The Institute for Women in Migration (IMM), an NGO that defends the rights of migrant women within Mexico, found in a study that 418 migrants, 50 of them minors, have been kidnaped while waiting on the Mexican side of the border for hearings in the United States for their asylum and refugee applications.
On January 29, the first migrant was returned to Mexico under the “Stay in Mexico” program agreed to by Donald Trump and Andrés López Obrador, which forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for an appointment with the immigration court to process their cases.
As of Oct. 15, authorities had returned 51,407 migrants to Mexico, according to Telemundo.
The NGO, which not only defends Mexican migrants but also those from other countries that use Mexico as a transit point, conducted an investigation during that period of nine months. They browsed information from 71 media outlets and studied reports from lawyers and civil society organizations, Telemundo reports.
The kidnappings, Telemundo quotes the IMM report, occurred in the border states of Tamaulipas, Baja California, Chihuahua and in an unidentified place, mainly outside bus stations, on the street, on highways, and even out of modules of the National Migration Institute, shelters for migrants and hotels.
The IMM identified that organized crime is responsible for 14 of these kidnappings, but the majority of their perpetrators are not known.
An exhaustive Associated Press report, signed by María Verza, says that in Nuevo Laredo, in northern Tamaulipas, narcos are looking for migrant men and women who do not have laces on their shoes. In this town, the reporter points out, the Northeast Cartel, a split of the Zetas, dominates. The shoes without laces “are proof that they [migrants] entered the United States to seek asylum, but the only thing they managed to do was to be detained for a few days –when their laces were removed for security reasons– before being thrown back into the wolf’s mouth, in the violent state of Tamaulipas. Sometimes they escape from one group to fall into the hands of another or it may be they themselves who, in the midst of despair, seek out the traffickers again in order to find any way out that does not imply returning to the countries from which they fled,” Verza writes.
Verza tells the story of Yohan, who left Nicaragua with his family –wife and two children of two and 10 years old–. Once they were returned to Mexico from the United States last July, “with only his cell phone and a plastic bag with an appointment to seek asylum, no shoelaces or money,” they stayed in Nuevo Laredo. Yohan wanted to ask for help from their coyotes, the only ones they knew there. He was about go find the coyotes by bus, because they were 160 kilometers away.
“Before arriving at the bus terminal, two strangers intercepted him while another group blocked his family. He saw only one armed man, but that was all he needed. They got them into a van, took away the little they had, including their shoes. They were given an opportunity to choose their destination: either to pay for their release or for a new crossing,” Verza reports.
One month after the study by the Institute for Women in Migration, the number of migrants returned to Mexico has surpassed 55,000. Tamaulipas, on that country’s northern border, is where the United States has returned the most asylum seekers, almost half of them.
Judicial setback for Trump
When this happened to Yohan in July, Donald Trump’s government issued a regulation prohibiting asylum in the United States for migrant who cannot prove that they have previously sought asylum in third countries. The measure came into effect on July 16th this year and was also intended to make the ban apply retroactively to those who have been waiting for protection before that date.
A federal judge in California blocked this retroactivity on Tuesday November 19th , because she considered it illegal.
“These asylum seekers understood that their access to asylum in the United States would be subject to their willingness to wait in Mexico. Relying on this statement from the U.S. government, they did so. The government –in a turn that, at best, can be considered disorienting and, at worst, deceptive– now seeks to change direction,” wrote the author of the ruling, Southern California District Judge Cynthia Bashan, quoted by Univision.
The decision responded to a lawsuit filed by the NGOs Al Otro Lado, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Center for Constitutional Rights, and American Immigration Council.
The judicial setback to the Trump administration’s measure takes place a day after the “safe third country” agreement between his government and the Guatemalan government was activated. The agreement empowers the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to return to the United States asylum and refugee seekers who have not sought protection in a different country while on their way to the United States. The agreement could begin to apply in December, according to Univision. The governments of the two countries would go through a selection process to see which of the two would study the migrants’ asylum and refugee claims.
Univision reports that this will also happen with El Salvador and Honduras, with whom similar agreements have already been signed.