MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) – Violene Marseille, her husband and two children were traveling by bus through central Mexico on Sunday when they began receiving warnings that their final destination, the border with the United States, was no longer a safe place to visit. Cross.
His countrymen who had already arrived at the border point between Ciudad Acuña, in northern Mexico, and Del Rio, in Texas, told them that the US government was deporting hundreds of migrants back to Haiti, according to data from the Haitian government. .
When getting off the transport in the middle of the bustling bus station of Monterrey, an industrial city in the northern state of Nuevo León that is close to the main border points between Mexico and the United States, Marseille noticed the presence of Mexican immigration agents and decided to hurry with his family to the Casa INDI shelter.
His journey, which had begun more than two months ago in Santiago, Chile, appeared to have concluded about 250 kilometers south of the US border.
As authorities in that country expel the last remaining of a group of more than 14,000 migrants who had stationed themselves under the border bridge in Del Rio, thousands of Haitians still seeking to reach the border with the United States have begun to realize that your chance to cross into US territory may have passed. As they have done before and after the actions of the US government to massively expel their nationals, they now seek to regularize their status in other countries, find work and wait for the next opportunity.
“We spent $ 4,000, all of our savings, to get to the United States, but because of what is happening in the United States, we better stay in Monterrey, we want to work,” Marseille, 36, told The Associated Press.
Marseille came to Santiago in 2016 in search of better opportunities than those he had in Haiti. In the last decade, the Caribbean country has experienced a massive departure of its inhabitants that began after the devastating 2010 earthquake and successive natural disasters, political instability and economic stagnation.
During her stay in Chile, Marseille managed to regularize her immigration status and got a job as a cleaning worker in a company that provides services to hospitals. She had been a stylist in Haiti and her husband, John Teslima, a bricklayer. In Chile they both got jobs and saved in order to eventually migrate to the United States.
Recently, Marseille and his family decided that the time to leave for the north had come due to changes implemented by the conservative government of Sebastián Piñera to immigration policies that consist of greater requirements to be able to extend the validity of the humanitarian visas issued to many of the Haitians who migrated to the South American nation.
As thousands more migrants have done this year, on their way they crossed the dangerous Darien jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama on foot. “On the trip they stole my wedding ring, I saw how they attacked girls and women, it was horrible,” he said.
As the family traveled to Mexico by bus, Marseille, Telisma, their Chilean-born 3-year-old son John, and their 8-year-old daughter Rebeca, the news about what was happening in Del Río forced them to change their plans.
“We don’t want to go back to Haiti, there is no government there,” said Telisma, who now collaborates voluntarily in the loading and unloading of food and donations sent to the shelter, where some 1,500 Haitians have arrived since Sunday. “We want papers, documents, to be able to find a place to live here,” added the migrant.
Documents could take time. The Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (COMAR) has registered a recent exponential increase in applications. So far this year alone, some 19,000 Haitians have applied for asylum in Mexico. The director of the agency, Andrés Ramírez, said this week on Twitter that, until August, the number of applications made by migrants from this country registered an increase of 56% compared to those received in total between 2013 and 2020. He added that hundreds of Applications had been sent this week to all the agency’s offices in the country.
This week, Mexico has transferred hundreds of Haitians from Ciudad Acuña to southern Tapachula, in Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala. The government has maintained a policy that has essentially consisted of immigration containment in order to keep asylum seekers in the south of the country and away from the border with the United States. However, this region is one of the most impoverished, with few job opportunities and many of the migrants have expressed being tired of waiting there.
This week, long lines of migrants, mostly Haitians, formed outside the COMAR offices in Mexico City.
In Monterrey, many of the Haitians who came to the shelter have expressed interest in obtaining documentation granting them permission to work in the country. They have been informed that agency officials will go to the scene to photograph them on Monday to advance the application process. Due to overcrowding, the shelter had to set up tents outside the dormitories.
Ana Estache, 43, also originally from Port-au-Prince and who, in the same way that Marseille lived in Chile in recent years, has even considered returning to the South American nation in the face of the complicated panorama in Mexico and the United States. “I could go back, if they don’t give us papers here, my son is Chilean,” explained Estache, who arrived in Monterrey with her husband and 2-year-old son. However, he said he has not yet given up hope of reaching the United States and achieving a better quality of life.
Selomourd Menrrivil, 43, from Cap Haitien, receives daily reports via WhatsApp from his acquaintances who are still in Ciudad Acuña and Del Río. The core message you get is to stay away from the area. For this reason, he said, he is now seeking to regularize his immigration status in Monterrey.
On the journey that he also undertook from Chile, where he also migrated in search of a better life, he used up the savings he managed to accumulate during his stay there, of about $ 10,000. “Now we have almost nothing, we sold everything to get here. The biggest wish I have is to be able to be legal in a country with my family, to find work to survive, ”Menrrivil said as his wife and daughters rested on the pavement under the tents outside the shelter.
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