Mexico is making a big effort to stop the flow of Central Americans trying to reach the US and has dramatically reduced the number of child migrants, but it is unclear for how long Mexican federal officials will keep up the raids.
A Mexican federal police officer said his group was told that they would be stationed in southern Mexico for six months. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to talk to reporters.
Convoys of federal police and immigration service employees in southern Mexico have been scouring the tracks of the infamous freight train known as La Bestia, or “The Beast,” that has long carried crowds of migrants on its route north. They have also set up roadblocks, checking the documents of passengers on interstate buses.
Journalists witnessed dozens of federal police and Mexican immigration agents storming the train as it made an unscheduled stop after midnight on Friday.
“We are federal agents. Give up. You are surrounded. Come down carefully,” the lawmen shouted to huddled, stunned migrants.
Fewer than 15 were detained on a train that once carried 600 to 1,000 migrants at a time.
US and Mexican officials say they are noticing the same reduction all along the route.
US POSITION
The roundups follow US requests for help from Mexico, as well as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador earlier this summer when the number of unaccompanied minors turning themselves into the US Border Patrol reached what US President Barack Obama called an “urgent humanitarian crisis.”
On Aug. 7, the US Department of Homeland Security released data showing that the number of unaccompanied children and children traveling with a parent arrested along the southwest border of the US in July was about 13,000, half what it had been in June.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the trend appeared to be continuing during the first week of this month, and Obama said on Thursday that numbers for the whole month would show a further decline.
“We’re seeing a significant downward trend in terms of these unaccompanied children,” Obama said in a news conference.
With the new crackdown, the migrants who once circulated openly in shelters and boarded the cars as they were being attached to the locomotive are forced to hide in the woods, where criminals lurk. There are few women and no children, because the journey now requires jumping onto a moving train.
Some of the Central American men say that instead of trying to cross into the US, they will now stay and look for work in Mexico. Many families have apparently decided not to attempt the journey through Mexico at all, since news of the raids and checkpoints — combined with stepped up efforts in the US and among Central American governments — reached their communities, said Carlos Solis, the manager of a shelter in Arriaga. He said the city, once bustling with migrants waiting to board the train, emptied out almost overnight.
“They are also going after the coyotes, so it is increasing the cost of the trip and making them move through less visible areas,” Solis said, referring to the smugglers paid to get migrants to the US border.
HUMAN WAVE
It is a far cry from the wave of migration that pressed toward the US earlier this year, spurred on by a surge in violence in several Central American countries and news that women and children who reached the US were being let go inside the country with orders to return for immigration hearings because family shelter space had filled up.
From October to July, about 63,000 unaccompanied children were detained after entering the US illegally, double the number from the same period a year earlier. Another 63,000 families were picked up during that period.
There were no Central American children in the Mexican government shelter in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, coordinator Jose Guadalupe Villegas Garcia said on Thursday. During the surge, at any one time the shelter housed about 15 Central American children who had been apprehended or rescued by Mexican authorities before crossing the Rio Grande. Officials say the children are being caught long before they get to the border.
“There are very few foreigners,” said Carlos Jimenez, a spokesman with the Mexican family services agency in Reynosa. “We received three or four children” in August.
Omar Zamora, a Border Patrol spokesman in the Rio Grande Valley, where most of the unaccompanied children have entered the US, said on Thursday that the agency was seeing between 30 and 40 children in custody each day in recent weeks. That is down from a peak when 300 or more were arrested per day earlier this summer.
How long Mexico can or will sustain the operation is unclear. Sealing off the porous border with Guatemala is neither physically possible nor politically popular, and strict enforcement inland is already drawing criticism, because it so closely mirrors the deadly cat-and-mouse game that US border patrol agents have long played with Mexican migrants farther north.
For now, the effort shows no sign of abating.
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