to flee the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Chicoloapan police officers took the people found to the municipal National System for the Comprehensive Development of the Family (DIF) where they received food and medical attention, while federal authorities determine their legal situation.
The rescue of the 208 migrants occurs after a record migration crisis in North America during 2023, where, in Mexico alone, irregular migration grew by 77.2% compared to the previous year.
407 immigrants found in three buses
Mexico’s National Immigration Institute reported that on Thursday, May 2, its agents found 407 foreigners “abandoned” on three buses in the southern state of Veracruz.
There were 91 family people on board, plus 264 adults and 52 unaccompanied minors, from seven countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America. A pregnant woman, her son and a man had to be taken to a hospital.
This same week, the Mexican and US governments agreed to implement immediate measures to drastically reduce irregular crossings on the common border.
Traveling crowded inside vans, trailers and buses is one of the most dangerous ways migrants use to clandestinely cross Mexico, heading to the United States.
On these trips that migrants undertake, they often suffer crimes such as robbery or kidnapping and for which they pay thousands of dollars to traffickers in order to reach the United States.
With information from EFE
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