Migrants from over 100 countries have crossed into Mexico: modern-day Babel
TAPACHULA, MEXICO — Migrants from around the world remained determined Saturday to continue their journey through Mexico to the United States, even as the government has ordered a crackdown on temporary travel permits allowing them to make their way to the northern border.
Outside Tapachula’s City Hall, less than thirty minutes from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, a Venezuelan mother sat with her two daughters as her husband searched the town for any leads on where they could obtain a travel permit.
The woman said that her family had arrived Friday, just after the National Institute of Migration ordered its offices across the country to stop granting the temporary travel permits.
Still, she said, her family would do whatever was in their power to continue their journey northward.
“We sold everything we had to come here, and our children, they walked such a long time,” she said.
Amadou Diallo, 32, who had left military-run Guinea a month ago by flying to Brazil before traveling by bus to Mexico, shared the Venezuelan woman’s determination to make it to the Land of Opportunity by any means necessary.
“I would travel illegally, because we can’t return to Guinea,” he said, noting that the police killed at least seven people during nationwide protests this week. “When we [left], life [was] not tranquil.”
And migrants and Mexican officials alike are blaming the chaos and human suffering on one man: President Biden.
Andrés Ramírez, head of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, said that Biden’s campaign rhetoric surrounding immigration was a “pull factor.”
“All the of the rhetoric from Biden, basically, in his campaign, and once he took office, it was very clear in the sense that he was more pro-migrant” than former President Donald Trump,” Ramírez said. “That was sort of a kind of incentive for many people.”
Immediately following his inauguration in 2021, Biden halted construction of Trump’s border wall and suspended the Remain in Mexico program, which made asylum seekers wait outside the US while their cases were decided.
This week, the administration ended Title 42, the pandemic-era rule that allowed US Customs and Border Patrol to immediately deport single adults who entered the country illegally – and immediately appealed when a federal judge issued an order that blocked immigration officials from releasing migrants without any requirement to appear in court – or any way to track them.
Throughout, the president has pledged to deport migrants following the expiration of Title 42 – while promising more opportunities for people to apply for asylum.
It has all added up to a steady stream of welcoming words from Washington that led millions to believe that America was ready to roll out the red carpet for them, several migrants told The Post.
Eden Aburto, 43, a carpenter from Nicaragua, said he’d heard on the news that Biden had promised to help those with injuries and illnesses. He said he was traveling to get spinal surgery in the United States that would allow him to again.
“I hope he’ll stay true to that,” Aburto said.
“Biden is worse than Trump,” said Irineo Mujica, head of the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras. “With Trump, at least we have one coherent message: ‘We don’t want you here and we’ll take you out.’ [Biden] is encouraging migrants to come, legally or not, by having this double talk.”
Over the past six months, Tapachula has become a modern-day Babel.
Between Nov. 23, 2022 and May 6, the National Institute of Migration (INM) office in the southern state of Chiapas, where Tapachula is located, gave out visas and permits to 81,245 migrants from 103 nations.
The vast majority of the migrants came to Mexico from countries in South America — Venezuela, where many migrants fled the poverty that goes hand-in-hand with socialist rule, topped the list with a staggering 23,329 nationals.
Ecuador and Haiti followed with 14,238 and 12,986 migrants, respectively.
But there were also four Swiss nationals, 39 from Kyrgyzstan, 345 people from Afghanistan, and 738 from China.
The longest journey was made by one person from Singapore — over 10,700 miles away.
“These people come here because they think it’s easier to go from here to the States. … They don’t want to stay in Mexico,” said Eunice Rendon, coordinator for Agenda Migrante, an advocacy organization.
Many migrants from around the world may have ended up in Chiapas in the past month because of the news that they could easily obtain temporary permits from the Mexican government — allowing them 45 days to make their way across Mexico to the southern United States border, Rendon noted.
“The government doesn’t want the immigration problem and for migrants to be stuck in here, so that’s why they’re making it easier to process visas,” Hope David Zuta Medina, 24, said Thursday, sitting in the shade outside of a bus depot while dreaming about his future working on a ranch in Georgia.
But by Thursday night, when the pandemic-era Title 42 policy lapsed, Mexico announced several steps to slow the tide of migrants crossing the border into Mexico from Guatemala.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised Thursday to send more National Guard forces to the country’s southern border, Bloomberg reported, although The Post observed armed forces taking no action yet against groups of people illegally crossing the Suchiate River — on makeshift river tube rafts from Guatemala into Mexico.
“In the past, when they tried to be very strict, very forceful, there was a lot of criticism that they were violating human rights and so on, so they have to be very cautious,” Ramírez, the Mexican official, said. “We are in the eve of elections in Mexico, and this is very political.”
The Institute of Migration, meanwhile, ordered its offices nationwide to stop issuing the temporary permits and shuttered a makeshift office in Tapachula’s Ecological Park handing out the travel documents in the country.
Earlier this week, The Post photographed thousands of migrants handing themselves in to get the permits at the makeshift facility.
A Mexican official said that from Tuesday to Thursday afternoon, authorities at the southern border with Guatemala issued 12,500 travel permits for migrants heading north.
“[The INM]…ordered all immigration offices in all states not to grant Multiple Immigration Forms, or any other document that authorizes transit through the country,” according to a fact sheet circulated at a conference held by López Obrador.
But in the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez, some migration officials were continuing to hand out the temporary travel documents to migrants who had been bused up from Tapachula, according to the activist group Colectivo de Monitoreo Frontera Sur.
“The INM gave migrants and people in need of international protection various documents, apparently arbitrarily,” the group said, noting that some were given the temporary travel permit, while others received exit letters to leave the country.
In Tapachula — less than 30 minutes from Mexico’s border with Guatemala — The Post spoke with migrants fleeing political and economic instability, who said risking their lives was worth it for a shot at a better future thousands of miles away.
“No one can change the situation” in China, said Zhang Zhiyuan, 68, a preacher and former professor at Hefei University, who is traveling to Los Angeles where nearly 200 of his students currently live.
Sweating through a wrinkled yellow shirt in the humid 81-degree heat, Zhang and his wife, Luo Min, 43, recalled being “persecuted” by the Communist Chinese government back home in Shanghai.
“In China there is hardship. People work harder and harder, but there is no freedom of speech, no religious speech,” Luo said, noting that they sold their house to afford their multi-continental trip and planned on applying for asylum in the United States.
“We [could] not go to church for several years.”
The International Organization for Migration in Mexico pointed to myriad factors — including the global economic impact of COVID-19, climate change-related disasters and violence — contributing to the international hodgepodge of migrants flooding the southern border of Mexico en route to the United States.
“Even as policy shifts, these deep-rooted issues persist, underscoring the need to promote safe, orderly, and dignified migration,” the group said in a statement.
For a group of Afghanistan migrants standing outside, the Taliban’s rise to power following the United States’ exit sparked their cross-continental trek.
“The Taliban went after us over our professions,” said a social worker, noting that he had helped aid a women’s empowerment organization while another had worked as a journalist.
One of his companions, a 26-year-old civil engineer in a brown knockoff Louis Vuitton shirt, recalled the horrors of trekking through the Darien Gap — a lawless area of thick jungle between Colombia and Panama.
“It was everything you think you will face,” he said quietly. “Animals. Death.”
“If you were sick, they left you behind.”
Huang Qing, 40, a cell phone factory worker from China’s Hubei province, said that he spent $6,000 in credit card debt on his journey so far, flying to Quito before taking a bus through Central America.
The cost is worth it to possibly reach New York City, though, because getting an American visa the traditional route is “almost impossible for ordinary people,” he said.
“America is the most democratic country in the world, and it’s for making money,” he said rosily about his potential future home, where he plans on learning English while working as a masseur or delivery worker.
“If I will work hard, I believe I can change my life or my family’s life.”
Some migrants, following the expiration of Title 42, have decided to stay in Mexico indefinitely.
Leyanis Durand, 44, said that she and her partner, Julio Eduardo Gamboa, left Cuba but fear that if they manage to cross the US border now, they’ll be among the first to be deported.
Instead, they’ve resigned themselves to settling in Monterrey, in northern Mexico, where they hope to pick up work in restaurants and occasionally see Durand’s 21-year-old son who managed to cross the border into Houston, Texas, a few months ago.
“My son, he said he’d like for us to go and stay in the States with him, but he’s telling me, ‘Mama, you sold everything to leave, so if you get deported to Cuba, you don’t have anything there. Don’t risk it.’”
Additional reporting by Mary Kay Linge and Rich Calder
