Following a record number of undocumented migrant apprehensions in June, Olga Sanchez Cordero, Mexico’s Interior Minister (Gobernación), has declared that migration in this country is “under control.”
Sanchez said the number of detentions “probably” increased by 50 percent in June. According to the National Immigration Institute (INM), Mexico detained 99,203 migrants in the first half of this year and deported 71,110 – more than the entire total of 2017. In June, 29,153 migrants were apprehended, the largest number in any single month in recent times.
Over the last month Mexico has toughened up the policing of its southern border after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to slap a five-percent tariff on all imports if the migrant flow wasn’t checked.
Although she denied that a migrant “crisis” exists in Mexico, Sanchez admitted that the Mexican Commission to Support Refugees (Comar) is saturated by a massive surge in the number of applications for refugee status. Despite the crackdown, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has promised to issue humanitarian work visas to all refugee applicants. The bureaucratic process, however, is slow, and thousands of refugees waiting for visas are living in squalid conditions on Mexico’s southern border.
Sanchez said more shelters to attend to migrants are being installed, as well as actions taken to ensure their health and wellbeing. Facilities to house migrants at the southern border are woefully inadequate, and overcrowding has become a problem at most of the shelters, sources on the ground say. Conditions at the northern border are just as bad, as the United States ramps up its policy of returning refugees seeking asylum to Mexico to wait out their cases being heard in U.S. courts.
The Mexican government seems determined to prove to the Trump administration that it has the migrant flow under control and that “caravans” of Central American asylum seekers are no longer heading to the U.S. border. Lopez Obrador is acutely aware that the threat of tariffs still remains, and, with a deadline to review the results of last month’s “deal” rapidly approaching, he clearly wants to hold the best deck of cards available. With the number of migrants arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border falling by 29 percent in June, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and with Trump heaping praise on Mexico’s efforts, it is unlikely the tariff issue will raise its head again.
High-profile detentions in Mexico making the headlines will also be well received in Washington. Two stood out last week: federal and state police discovered more than 220 Central American migrants crammed into a Pepsi Cola truck in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, while Mexican Immigration agents detained 61 migrants who were encamped at a hotel in downtown Cancun. Both stories were widely reported.
As these kinds of apprehensions become increasingly more common, relations between Mexico and its Central American neighbors are getting strained, some reports suggest. A recent Washington Post article raised the concerns of Guatemalan and El Salvadorian officials over the rise in the number of abuses committed by security forces placed under intense pressure to root out undocumented migrants.