ImmigrationAsylum-Seeking Migrants Pushed Farther South into Mexico, Left to Fend for Themselves

By Jay Root

Published 9 August 2019

Migrants have been bused to Monterrey and, they say, Chiapas under an ever-changing and often brutal “remain in Mexico” program. The policy is being carried out up and down the border by the Trump Administration in a controversial partnership with the Mexican government.

It was close to midnight when Angelica Zavala and her two kids were dropped off at the bus station in downtown Monterrey on July 29.

She was glad to be out of the hot parking lot where they’d been camping outside a migration office in Nuevo Laredo for three days, but the bus driver had bad news. He didn’t know anything about the shelter and job the Mexican government told her she would find here.

“We asked the driver, what are we supposed to do? You’re leaving us stranded here, it’s dangerous,” Zavala recalled. “ He said, ‘I’ve taken care of my responsibility … My job is to get you here. I don’t know what you’re going to do.’”

Welcome to the ever-changing and often brutal “remain in Mexico” program, which is being carried out up and down the border by the Trump Administration in controversial partnership with the government of Mexico. Migrants subjected to it are required to wait in Mexico, potentially for months or longer, while their asylum cases play out in U.S. immigration court.

More than 20,000 asylum-seekers have been returned to Mexico since the program was launched in January, and according to the Associated Press, about 3,000 had been sent back as of the beginning of August to dicey Tamaulipas State, ranked as a “do not travel” zone by the U.S. State Department because so many people get robbed, kidnapped or murdered there.

Late last month, hundreds of migrants returned to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas — including Zavala and her two children — were bused three hours farther south to Monterrey, an industrial (and far safer) city with a bustling economy and the third-largest metropolitan area in Mexico. More recently, buses have taken many of them all the way to the deep southern state of Chiapas, along the Guatemala border, according to several migrants waiting for the buses near the bridge connecting Nuevo Laredo to Laredo, Texas.