Thread: Migrants, troops slowly build up on Guatemala-Mexico border

Migrants, troops slowly build up on Guatemala-Mexico border


International


by: MARÍA VERZA, Associated Press


Posted: Jan 18, 2020 / 12:05 AM EST / Updated: Jan 18, 2020 / 10:43 AM EST









A Mexican National Guard looks at local residents crossing the Suchiate River, near Ciudad Hidalgo, on the Mexican border with Guatemala, Friday, Jan. 17, 2020. Border security forces in southern Mexico were preparing Friday for the expected arrival of hundreds of Central Americans traveling through Guatemala in hopes to reach United States.





TECUN UMAN, Guatemala (AP) — More than 200 mostly Honduran migrants rested on a bridge at the Guatemala-Mexico border waiting for the arrival of others and hoping sheer numbers will improve their chances of entering Mexico and continuing their journey north.


Across the river from Tecun Uman, in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Hidalgo, National Guard troops with riot shields trucked in throughout Friday afternoon in anticipation of the migrants’ next move.


Mexico’s government has said migrants entering the country without registering will not be allowed to pass from the border area. But those seeking asylum or other protections will be allowed to apply and legalize their status.


Guatemalan officials had counted more than 3,000 migrants who registered at border crossings to enter that country in recent days and there were additional migrants who did not register.


Sonia Eloina Hernández, the Ciudad Hidalgo mayor, said officials were expecting a large number of migrants.


“We’re readying ourselves,” she said. “We don’t know exactly how many people are coming.”


About 148 migrants had crossed to Ciudad Hidalgo in recent days and requested asylum, Hernández said. At least 500 more were spread around Tecun Uman waiting.


As night fell Friday, migrants tried to sleep on the Guatemala side of the bridge, heads propped on knapsacks, children lying on parents. Damp clothes hung from fences. Others killed time playing soccer along the banks of the Suchiate river.


“We have to wait to see what happens,”said Tania Mejía, a 25-year-old mother from Honduras. She had staked out a few square feet on the ground beside a tree at the bridge’s entrance with her 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.


Mejía wanted to be among the first to cross, but was weighing that desire against the safety of her children and thinking she might hang back to see how things develop.


Her memories are still fresh of the first two migrant caravans she traveled with alone, one at the end of 2018 and another in the spring of 2019. She knew things could escalate if security forces tried to stop the migrants from entering Mexico.


“They say the Mexicans aren’t going to allow passage, but who knows?” she said.


If necessary, Mejía said, she might have to wade across the river like she did one of the previous times. Her hope this time is not making it to the United States, but rather to northern Mexico.
“I have a person in Mexicali who can give me a job so I went to get there,” she said.


The bridge was not closed by Mexico on Friday. Migrants who wanted to cross and request asylum or seek to regularize their status and find work could do so.


But the migrants were wary of a trap. Mexico’s offer of legal status and potential employment carries a stipulation that would confine them to southern Mexico, where wages are lower and there are fewer jobs than elsewhere in the country.


Hernández, the mayor, said it is different now in Mexico from 2018 and early 2019, when mass caravans flowed across the border. She said the Mexican government from the municipal to the federal level is coordinated and prepared.


She expected more guardsmen to arrive in Ciudad Hidalgo “so the people don’t cross via the river, so that he who wants to enter Mexico, as our president says, ‘Welcome,’ but via the bridge.”


In Guatemala’s capital, Mauro Verzzeletti, director of the local migrant shelter, said he expected 1,000 to 1,500 people to bed down there Friday night. The migrants planned to set out again Saturday around 4 a.m.


Meanwhile, Guatemala’s human rights defender’s office said there were a bit more than 1,000 migrants gathering at another point on the Mexican border far to the north in the Peten region and there were reports that Mexican forces were gathering on the other side of the border there.
In Ciudad Hidalgo, Francisco Garduño, commissioner of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, was emphatic that migrants who try to enter the country irregularly would go no farther.


“They cannot enter because it would be in violation of the law,” he told The Associated Press. He declined to talk in specifics about border reinforcements, but said there were “sufficient” troops to keep things orderly.


___
Associated Press writer Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City contributed to this report.


https://www.news10.com/news/international/migrants-troops-slowly-build-up-on-guatemala-mexico-border/

Mexico REGISTERS them to enter and Mexico can keep every damn one of them.

No entry into the USA...period!

They are economic migrants. No asylum, no entry, no anchor baby, no medical care. Keep out!

Guatemala sweeps up migrant group on way to US, returns them to border

Associated Press

Posted On 6:50 am January 17, 2020

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Honduran migrants walking in a group stop before Guatemalan police near Agua Caliente, Guatemala, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020, on the border with Honduras. Hundreds of Honduran migrants started walking and hitching rides Wednesday from the city of San Pedro Sula, in a bid to form the kind of migrant caravan that reached the U.S. border in 2018. (AP Photo/Santiago Billy)

EL CINCHADO, Guatemala (AP) — Guatemalan police accompanied by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept up the majority of a group of some 300 migrants Thursday, loaded them on buses and took them back to the Honduran border, effectively dashing their plans to travel together in a “caravan” with hopes of reaching the United States.Near another border point, a different group of about 600 rested at a shelter after crossing the frontier earlier in the day and encountering no resistance from police. Other, smaller groups were traveling highways elsewhere in unorganized dribs and drabs in a movement involving several thousand people but far different in nature from previous caravans.


Praying and singing songs, the group of 300 migrants — adults, teens and young children — had set out from a shelter in Entre Rios under rainy skies before dawn and walked about six hours before stopping in the town of Morales to eat and rest. There they were challenged by police who asked for their entry documents, and nearly all had crossed into Guatemala irregularly and didn’t have such documentation.


The migrants were put on three gray buses and told they had to go back to register properly at a border station under rules governing freedom of travel in the Central American border agreement between Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.


There was no violence in the encounter, though some wept and begged to be allowed to continue, while police gave them no choice but to go back. Red Cross workers gave several migrants anti-inflammatory medicine for wounds on their feet.Guatemalan police who declined to be identified by name said the United States paid for the buses.


The U.S. Embassy in Guatemala did not immediately confirm that. The action effectively dissolved what had been the largest and most cohesive group that left the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Wednesday in response to a call for the first migrant caravan in many months. Guatemala’s tactics mirrored those employed last year by Mexico to discourage and break up caravans on its territory following intense pressure from Washington.Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said Wednesday that the migrants would be allowed to pass through Guatemala, though he noted they would need the proper papers and predicted they would run into a “wall” in Mexico.


Almost immediately on Wednesday most of the migrants fractured into smaller groups, some as small as 20-30 people, and began walking along highways, boarding buses and hitching rides in private cars. It was nothing resembling the mass human flows that formed in recent years, inspiring the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump and becoming a political football in the United States.“I will say that this caravan is not anything even remotely similar to what we saw in ‘18 and a little bit in ’19. A few folks here and a few folks there,” acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said in an interview on the “Brian Kilmeade Show” on FOX News Radio. “What has changed … are the number of agreements that we have in place with Honduras, Guatemala, as well as Mexico.”Wolf also noted the presence of U.S. “tactical agents” in Guatemala.Guatemala’s immigration agency reported a total of 2,274 migrants registered at its El Cinchado and Agua Caliente crossings.


An unknown number of others crossed irregularly.Many of those swept up Thursday were expected to give up and return to Honduras, even as scattered groups continued to walk and hitchhike through a tropical region of southeastern Guatemala.Among them was Génesis Fuentes, a 19-year-old Honduran who was part of the first caravan in October 2018. Back then she made it to the northern Mexico city of Mexicali, across from Calexico, California, and lived there working as a waitress and cook for about five months. She ultimately crossed the border with some friends near Algodones, which borders California and Yuma, Arizona, but was detained by U.S. border agents and deported last May.Clad in a red T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, jeans and sandals, Fuentes was limping from a bruised knee. She explained that being sent back home meant returning to a life that is no life at all.“There is no work in Honduras,” Fuentes said. “Since they deported us, we have not been able to find jobs.”About 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the southwest, in Esquipulas, Guatemala, the more than 600 migrants who crossed Thursday at Agua Caliente lay on the ground under a low, gray sky, sleeping or eating.


A plan was forming to spend the night there and leave before dawn Friday.Jomas Joel Paredes of Villanueva, Honduras, left San Pedro Sula on Thursday morning, a day after most of the other migrants. He had luck hitching rides, and the truck he was aboard was not stopped before the border.He said it was his fourth attempt at migrating to the United States. He never got any farther than Mexico in any of the other tries, the most recent in 2017.Paredes said he was fleeing gang threats, debts and unemployment. He had heard in the local press that Mexico said it wouldn’t let migrants pass, but he hoped the government would change its tune. He has plans to work in Mexico for a while and send money back home before eventually trying to reach the United States.He left his wife and three daughters behind in Honduras.“Those are decisions one has to make sometimes,” Paredes said.Late in the afternoon, Guatemalan police arrived in Esquipulas and reached an agreement with migrants to ferry those who had not registered at the border back there to do their paperwork and then bring them back to the shelter.Less-organized migrants, tighter controls by Guatemalan and Mexican authorities and the presence of U.S. advisers have reduced the likelihood of a repeat of the huge, cohesive processions that the term “caravan” came to conjure in 2018.Guatemala is stricter about checking documents, and Mexico has deployed thousands of National Guard agents in key corridors to do immigration control.


Asylum seekers who manage to make it to the U.S. border are, after long waits, generally sent back to Mexico to await the outcome of their cases or, more recently, flown to other countries in the region and told their only option is to apply for refuge there.


Associated Press photojournalist Santiago Billy in Esquipulas, Guatemala, and AP writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.—-


http://www.gopusa.com/guatemala-sweeps-up-migrant-group-on-way-to-us-returns-them-to-border/

ILDEFONSO ORTIZ and BOB PRICE
18 Jan 2020

Mexican authorities managed to hold off approximately 1,000 Central American migrants who tried to force their way through its southern border with Guatemala.

A scuffle that went on for approximately one hour took place at the midway point of one of the ports of entry on the Suchiate River. Migrants initially tried to force their way through the international boundary. According to Mexico’s Revista Proceso, Mexican National Guard troops and immigration officials using riot shields managed to hold the line and close the gates as the migrants tried to force their way in.

(some tweets with videos at source link)

A series of videos posted on social media revealed the intensity of the scuffle. Many of the male migrants used clothing or bandanas to cover their faces as they attempted to force the gates open.

During the scuffle, Mexican officials kept telling the migrants that they would only allow entry to those seeking to claim asylum or seek another immigration status in Mexico. According to Proceso, after an hour of scuffles, the group calmed down and authorities began allowing 20 migrants at a time to enter Mexico to claim asylum.

As Breitbart Texas reported, earlier this week, Mexico’s top officials announced they would provide transit visas or other forms of passage for migrants looking to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican authorities would only allow entry migrants looking to obtain legal status in Mexico.

On Friday, the government of Mexico offered about 4,000 jobs to caravan migrants from Honduras.

https://www.breitbart.com/border/202...exican-border/

Tear gas, water canons, screaming sirens!

Keep them OUT of Mexico.

Mexico does not want them.

USA does not want them.

If Mexico lets them pass, they TRICKLE their way to our border. Take in NONE!

No more airplane rides home. They can walk home. We are not their Uber Driver, we are not their Travel Agent. I do not want to FLY thousands of these foreigners back home.


THEY ALLOW 20 AT A TIME...AND THOSE GROUPS OF 20 WILL END UP AT OUR BORDER!

SHUT OUR BORDER DOWN!!! NO VACANCY!

During the scuffle, Mexican officials kept telling the migrants that they would only allow entry to those seeking to claim asylum or seek another immigration status in Mexico. According to Proceso, after an hour of scuffles, the group calmed down and authorities began allowing 20 migrants at a time to enter Mexico to claim asylum.

I'm calling B.S. here. These folks, regardless of what they tell the Mexican immigration officials, have one goal in mind and that is to reach the United States. Yes, I'm suggesting most of those claiming asylum in Mexico are only doing so to get into Mexico so they can continue their travel to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Since they would just come back "illegally" again and again, I'd suggest something a little more persuasive then tear gas, water canons.