Federal shelter in Tijuana opens for 3,000 migrants waiting for U.S. asylum
Federal shelter in Tijuana opens for migrants waiting for U.S. asylum
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/d...ter-dm-004.jpg[An employee stands at the entrance to a dormitory in the Centro Integrado para Migrantes Carmen Serdan after a press conference to announce its opening on December 11, 2019 in Tijuana, Mexico.
The government-run shelter, which will receive asylum seekers under the MPP program who are send to Mexico to wait for their court appointments, will also assist the asylum seekers in getting documents so they can work and stay temporarily in Mexico.
(David Maung/San Diego Union-Tribune)
The Centro Integrador para el migrante “Carmen Serdán” will be a centralized location where migrants can get access to shelter and food, as well as services for health, education, paperwork, training, and employment
By WENDY FRY
DEC. 11, 2019 5:28 PM
TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA — A federal shelter with a capacity for housing 3,000 migrants opened Wednesday in Tijuana, aimed at providing services to U.S. asylum seekers waiting for the outcome of their immigration cases.
The “Carmen Serdán” Migrant Integration Center will be one centralized location where migrants can access shelter and food, as well as services for health, education, paperwork, training, and employment, officials said.
It’s located in an industrial park in the El Águila neighborhood in Tijuana’s Cerro Colorado borough. A brief media tour of the facility featured a well air-conditioned receiving area, small office spaces for providing services and large separated dormitory areas with metal bunk beds.
The shelter is specifically for asylum seekers enrolled in a Trump administration policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols program or Remain in Mexico.
Rolled out in January in Tijuana and then expanded across the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy requires migrants trying to legally enter the United States wait in Mexico to complete the immigration court process.
That process usually takes several months, sometimes up to a year, and involves multiple court hearings.
So far, only 12 people, mostly from Honduras, are being housed at the new facility.
Mexico’s Deputy Secretary of Employment Horacio Duarte Olivas said the goal is to help migrants integrate into the Baja California labor market while they wait for their next court appointment in the U.S.
The location of the facility is in an industrial park where migrants may be able to find factory jobs, but it is somewhat isolated from the central, urban parts of the city where other service-industry jobs and transportation may be more readily available.
Officials said they plan to provide busing to workplaces, if necessary.
Duarte, who is the national coordinator for the country’s Migrant Assistance Plan and the sub-secretary for employment and labor productivity, said the facility was the second such center for migrants to open in Mexico’s northern border states.
In October, the government opened the “Leona Vicario” facility in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso. That facility has housed or provided services to more than 7,000 migrants, he said.
There are plans to open similar facilities in Mexicali and Matamoros for a total of four migrant care centers along the border that will help Central Americans find jobs while they wait for their U.S. court dates.
The government official, part of the national cabinet of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, stressed the purpose of the facility was to help people quickly become independent and find more permanent housing.
“I reiterate that this is not a shelter, this is an Integrative Center that seeks to place migrants into jobs and thus they can have a contribution to the economic life of the city, to the economic life of the state and obviously to the economic life of our country,” said Duarte.
For at least six months, Mexican officials have said they were about to open a huge shelter in this border state where they have accepted at least 11,600 Central Americans returned to Baja California under the Remain in Mexico policy.
Wednesday, Duarte said approximately 30 percent of the retornados or migrants returned to Mexico have decided to voluntarily return to their country of origin.
Federal delegate Alejandro Ruiz Uribe said he has closely monitored the numbers of Central American migrants in the state and the capacity of privately run shelters throughout the city and state. Up until this point, the number of Central American migrants have not required a federal shelter, he said.
Duarte said providing services and protection to asylum seekers stranded in Mexico’s northern border states was part of a commitment between the United States and Mexico to avoid punishing tariffs President Trump threatened to impose.
Those tariffs “would devastate the country’s economy from the northern border to the southern border,” he said.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...for-u-s-asylum
