Fewer Central Americans are immigrating, officials say

By Sean Gaffney, The Monitor

REYNOSA - Broke and hungry, several Central Americans begged for food and impatiently scanned oncoming traffic from their perch on a dusty roundabout in this border city, waiting for a truck that might pick them up for a day’s work.

The morning smell of roasting taco meat that wafted from a nearby block taunted the already hungry undocumented immigrants as they recounted the odyssey from their home countries that left them penniless and stranded.

The 30 or so immigrants had left home to seek work in the United States, but after paying off police and gang members on their trip through the Mexican countryside, they were unable to afford a coyote, or human smuggler, to lead them across the Rio Grande.


“I didn’t know that this was the journey that would happen to me,â€