A student project of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University
Supported by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation
How thousands of migrants became trapped in Mexico’s ‘open-air prison’
From March 3 to 12, 2022, 18 Cronkite students and three faculty advisers traveled to Tapachula, Mexico’s southernmost city, to report from what has become the frontline in the battle to stop northward migration to the U.S. Students found migrants from all over the globe blocked by Mexico authorities from continuing their journeys, swelling the city by thousands. These are their stories.
The team: Athena Ankrah; Laura Bargfeld; Taylor Bayly; Tirzah Christopher; Nathan Collins; Katelynn Donnelly; Mikenzie Hammel; Alyssa Marksz; Shahid Meighan; Emilee Miranda; Daisy Gonzalez-Perez; Drake Presto; Salma Reyes; Juliette Rihl; Jennifer Sawhney; Natalie Skowlund; Taylor Stevens; Geraldine Torrellas.
Faculty advisers: Rick Rodriguez; Jason Manning; Adriana Zehbrauskas. The trip and this book were generously funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.
Photo by Tirzah Christopher/Cronkite Borderlands Project
Naomi, 4, sits in Parque Bicentenario in Tapachula, Mexico, where her family has slept on sheets of cardboard for several nights waiting for their immigration applications to be processed. One in three of the migrants who travel to Mexico from South and Central America is a child, according to a report from UNICEF. (Photo by Taylor Bayly/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
TAPACHULA, MEXICO – The desperation here is palpable.
I t fills the stifling air as migrants line up in the hot sun outside the National Migration Institute in hopes of receiving an interview, their children close at hand and their visa applications tucked under their arms in colorful protected sleeves so the papers won’t get ruined on the nights their families sleep outside in the rain.
I t strains the voices of the asylum seekers protesting outside a news conference by Mexico’s president, as they chant demands for action
before some sew their mouths shut in defiant, gruesome silence.
A nd it wells in the eyes of displaced Haitians – struggling to deal with a system entrenched in anti-Black racism – when they throw rocks and set fires on the streets to bring attention to their plight.
T hese moments unfold day after day in Tapachula, a city of about 350,000 near the border of Guatemala that has long served as a waystation for migrants spurred north by political turmoil, gang violence, discrimination and
poor economic prospects in their countries of origin.
B ut as the United States has pressed Mexico to stem the flow of people heading to the U.S. in recent years, tens of thousands of migrants have become trapped here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state.
T hey now face extreme limitations on their movements, few job prospects, poor living conditions and long waits for immigration hearings in an environment some have labeled an “open-air prison” and others have described as a southern
extension of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You see misery. You see anger. You see desperation,” said Freddy Castillo, a Haitian migrant who arrived in Tapachula last August. “People say, ‘Well, what did I come here for?’ You know, the situation is bad in my country. But that’s supposed to stay there, because I (want to) have maybe a better life someday.”
A s frustrations have reached a boiling point in the city, thousands of migrants set off in the rain Monday for the United States. The group intends to walk the length of Mexico and could grow to as many as 15,000 people, by some estimates – a number that would make this caravan the largest ever recorded in the country, according to The Guardian.
M any of the migrants who end up in Tapachula are from Honduras, El Salvador and other Central American countries, but others started their journeys from such far-flung places as Palestine, Cuba, Nigeria, Brazil and, recently, Ukraine.
A fter escaping the sometimes brutal conditions in their home countries, migrants moving up through South America must pass through the treacherous Darién Gap, a more than 60-mile stretch of jungle that connects Colombia to Panama, where robberies, rapes and encounters with animals are frequent.
T he journey takes multiple days for most migrants. And those who make it out alive sometimes view Mexico as a reprieve, said Yamel Athie, a Tapachula resident and community organizer who has been facilitating dialogue between migrants and locals. I nstead, they face only more challenges.
“I magine if you are from Africa or the Middle East or Haiti and you have spent months fighting to survive, to live, to eat, to pay for your trip,” Athie said. “And when you arrive here, with all of your emotions at the surface because you are reaching your goal, you smash into a wall. And it is a wall that will break your soul.”
The new caravan is yet another sign that although Mexico has stemmed the flow of migrants on their way to the United States, it hasn’t shut it off completely. In April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that U.S. officials encountered about 230,000 people attempting to cross the southern border – the highest monthly total in at least the past four years. An encounter is defined as either the apprehension or expulsion of a migrant.
And some analysts predict even more will come because of President Joe Biden’s stated intention to end Title 42 – a policy the federal government used during the pandemic to expel thousands of migrants under the guise of public health protections. Shortly after Biden’s April 1 announcement, groups of migrants took off from Tapachula for the United States, defying local restrictions on their movements. Some fought with police and Mexican immigration officials.
On May 20, a U.S. federal judge blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42, agreeing with a complaint from 24 states that the move would increase illegal
immigration. He also ruled that the administration must provide public notice and a comment period before ending the policy. The administration has announced it intends to appeal the ruling.
Despite migrants’ frequent complaints of poor conditions in Tapachula, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico offered little recognition of and few solutions during his remarks at a news conference in the city March 11.
The best way to help migrants, he said during a brief discussion of the issue, was not to improve conditions in Mexico but to create work programs for them in Central America.
“People don’t hit the road because they enjoy it but because of necessity,” he said. “The majority of the migrants are young people
who want to move forward and progress in life – so we have been proposing that there be investment in Guatemala, in Honduras, in El Salvador.”
That approach mirrors the United States’ “root causes” strategy, which seeks to address the forces that push people to leave their home countries as part of an effort to stem migration before it begins. But the strategy would do nothing to help improve conditions for the migrants who protested beyond the white tent set up for López Obrador’s visit.
Wairiuko Samuel Kimani, an asylum seeker who said he fled his home country of Kenya after his family learned he was gay, survived 10 days in the rainforest in Panama. He said being in Tapachula has been worse even than that. At least in the jungle, he saw a way out.
“These people you see here,” he said, motioning around to the mass of migrants nearby, “they are very frustrated because we thought getting out of the Darién Gap was all. We thought that was our living nightmare. But actually Mexico is.”
D uring a religious festival in early March, three national flags were posted in the middle of the Suchiate River, which separates Chiapas state and Guatemala –the Mexican flag, the Guatemalan flag and the stars and stripes – a symbol of U.S. influence here, although its border is more than a thousand miles to the north.
U nless they pay a coyote who takes a different route or they have the means to fly over Tapachula, many of the
thousands of migrants who make the journey north through Central America each year will cross the Suchiate here.
A bout 70% to 80% of all asylum applications in Mexico are filed in Tapachula, according to the local refugee office. In 2021, that number was 89,000 applicants. And because the city is so close to a main route into the country from Guatemala, Tapachula is “always going to be a place of pressure and then relieving that
took root in 2019, after thenPresident Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs starting at 5% on Mexican imports if the country didn’t increase efforts to “reduce or eliminate the number of illegal aliens” coming to the United States.
F earing the potential impact to its economy, Mexico – whose biggest trading partner is the U.S., and vice versa – struck a deal promising to deploy members of
“I absolutely believe that U.S. pressure on Mexico has a lot to do with why Mexico has militarized its southern border and is trying to keep migrants out of the country – to stop flows of people coming to the U.S.-Mexico border,” she added.
L ópez Obrador, for his part, has said the shifts in Mexican policy are not a result of his bowing to U.S. pressure. Instead, migrants are being kept in the south to protect them from the powerful gangs that operate near Mexico’s northern border, he said.
“We don’t want them to come to the north where they might become drug addicts or victims of crime,” he said in a press conference in January 2020.
W hatever the motivations, experts say the policy shifts that resulted from the 2019 deal have significantly restricted the movement of migrants.
B efore the agreement, “people were for the most part getting through Mexico,” said Arturo Viscarra, a staff attorney with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a nonprofit migrant advocacy and civil rights group that is working in Tapachula.
pressure and then pressure again” when it comes to migration, said Rachel Schmidtke, an advocate for Latin America with the global nonprofit Refugees International. B ut the pressures here have felt higher than ever in recent years, thanks to a complicated cocktail of government bureaucracy, politics and pandemic-related challenges that have further exacerbated the difficult conditions for migrants. The same cocktail has strained Tapachula residents, who face great competition for jobs and housing.
M ost experts agree that the current situation in Tapachula
the National Guard to its border with Guatemala. The deal also expanded the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, which requires grants to stay in that country while awaiting immigration processing in the United States. Most applications for asylum or other forms of entry are denied.
S chmidtke said Mexico’s harder line toward immigration has in part reflected its own values, noting that the country doesn’t want “a lot of refugees or migrants.” But the U.S. also plays a “pretty significant role in Mexico’s immigration policies,” she said.
B ut the National Guard’s increased militarization of the southern border has since made it “more difficult” for people to get through the country, he said.
J ust one month after the countries signed their deal, the Mexican National Institute for Migration held more than 30,000 migrants in detention – “the highest number of detentions made in a month in the last 13 years,” according to Refugees International.
I n Tapachula, Kimani, the Kenyan migrant, described the city as a prison, noting that many migrants struggle to leave without proper paperwork.
“I think this, all this you see here, is the job of President Donald Trump,” he said, gesturing to the masses of people gathered
outside the National Migration Institute office.
A lthough experts and migrants blame Trump for some of the on-the-ground realities migrants face in Mexico, Kimani said U.S. politics continue to drive changes here even under a new administration.
H e said he’s heard from several migrants who began their journeys after Biden was elected in 2020, in hopes that they might benefit from the Democrats’ softer approach to immigration.
B ut while the rhetoric has changed significantly under the new president, many U.S. immigration policies have remained much the same – and they continue to send ripple effects from the southern border of one country to the other.
“M ost people came because they thought Biden would have a new effort or a better effort toward migration,” Kimani said. “According to what I have read, he hasn’t done much.”
Below: The U.S flag is set up in the Suchiate River, which separates Mexico and Guatemala, during a 10-day religious festival on March 4, 2022. Some observers have called the nearby city of Tapachula, Mexico, the “new U.S. border,” and the flag served as a physical representation of that idea. (Photo by Drake Presto/ Cronkite Borderlands Project)
Rosbalis Parez and her son, Daniel Alejandro, 2, wait in the crowd outside the COMAR office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 9, 2022. The Venezuelan migrants have been living in a tent close to the office while waiting for their immigration paperwork. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
Above: National Guard officers stand between an immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico, and the dozens of migrants awaiting entry on March 8, 2022. In recent months, there have been multiple clashes between migrants and law enforcement in the city of 350,000. Below: A young girl waits with her family outside an immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. Obtaining the necessary paperwork to move freely throughout Mexico can take months.
(Photos by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
On a muggy day in March, migrants line the wall up and down a colorful mural outside the National Migration Institute office, desperate to obtain an audience with officials who could grant them an earlier immigration appointment. The energy in the air is at once frenetic – as if a protest could erupt at any moment – and listless, as the day gets hotter and they go longer without food and water.
“E very day people are here,” Kimani said, “because they’re trying to reduce their dates. There are people whose dates have been reduced, but I don’t know how they choose who they reduce their dates for.”
N ear the office, National Guard members with shields keep the crowd at bay, avoiding eye contact with the migrants huddled before them.
Am ong the group are Maria Linares and Yandry Mijares of Venezuela, who said they fled the government corruption and violence of their home country in hopes of securing a better life for their son and daughter.
Bu t after they arrived in Tapachula in January, the family found that their struggles were only compounding. Unable to find work, they struggled to pay rent and instead had to sleep on the streets each night. Unable to buy food, their children were facing malnutrition. And without proper immigration documents, they said, their asthmatic son
can’t get a prescription for an inhaler.
Li nares spread paperwork out across her hands showing that each family member had a different immigration appointment date – all of which were weeks into the future.
Ev en under normalcircumstances, the process to apply for asylum or a humanitarian visa in Mexico can be long and complex, requiring multiple appointments, interviews and documents. And the stakes are high for people like Linares and Mijares, who are sometimes stuck in limbo for
weeks or even months without proper immigration papers.
A s they wait for their applications to be processed, migrants are required to stay in the state where they submitted their claim. In the meantime, they become effectively stuck in Tapachula, with limited housing and job opportunities.
Th ose who try to leave the city without authorization risk detainment in the governmentrun immigration center known as Siglo XXI, and they could be deported to their home countries. Me xico’s already challenging immigration process was further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the United States to effectively close its borders to migrants under Title 42. Since Title 42 was enacted, Schmidtke said, many migrants became “basically incentivized to stay longer in Mexico.”
Th e number of asylum applications had already been rising in Mexico, doubling “each year from 2015 to 2019,” according to the U.S.
Congressional Research Service. But by 2020, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, known by its Spanish acronym of COMAR, faced steep backlogs, which it was able to work through only with help from the U.N. High Commissioner. The agency in 2021 again struggled “to meet record demand” for asylum claims.
Al though the number of applications has spiked, not all these migrants want to achieve refugee status in Mexico –particularly because doing so could complicate their efforts to ultimately get legal protection in the United States. And not all the applicants are necessarily eligible for asylum, an international protection available only to people who can prove a “wellfounded fear of persecution” based on their race, religion, political opinion, nationality or membership in a particular social group.
M exico does offer asylum to a broader subset of people than the United States. People whose home countries face “generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive human rights violations, and other
circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order” are also eligible for asylum under the Cartagena Declaration, a nonbinding agreement reached in 1984.
I n some cases, migrants apply for asylum in Tapachula as a protection against deportation because they can’t be booted out
of the country until their claim has been processed. Others apply so they can obtain a humanitarian visa free of cost, according to Alma Cruz, who is in charge of COMAR’s Tapachula office.
Th e visas, which are issued by the National Institute for Migration and are valid for six months to a year, facilitate access to important government services, including education, health care and permission to work, according to Refugees International.
T hat’s why long waits for humanitarian visas pose such a problem for migrants stuck in Tapachula.
“T he people are coming to us, and if you ask them, they don’t want to be here,” Cruz said.
“They don’t want to be refugees here. The complaint of the people is, ‘I need free movement in Mexico. … I need a humanitarian visa. I need to go out from here as soon as possible.’ And COMAR is not the source of the problem.”
W hile they wait for documentation, masses of migrants in Tapachula spend
‘It’s better not to come right now’Two people hug as they wait to enter the COMAR office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 9, 2022. Mexico’s complicated process of applying for asylum typically takes months, and many applicants are unsuccessful. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project) Migrants help unload produce at Mercado San Juan in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 5, 2022. They work at the market from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, earning the equivalent of $10 a day. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
long days in parks or in the city square, where the men often bide their time playing chess and the women braiding each other’s hair.
So me resell goods on the streets, keeping a watchful eye out for city employees who could shut them down for operating without work permits. Others beg passerbys for money for food or other necessities.
O scar Sierra, who fled Honduras with his wife and three children in early January, looked for formal work when he arrived in Tapachula but found his options limited. He considered a particular job only to learn that it required grueling hours from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a daily wage of 150 pesos (about $7.50).
“I t is heavy,” he said, standing with his wife and three children in front of the city steps where
they slept their first night in Tapachula. “The people are taken advantage of.”
Si erra said his family had a good life in Honduras and never imagined they would have to leave everything. But as their piñata business became more successful, gangs took notice and began extorting them for money. They were quickly in over their heads, estimating that they owed thousands in protection money. And they feared that they would be killed when the payday came.
Th at’s when they left everything they owned and got on a bus to Tapachula.
Th e family ultimately hopes to make it to the United States to restart their business. In the meantime, they’re trying to pay the bills by churning out piñatas in their small apartment at a rate of four or five per day.
But at 2,000 pesos a month, the apartment isn’t cheap, and they’ve had trouble making rent.
“T he economic situation is complicated,” said Lizeth, Oscar’s wife.
Go vernment jobs programs can help some migrants, but not everyone can take advantage of them.
Af ter finding ways to make money, obtaining shelter is among the biggest challenges migrants face in Tapachula.
La ndlords often charge them exorbitant rents, which some migrants counter by sharing a unit with others to split the cost. Athie, the community organizer, said space was so limited in December that some homeowners began charging people to sleep on their roofs.
“They put up plastic tarps, and people charged them for this,” she said. “It is very sad.”
So me migrants end up in shelters, but space is limited and they often are over capacity, according to a March report from the humanitarian aid organization UNICEF. So those who can’t find work often end up sleeping on the streets; the lucky ones finding an out-of-the-way corner or a thick piece of cardboard to provide some support from the hard ground.
De spite their limited resources and different backgrounds, some migrants do their best to help others.
On one occasion, a group pooled their money together so they could prepare a community meal near the town square – a small act of solidarity within a population that so often ends up fighting for scraps.
“M any of the children were very hungry –not just the Haitian children, but Venezuelan children, all of us,” said Wilnot Devalsaint, a Haitian migrant who has been in Tapachula since late last year. “So what do we do among all of us? We asked, ‘Do you have 10 pesos, 5 pesos, 4 pesos, 20 pesos?’ And so we put it all together to make food. To help each other.”
Fo r all the challenges migrants have faced here, Athie said, their influx also has strained longtime residents of Chiapas state, leaving them with fewer jobs and housing options. Some even see the presence of so many outsiders in the small, poor city of Tapachula as something of an invasion, she said.
“T he local people feel really harmed by the presence of migrants here,” Athie said.
Os car Ulises Sol Diva, a lifelong Tapachula resident, said he has stopped walking his dog at night over fears of violence. He said he understands the obstacles migrants face but noted that many permanent residents in the community don’t have much to give – they’re struggling themselves to find work and to feed their families.
“I don’t know,” he said, “it makes us mad sometimes, with the migrants. They want everything. They say, ‘Give me, give me!’”
A thie, whose family migrated to Mexico from Lebanon, said she has tried to help both sides better understand one another through a community Facebook group she started. On it, she advocates for “a dialogue and a language where we are able to share the co-humanity of everyone and the necessities that we all have.”
Be cause in an area that’s long been shaped by migration, for better and for worse, experts say it’s unlikely that the flow of people through Tapachula will end anytime soon.
Ki mani and other migrants, however, said that if they’d known
what awaited them in Tapachula and on their journey here, they would have never left home.
“If you are not in immediate danger, if it’s something you can control, it’s better not to come right now,” Kimani said he would advise other migrants. “Here, people are sleeping out. They don’t have food. They don’t have somewhere to sleep. People are desperate.”
Don’t come, he added, unless “you are willing to be that kind of desperate.”
By Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project June 16, 2022
TAPACHULA, Mexico – The migrant crisis is evident everywhere in this city of 350,000 near Mexico’s southern border.
Migrants queue up at dawn to apply for immigration documents. Sidewalks overflow with migrants peddling fried rice and flat bill hats. A park, once a popular tourist attraction, is a makeshift campground. The sounds of Spanish, Hatiatian Creole and other languages rise above the teeming streets.
But one facet of the crisis simmers, invisible and largely ignored: The devastated mental health of migrants passing through Mexico on their way to the U.S.
For most migrants in Mexico, trauma is inescapable. It’s in the gang violence, domestic abuse and lack of basic necessities that prompt them to leave home, and it’s on the journey through Panama’s Darién Gap – a perilous route where rape, assault and death are common. And trauma waits for them in Mexico, where any hope of respite vanishes as they spend months sleeping in the streets, struggling to find work or sewing their mouths shut to protest the torpid immigration system.
Experts say it’s even in the migration and asylum process, which requires migrants to recount over and over again the violence they’ve endured.
The migration system “seeks to destroy the souls and minds of the people,” said Yamel Athie, a Tapachula psychologist and migrants’ rights activist.
The Mexican government does little to prioritize mental health for its own people, let alone people from other countries. Mexico trails its peers in both mental health spending and number of mental health professionals, making services hard to access all around.
And even where services are available, providers face numerous obstacles. Many migrants avoid seeking help because of the stigma attached to mental health issues, or because they come from cultures where trauma is so commonplace it goes unrecognized. Some don’t see the point in starting therapy or medication in a place they view as temporary. Others are simply too busy trying to survive.
Nongovernmental organizations are working tirelessly to fill the gap in need, creating innovative, culturallycompetent services to meet migrants where they are.
Still, providers and experts agree that the problem eclipses all existing resources. As the migration crisis in Tapachula continues to worsen, they said, so, too, will migrants’ mental health.
“This is not just a crisis,” said Nadia Santillanes, a social anthropologist at University of California, San Diego’s Center for Global Mental Health. “This is going to be permanent.”
After walking for eight days, her feet blistered and cracked, SYH finally arrived in Tapachula from El Salvador.
The mother of three, who asked to be referred to by her initials to protect her identity, was anguished over leaving her home and family behind. But she felt she had no choice: After she and her partner refused to continue paying extortion money to a local gang, the gang kidnapped her and attacked her with an aluminum bat, she said. Fearing for her life, she fled.
Within her first few days in Tapachula, a sympathetic stranger helped connect SYH with Hospitalidad y Solidaridad, a shelter for refugees and asylum seekers. There, she was given a medical examination and two sessions with a psychologist. Just being able to vent about what she’d been through, she said, was cathartic.
“That helped me a lot, to get it off my chest,” she said.
SYH’s circumstances are common. The majority of migrants passing through Tapachula are from El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Chile and Haiti, where poverty, government corruption and gang violence are everyday occurrences.
In many migrants’ cultures, violence and trauma are so common they are normalized, experts said. And around the world, mental health treatment often still is thought of as only for people with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder, and require institutionalization. More common symptoms, like depression and anxiety, are overlooked.
Pair those factors with most migrants’ realities as they struggle in Mexico to find work, shelter and feed their families, and it’s not surprising that relatively few seek mental health support.
“They are busy with other things. They are concerned with other things,” said Dr. Ietza Bojorquez, a researcher in the Department of Population Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico. “They are not going to seek a psychologist because they are blue.”
This history of untreated trauma, combined with the dangers migrants face on their journeys, the hardships they endure once in Mexico and the sense of loss they feel from leaving their homes, snowball into what some experts call “migratory grief.”
“They’re making the decision to move away from their countries. They’re experiencing mental health issues before even starting the process of migration,”
said César Infante, a researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health.
Many migrants expect their situations to improve once they arrive in Mexico, he said, only to be immersed yet again in violence, deprivation and scarcity of food, water and shelter.
The sluggish migration process, which often keeps migrants trapped in Tapachula for months, can cause these crises to spiral. Multiple migrants have died by suicide in Tapachula in recent years, according to local news media reports.
The problem is widespread: According to data and testimony recorded by the global NGO Doctors Without Borders, of the thousands of migrants in Mexico it interviewed during mental health consultations in 2018 and 2019, the majority appeared to have anxiety, depression and PTSD. More than half said they had been exposed to violence on their migration route. Of the women surveyed, a third said they had suicidal thoughts.
And that was before the pandemic. In March 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump implemented Title 42, a controversial public health order that drastically restricted migration from Mexico and Canada in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19. This left many migrants stuck in limbo, unable to move forward in the U.S. asylum process. (The Biden administration has attempted to end Title 42 but has been blocked in federal court.)
In the pandemic’s early days, Bojorquez said, some migrant shelters implemented lockdowns that prevented people from coming and going freely, which made many feel even more trapped.
“The feeling of autonomy is very important for mental health,” she said. “That was lost during that time.”
Even the migration system itself is traumatic, doctors and aid workers said, as people must recount what they’ve been through in great detail at multiple steps in the process.
Although some of the government employees who conduct immigration interviews now receive
sensitivity training, retraumatization is still “inherent” in the asylum process, said Blaine Bookey, the legal director for the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California, Hastings College. The legal requirements for establishing eligibility and credibility require applicants to provide a granular level of detail, she said.
“To some extent, even utilizing the best practices, it just is a traumatizing process,” Bookey said, adding that she believes every client she’s ever had has needed mental health support.
At Hospitalidad y Solidaridad in Tapachula, as SYH prepares to apply for asylum, shelter staff have
warned her how emotionally demanding the process can be. She’ll likely have to tell her story many times over, they told her. Still, she’s determined to move forward.
“I think mental health is an abandoned issue in Mexico,” Infante said. “Not only for migrants but for everybody.”
– César Infante, researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health
“What happened to me, I will never forget,” she said. “But I have to be strong and get on.”
Mexico’s refugee agency, the Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados, known by its Spanish acronym COMAR, recognizes the dire need for more mental health services for migrants, said Alma Cruz, who heads COMAR’s Tapachula office.
But her agency receives no money from the federal government to address it.
“We have zero pesos” for mental health services, she said. “It’s a big, very big problem.”
In Mexico, it’s not only migrants’ mental health that goes overlooked. Doctors, researchers and NGO workers agreed that the country barely addresses the mental health needs of its own citizens: In 2017, only 2% of Mexico’s overall health budget – just more than $1 per person – was allocated to mental health. In a 2011 report, the World Health Organization described Mexico’s mental health workforce as “insufficient” and “poorly distributed.” And for people in Tapachula,
the nearest psychiatric hospital is in Tuxtla, five hours away by car.
“I think mental health is an abandoned issue in Mexico,” Infante said. “Not only for migrants but for everybody.”
In 2019, a group of experts began working with the Mexican Secretaría de Salud’s mental health council to draft a plan to address migrants’ mental health. But the COVID-19 pandemic and staff turnover at the ministry interrupted the effort, said Bojorquez, who was part of the group. There has been no follow-up since.
“I think mental health is an abandoned issue in Mexico. Not only for migrants but for everybody.”
– César Infante, researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health
Cruz, the COMAR worker in Tapachula, said federal agencies recently sent migrants to Tuxtla for psychiatric care in a few severe cases. But for the majority of migrants, their mental health goes unattended.
Darwin Chevez, 30, left home in Nicaragua because of the tumultuous political situation and failing economy. But living in Tapachula was even worse, he said in March. He and his girlfriend spent their nights on a piece of cardboard under a tree in the park, trying to sleep while constantly worrying about being robbed, kidnapped or deported.
At one point, he became depressed when he thought about returning home and realized he couldn’t. He had only 200 pesos left, the equivalent of $10.
Mental health services would have been helpful, Chevez said, but he didn’t hear of any.
“For all the immigrants who arrive in Mexico, it’s hard because they don’t receive any medical care from any institution,” said Chevez, who has since left Tapachula and arrived in California.
Where government response lags, migrant shelters and NGOs long have acted as a safety net. Now, many in Tapachula are adding mental health to their already long list of services.
Fray Matías Human Rights Center, a local nonprofit, has teams of social workers, lawyers and psychologists that work to comprehensively meet each migrant’s needs. At the international organization Jesuit Refugee Services, psychologists run support groups for migrant men, women and adolescents. And at Global Response Management, an international medical NGO, intake workers screen patients and refer them to appropriate mental health services.
Above all, organizations on the ground have adopted a “psychosocial” approach that addresses migrants’ mental health in a culturally competent way, such as through group activities centered on family, community and self-expression.
“How they speak about mental health is revolutionary,” said Santillanes of UC, San Diego, who has studied mental health protocols in shelters in Mexico.
When Mirta arrived in Tapachula three years ago, she had just escaped domestic violence, had left her three
children behind in Guatemala and was sleeping in the street, her mental health in ruins.
She soon joined a support group at Jesuit Refugee Services, where twice a week she bonded over food, conversation and such activities as painting and jewelry making with other women who had survived similar experiences.
She could breathe again, said Mirta, whose last name is being withheld for her protection.
“I’m always, always going to be grateful for this service,” she said. “Why? Because it’s changed my life.”
Although such services are essential, they are scarce. Marilú Cárcamo Menéndez, the psychologist who runs the women’s group at Jesuit Refugee Services, said the group has helped about 100 women since its inception in 2019 but hasn’t been able to accommodate everyone who wants to be involved.
For the migrants who can access mental health services, caring for them isn’t always easy, doctors and health care workers said.
Dr. Jorge Eduardo Montesinos Balboa, one of only a handful of psychiatrists in Tapachula, said giving medications can be particularly challenging. For example, antidepressants are supposed to be managed over the course of a year – but with patients who are migrating, there’s often little or no opportunity for follow-up.
“One just barely begins to offer medicine and you put them on a plan for a year, but who knows if they will be able to do that? Who knows what is going to happen?” he said.
It can also be hard on the health care workers themselves who, by working closely with migrants, are susceptible to vicarious trauma.
Laura Benitez, a project manager at Global Response Management, often spends her days taking migrants to the hospital and connecting them with other services. Listening to their stories weighs heavily on her, she said. She recently restarted therapy as a way to protect her well-being.
“I think a lot of people in activist or humanitarian groups, they are so busy helping people, they don’t put their mental health as a priority,” she said.
Despite the challenges in providing care, medical and NGO workers agreed that more resources need to be put toward making sure migrants’ comprehensive needs are met. On top of general mental health services, specialized services are also lacking, Benitez said, such as grief counseling and services for people with intellectual disabilities.
But shelters and NGOs are already stretching their resources thin. In the end, they often are the only line of defense for migrants’ mental health.
“In general, without NGOs here, people would be suffering way more,” Benitez said. “Because government doesn’t do enough.”
By Drake Presto/Cronkite Borderlands Project
In Tapachula, migrants sew their mouths, start fires and blockade roads, in protest against the Mexican government’s slow process for those seeking asylum and work visas. In some cases, migrants have been trapped in the city for years.
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Martin Nore sells odds and ends –baseball hats, a stock pot, a blender – in front of a memorial dedicated to Benito Juarez, Mexico’s first Indigenous president, while he waits for documents that would allow him to continue his migration north.
The Haitian’s journey to the United States has been stalled in southern Mexico for nine months. To survive while waiting for his Mexican papers, Nore is selling what he can without a permit, which draws the scrutiny of government inspectors and the ire of local vendors, who must pay for business permits.
But Nore, 40, says he has little choice. No one will hire him.
“When I walk into a store here and ask about work, they say, ‘No, no, no, I don’t work with Haitians!’” Nore said, standing near his makeshift storefront in Parque Central Miguel Hidalgo, in downtown Tapachula.
In addition to his sales, Nore depends on money sent to him by family members in Haiti. Their ultimate goal is to fund his migration to the United States
so that once there, Nore can find work to in return support them through remittances – money sent across national borders, usually by wire transfer.
Nore saves what he makes from his business, and when he doesn’t have enough to pay for more merchandise, his father in Haiti sends him money. A transfer during a weekend in March allowed Nore to nearly triple his inventory.
45% of financial flows entering those countries globally, according to a 2020 article in Southern Economics Journal from researchers at Texas A&M.
As in Nore’s case, money from remittances flows in both directions – from home to help the migrants on their way, then from the migrant back to home once they’re established in their new country. These money transfers are big business for the
“Basically, decisions on how to migrate, when to migrate and where to migrate are (decided) by … economic differentiation … and the incentive to improve your life by leaving,” said Raul Hinojosa-Ojenda, a professor of economy and Latin American migration at UCLA.
“Projections show that not only are we going to need a lot of more immigrants in the next 10 years, there’s also going to be a lot more remittances,” HinojosaOjeda said. “We anticipate a trillion dollars in remittances in the next 10 years to Mexico and Central America.”
But sending and receiving money on the individual level isn’t cheap or easy. In Tapachula, migrants wait hours in lines to get money from home, only to be turned away for lack of verification, bureaucratic delays or simply because the offices ran out of money.
For migrants like Nore, remittances are measured in small increments – enough to get a business going or save up to bring their families to join them.
Even with this help, Nore struggles financially, although he noted the local economy clearly benefits from the migrants who have flooded into Tapachula over the past few years.
“We (migrants) come here, we spend money. If someone’s relative or friend sends us money, we spend it here,” he said.
For the estimated 30,000 migrants scattered around Tapachula who are waiting to continue their migration journeys, there are the limited avenues for survival –selling goods without a permit, joining the long lines of people seeking government assistance or collecting remittances from home.
Remittances have long been crucial to the foreign direct investment of developing countries – representing about
places where they are received, a boon to local and national economies alike.
Remittances are increasingly vital to economies throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The World Bank reported that remittances to countries in those regions increased by 25.3%, to $131 billion, from 2020 to 2021.
In Tapachula, the effects on the local economy have been explosive.
From 2020 to 2021, remittances sent into Tapachula doubled from $20 million to just more than $41 million, according to DataMexico, which is a joint project between Mexico’s Secretary of Economics, Banco de Mexico and Datawheel. Additionally, remittances make up nearly 4% of Mexico’s overall GDP, according to the Wilson Center, a research institute.
And while Tapachula’s economy grows from remittances, municipal inspectors force Nore and other migrant vendors off the street for selling goods without a permit multiple times a day.
Near Nore’s space, five or six vendors are peddling their wares on the same streets around the park. On a narrow road behind them are dozens more merchants selling produce out of wheelbarrows, trying to operate in less visible areas of the park.
Nore’s merchandise is neatly lined up on a black tarp, ready to be scooped up at a moment’s notice if municipal workers try to shut him down.
A vendor nearby barters in Spanish; the seller next to Nore speaks Creole. Elsewhere in the city, the diversity among
(Video by Emilee Miranda/Cronkite Borderlands Project)migrants is seen in the parks, heard on booming speakers in passing cars and in smells wafting from different foods prepared and sold in the many markets intertwined among Tapachula’s aged architecture.
On a humid March afternoon, Nore is approached by a halfdozen municipal workers, wearing tan vests with black patches on their breast pockets reading “Inspector.” They speak to one another and to Nore, and their tone switches from serious to jovial when they notice journalists’ cameras and microphones. They soon leave.
Nore said local officials should let migrants earn a living while
waiting for documents that will permit them to continue north.
“We immigrants do good here,” he said. “Spending money in this economy. It works. But we have passed through a lot of misery. And they don’t help us.”
About 90% of remittances are sent in the form of cash, but high transfer fees – an international transfer through Western Union costs $45 or about 940 pesos –diminish the amount that can be sent.
More problematic is what Hinojosa-Ojeda at UCLA calls a lack of local investment opportunities, so the remittances are used to launch more migrant journeys.
“When you send a lot of cash back to villages, where there are no banks, no mechanism
for saving the money – most remittances are used to finance more people leaving because that’s the best return on your money,” Hinojosa-Ojeda said.
Businesses that process wire remittances frequently have limited amounts of cash on hand, so customers who line up early usually are in a better position to receive their money. But there’s no guarantee, and more time waiting in line means less time looking for work, securing documentation or tending to a business.
Claudia Matute, a legal resident of Mexico who’s originally from Honduras, is living solely on remittances while she waits for her daughter to be released from Siglo XXI in Tapachula – Mexico’s largest immigration detention facility. She said her daughter, Genesis Graciela, who’s also from
Honduras, has been detained for 15 days for illegally crossing into Mexico in order to join her mother.
To get her money, she joins migrants in similar straits lining up, at least one day a week, outside Coppell – which processes money transfers – in Parque Central Miguel Hidalgo. Coppell employees step out onto a cobblestone walkway, moving down the snaking line of 20 to 30 men and women, handing out vouchers to those who will get their money. The last one goes to the man directly in front of Matute.
Through tears, she starts sending texts and voice messages on her phone.
“They should have a special bank for (migrants) so that they are not struggling,” Matute said.
“They can’t keep up because the demand from foreigners is too high.”
Elektra, another money transfer business, also was low on cash that morning, she said, adding that it’s wrong to be denied cash that’s sent legitimately.
Sadio Ansou, a Senagalese migrant also waiting at Coppell to pick up a large wire transfer from his brother, said he wants to establish roots in Tapachula, but money transfer businesses either don’t have enough money on hand or won’t accept his transfer documents.
“I want to buy a house,” Ansou said, pulling a tattered handwritten document displaying his money order information from a plastic multicolored folder.
He won’t get his wire transfer on this day, and he isn’t sure he ever will.
Like many migrants awaiting documents, Ansou can’t find work or provide for himself. Wire transfer difficulties compound his desperation.
“What do I do now?” he asked. “I have no family here.”
For Nore, Ansou and Matute, economic stability is day-to-day or week-to-week. Nore hopes to make it farther north to secure a more viable way to make a living, with long term goals of bringing his family to the United States from Haiti.
He says that he and two other people pay 4,000 pesos a month for a small apartment near the center of Tapachula. That’s nearly $200, in a country where the average minimum wage for legal workers is $7.50 a day.
Despite his struggles, Nore said he doesn’t consider Tapachula an “open-air prison,” as some migrants and officials call it. But he blames U.S. politicians for
turning a blind eye to the issues in Tapachula and in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Until the international focus changes, Nore and other migrants
will continue to peddle their goods on the street, queue up at daybreak to receive remittances or government assistance, and continue to wait for the Mexican government to issue travel documents.
TAPACHULA, Mexico – For migrants in this overwhelmed city, many women from very different parts of the globe turn to sex work for the same reason: survival.
Behind Benito Juarez Park, in Tapachula’s center, women sit in pairs or stand by themselves outside the bars and restaurants. Their heavy eyeshadow and bright lips are juxtaposed with their casual blouses and sandals. They blend in among the chaos of the square but stand out to the men looking for their services.
Nearly half the migrants who crossed Mexico’s southern border in 2021 were women, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. When women, especially single mothers, arrive in Tapachula, they lack job opportunities and proper work permits, according to Cristian Gomez Fuentes, coordinator for Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer Elisa Martinez center in Tapachula.
The organization, which provides medical care, counseling and many other services to sex workers, in February reported a 70% increase in prostitution in Tapachula over the previous several months. The group, founded 35 years ago in Mexico City, has worked in Tapachula since 2017.
Some migrant women become sex workers – defined as adults who receive money or goods in exchange for consensual sexual services or erotic performances – because they consider it the only way to provide for themselves and their families during the weeks or months they’re stalled in Tapachula, waiting for documentation that will allow them to continue north toward the United States.
“What you have is all these women who come, and they are taken into this sector, which is not what they expected,” said Itzel Vizcarra, head of the International Office for Migration, an United Nations agency that aids migrants in Tapachula.
Because of the stigma of sex work – the women often try to hide their activities from their families –accurate statistics on how many migrants turn to sex work in Tapachula aren’t available, according to a 2020 research study in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.
“The vast majority, the only place where you can work without documents to start with is in a botanical center [park] or in a bar or directly in the street,”
Gomez Fuentes said. “In sex work, they can subsist day-by-day and be able to send a little resource to their families who are left behind in their country.”
Migrant women often are subject to abuse and harassment while working, depending on whether they work indoors or out, according to the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. Women working in more formal settings, such as bars, are more likely to receive some protection from managers, staff and other co-workers. Abuse from clients and immigration officials is more common for migrant women working in informal outdoor settings, the study said.
According to a research article published in PLOS ONE in 2018, sexual and psychological abuse by clients often occurs during condom negotiation, or as the result of intoxication. When women are arrested by immigration officials, Gomez Fuentes said, they’re often assaulted and robbed to pay a fee, and most will not report abuse out of fear of deportation.
“They were really afraid of all kinds of violence with authorities, especially international migrants, fear
of being deported because the deportation process is horrible,” said Belen Febres-Cordero, a former research assistant at the Center for Gender and Sexual Health Equity, a research center affiliated with the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.
In addition to abuse, migrant sex workers are underpaid, said Elvira Madrid Romero, founder of Brigada Callejera. Workers make 200 to 300 pesos a day (up to $15), she said, which was a slight increase in recent months but still not nearly enough, especially when local business owners and landlords routinely overcharge migrants.
Sex workers in Tapachula often turn to Brigada Callejera for medical assistance and other help without judgment.
“We work defending the rights of sex workers. … It’s not black and white,” Madrid Romero said.
Brigada Callejera offers general medical care and HIV and syphilis testing at its center in north-central Tapachula. It also distributes comic books that provide educational material related to the center’s work, including AIDS and condom use. Team members also go directly to places where migrants work, providing testing for HIV and discussing sexual and reproductive health, as well as human and labor rights.
For sex workers who become pregnant, Gomez Fuentes said, workers from the center ensure they get proper treatment, which many clinics and hospitals will not provide because of the women’s status. They help track the pregnancy, provide vitamins and perform prenatal check-ups. When women go into labor, the team will direct them to health centers so they can get proper treatment at no cost.
In addition to basic medical services, access to medicine and STD and HIV/AIDS testing, Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer Elisa Martinez provides condoms to sex workers. Brigada Callejera workers distribute them to sex workers at parks, bars and nightclubs in Tapachula, Mexico. (Photo by Jennifer Sawhney/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
“For moms,” Gomez Fuentes said, “it is true that they have the pressure to be the provider of the family’s home and are mainly the head of the family because they have to take care of everyone, paying rent, water, electricity and food.”
Lack of access to and knowledge of sexual and reproductive health also is a problem among sex workers, according to the study in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. Distance, time and cost play a large role in women not seeking out resources, such as HIV/STI testing, condoms and contraceptives. Others forgo help for fear of disclosing their status as a sex worker to local health clinics. Febres-Cordero said some women don’t know how HIV spreads or pregnancies occur.
“Simply because they are migrants, they do not receive the proper attention they should give them,” Gomez Fuentes said.
As jobs for migrants remain scarce in Tapachula, women will continue to work the bars and streets. For most, keeping their families alive in hopes of someday continuing their journey north outweighs the risks of sex work.
“Sex work is survival,” Madrid Romero said.
Cronkite reporter Jennifer Sawhney contributed to this story.
TAPACHULA, Mexico – On a cool Monday morning in early March, dozens of people – migrants and citizens alike – line up outside a public health clinic as rush hour traffic hums by.
One man’s knee is wrapped. Another has a large growth on his face. A teenager is pregnant. Mothers and fathers hold
coughing babies, some parents cough themselves. A child vomits onto a pink cloth on a woman’s shoulder.
As she waits, Karla Matute, 35, holds the right hand of her son, Joryí, 7, whose left hand is wrapped in thin gauze at the wrist. They are migrants from Honduras.
When Matute gets to the front of the line, she shows the nurse a letter from the Mexican
government’s refugee agency, known as COMAR, giving her permission to seek free treatment for her son. She says someone from the Red Cross told her that he may have a fractured arm.
They came to the clinic, Matute said, after a public Tapachula hospital told her they could not treat Joryí for free because she hadn’t started the asylum application process and they aren’t Mexican citizens.
Public directories list more than a dozen hospitals in Tapachula –but depending on interpretation of law and policy by hospital staff – some turn migrants away if they can’t pay, others only treat them after a referral from a primary care clinic, and others only after they have paperwork proving they are in the asylum system. The situation is confusing for migrants seeking care.
The nurse asks, “Where do you live? I need your proof of address so that you can pass through to consultation.”
“Parque Bicentenario,” Matute replies, referring to a park in the city center where she and her son sleep in a tent.
The nurse looks up, confused.
“In the park?”
After further discussion, Matute and Joryí are allowed inside.
Health care in Tapachula was not built for this moment. It is a city of 350,000 in one of Mexico’s poorest, most under-resourced states. Tens of thousands of migrants heading north are stuck here as they await asylum meetings, humanitarian visas and other documents that will allow them to gain residency or legally continue their journeys to Mexico’s border with the United States.
And as policies enacted by Mexico and the U.S. have trapped migrants in Tapachula for months at a time, the city’s health care system has been entirely overwhelmed. The crush comes in addition to the ongoing effects of the pandemic, limited amounts of medication, the high costs of medical testing, paperwork
inefficiencies and reports of discrimination based on race and nationality.
But experts say the situation in Tapachula would be far more dire without the involvement and dedication of nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations, and local health officials.
Under Mexico’s complex health care system, the law guarantees that all people, citizens or not, have access to basic care. That care is provided by a complex web of coverage that includes private insurers (for those who can afford it), employeeprovided coverage, and various public coverage programs. But migrants can’t always access care, say experts and advocates. Communication between policymakers and providers on how to cover migrants and under which programs has been slow and unclear.
Underlying these challenges is the inability of Tapachula’s health care system to meet the needs of its own citizens. Medical providers face resource shortages and structural challenges brought on by limited government funding. Chiapas state has a poverty rate that far exceeds that of other Mexican states; almost 70% of the state’s population qualified for free public health care in 2020, according to Mexico’s Government Institute of Statistics and Geography.
Migrants, particularly women, children and those with chronic conditions, are among the most vulnerable to these gaps and disparities.
When Erliwe Germain went into labor in September, she had been sleeping in Tapachula’s Central Park for five days. Hungry, tired and unable to find housing, she made her way to the public hospital, an experience she described as difficult and scary.
Germain gave birth in a room with seven other mothers. They didn’t even clean the baby, she said, only giving one unidentified injection and no followup care.
Germain had arrived in Tapachula with her husband, Dimitry Docile, just a few weeks before that. The couple, who are from Haiti, had been living in Chile, but she said they were subjected to racism there and wanted better for their unborn daughter. They migrated north and eventually made their way to Tapachula.
Having a baby in Tapachula has allowed Germain to get permanent residency status in Mexico, which affords her access to more services. Germain’s cousin, Christela Saint-Louis, and her cousin’s husband, Dieulifoute Dorme, are not so lucky.
Saint-Louis said her year-old son was born in Chile before the family started the journey to Tapachula with Germain. She suffers from ongoing medical issues that have gotten worse on the trek north.
Although UNHCR, the U.N. agency for refugees, claims they should be able to seek care and
gave them the paperwork to do so, Saint-Louis said, they haven’t gotten the help they need.
In Haiti, Saint-Louis said, doctors operated to remove fluid in her lungs, and she had ongoing medical care after migrating to Chile. However, after walking through the Darién jungle from Colombia to Panama for five days, her breathing problems started again. She said she has lost weight and the pills she was given at a clinic in Tapachula, an antibiotic and antiinflammatories, don’t work for her.
Dorme, who developed a rash on the journey, said the antifungal ointment he was given didn’t work either. Their children are well-prioritized by local organizations, he and Saint-Louis
said, but in their experience, care for the adults is minimal.
Leila Castro came to Tapachula in March with her 7-month-old baby girl and 4-year-old son. They were dropped off at the shelter Jesús El Buen Pastor by immigration officials. Castro left behind two more children in Honduras.
One recent night, Castro’s daughter developed diarrhea, and then a rash on one shoulder. Castro said the doctor and nurse on staff at the shelter gave her electrolytes for the diarrhea but had no medication to treat the rash.
As the baby coughed, Castro held her tightly. The girl has a lung condition, and her health already
is complicated, Castro said, but she intends to keep trying to find treatment for her daughter.
Roberto Báez Castillo was detained by immigration authorities just a day after arriving in Tapachula in late February. He was taken to Siglo XXI, the city’s immigration detention center, where he remained for 11 days.
When he got there, he said, he showed officials the prescriptions for his three-month supply of antiretroviral medication, which he’d received for free in Panama to treat HIV. But the paperwork didn’t matter, said Báez, who has been living with HIV for 12 years.
“These are all the documents I gave them so they would know I have my condition. And yet my
medications were thrown away at Siglo XXI,” he said. “They threw them in the trash.”
As he waited outside the COMAR office, he recalled his long struggle with getting the medication he needs to manage his condition.
Báez, who is gay, said he fled Cuba to escape ongoing, violent discrimination from authorities. He spent a year in Peru without medication. Eventually, he made his way north to Panama City, where he finally started getting medical care in mid-2019.
On this day, he spoke with someone at the UNHCR office in Tapachula who told Báez the agency would connect him with a local nonprofit that serves HIV patients. It’s progress, but he remained distressed that it could be another week before he would get antiretrovirals, putting him at further risk for complications from the virus.
To understand how so many gaps in access exist for Tapachula’s
migrant population, it’s necessary to look at the complex network of available care.
The vast majority of primary health care for migrants is provided by NGOs – nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations –including shelters, many of which are still reeling from the huge increase in migration over the past few years and the effects of the pandemic.
“Nothing here is enough,” said Laura Benitez, the project manager for Global Response Management’s site in Tapachula. Among other things, the international NGO provides free medical services in Tapachula on a walk-up basis. No paperwork is necessary.
Benitez, who also has experience working with migrants in Tijuana, said things have been especially difficult in Tapachula since 2019, when U.S. demands that Mexico slow northward migration led Mexico City to institute a containment policy for migrants who entered the country from Guatemala. The previously transient population became a
static one, overwhelming health and aid workers.
“The health system collapsed, basically,” Benitez said, “and there’s not many NGOs. If we compare this with Tijuana, it’s like, we don’t have enough.”
Global Response Management addresses a need among migrants for good primary care they can easily access. The agency recently moved its office from a public clinic to a park complex called Tapachula Station, where other services, including dentistry, are available. Workers treat such issues as dehydration, foot injuries, fevers and skin conditions.
The team of fewer than 10 serves 20 to 50 people a day, and Benitez predicts those numbers will increase as word of their new location spreads.
“I’m sure in a few weeks, we’ll have more patients,” she said.
Paperwork has been a major barrier for migrants seeking medical care, Benitez said. When migrants apply for asylum in Tapachula, their first point of contact is with the COMAR office to get an appointment date and time. At that appointment, they receive official documents that allow them to more easily access services, including health care at public clinics and hospitals.
However, Benitez said, at the end of 2021, asylum seekers were receiving appointments as far as six months out, causing delays for those with urgent health needs.
“In six months, they cannot work, they cannot leave, they don’t have money, they don’t have food to eat, and they don’t have access to medical health services because they don’t have the document,” she said. “So it was desperate times. It was chaos.”
Although wait times have improved, COMAR staff members
still are overwhelmed as the flow of asylum seekers into the city continues.
“People were coming to us crying. They didn’t know what to do,” Benitez said, “but now it’s better. It’s not OK, but it’s not as bad as it was.”
Paperwork, however, is just one hurdle. Haitian and African migrants in particular face shortages of interpreters in medical settings, as well as widespread reports of systemic racism and anti-immigrant bias.
“It’s not just about them being migrants,” Benitez said. “It’s about them being dark-skinned.”
Research by Amnesty International and the Haitian Bridge Alliance released in October contained accounts from Black migrants in Tapachula of “intersecting forms of discrimination in accessing health care, based on language, race and nationality.”
And one 2020 study from the Population Council in Mexico about migrant women’s access to reproductive health care in Tapachula found that discrimination and racism has a measurable effect and “acts to the detriment of these women’s health.”
Female migrants of multiple ethnicities have reported physical reactions to this discrimination, the study said, including “high
Every day, he reviews data sent to him by COMAR and other agencies. Jiménez is responsible for 108 health units – clinics, hospitals and ambulances – in Tapachula and the vicinity. There are services in each of the shelters, too. As he spoke, he answered multiple calls requesting ambulances and medical services from around the city. In essence, everyone in Tapachula answers to him when it comes to the government response to migrant health care.
“There’s a magic word,” Jiménez said. “It’s called teamwork.”
Although the health system as a whole faces challenges, Jiménez cited many ways in which the state health ministry has been successful in working with such NGOs as UNHCR and UNICEF to facilitate medical care for migrants in Tapachula.
UNHCR has donated ambulances, masks, gloves and auxiliary ventilators to medical settings in Tapachula and throughout the region. It also has provided access to prenatal ultrasounds and support for newborns.
blood pressure, tachycardias and stress and anxiety symptoms.”
Although the report highlighted efforts to hire Haitian migrants as interpreters and translators, the researchers made it clear these resources aren’t sufficient.
Dr. David Jiménez, coordinator of attention to the migrant population in Sanitary District VII of the Ministry of Health of Chiapas, is a big believer in order.
Additionally, UNHCR works with the local university to make more interpreters for Haitian migrants available and makes pamphlets and banners in Spanish and Creole that provide instructions on preventive health care and how to seek services.
“And these materials also benefit the entire population, because it is material that everyone needs, not only refugees and migrants,” said Pierre-Marc René, a public information associate for UNHCR Mexico.
UNICEF also is filling gaps in maternal health care by hiring a gynecologist and providing resources to support children, adolescents and pregnant women. It serves about 150 patients a week, according to a UNICEF report from mid-March.
Lastly, with assistance from the federal programs IMSS-Bienestar and Grupo Beta, Jiménez and his team have assured that most every shelter in Tapachula has some level of medical staffing and transport to hospitals when necessary.
Despite these steps, some gaps remain.
Herbert Bermudez, a worker at Albergue Jesús El Buen Pastor, said he sometimes uses his own money to buy medicine for migrants who can’t find what they need in the shelter’s supply of donated medications.
In addition, COVID-19 continues to be a challenge in many shelters, creating staffing shortages and safety concerns because of overcrowding, which forced some to shut down, UNICEF reported in late March.
Jiménez acknowledged that it was difficult at the beginning to treat so many people from so many cultures, but said they’ve come a long way.
“I do not think I know perfection, but I think that we are already
getting to know each person: the migrants from different countries,” he said.
But he also expressed long standing frustrations.
In his experience, Jiménez said, Haitians in particular are constantly in conflict with those who’re trying to help them, always pushing to the front of the line. He wants everyone to follow the system laid out for them and go through proper channels.
Jiménez also said migrants prioritize their health after everything else, especially immigration appointments and their attempts to leave Tapachula.
“More than anything, you need to know how the migrant puts other things first,” he said. “The least important of those things is their health.”
Benitez at Global Response Management also spoke to this phenomenon, although with a differing perspective.
“There’s a lot of people who need medical attention or psychological help, but they
have other priorities,” she said. “Even if they know they need it (medical care), they prefer to go look for a job or make money to feed their family.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (referred to as AMLO) addressed the inefficiencies in this web of health care in a large-scale reform of Mexico’s health care system in early 2020. Healthcare reform was a major talking point of his campaign in 2018.
Although the strengths and weaknesses of the old system, known as Seguro Popular, were nuanced, it did guarantee asylum seekers three months of free health care access once they had their asylum appointments.
AMLO’s government created a fully public option, known as INSABI, to make health care more accessible for all, including migrants. Public funding was expanded by 35% in 2020 to meet these goals. That ended the three month limit for asylum seekers and expanded access, on paper anyway.
But communications about policy and expectation remain poor, according to some medical researchers, and there are widespread accounts of medication shortages and access issues for migrants and Mexican citizens alike. In addition, there have been reports of corruption within hospitals, which, when supplies are low, may charge patients for resources that should be free.
Experts also have criticized López Obrador for severely underfunding health care. An independent analysis in 2020 indicated health care in Mexico is under-resourced by as much as 658.5 billion pesos. And despite some funding increases, that gap hasn’t been closed.
Although the Chiapas health ministry contributes resources for migrants, the majority of the funding Jiménez distributes comes from NGOs. Jiménez is proud of the strides his team has made, but more support is needed, he said.
Jiménez said the NGOs he works closely with would soon be petitioning AMLO, who visited Tapachula on March 11, asking that “more resources be allocated to the health system.”
Benitez agreed that resources from the Mexican government have been lacking.
“The government doesn’t do enough,” she said. “That’s why it’s important that we NGOs are here.”
Government reforms have also been affected by the ongoing pandemic. Mexican public hospitals, which serve people who need more than basic care, often have found themselves overwhelmed, and wait times in emergency rooms remain high.
Furthermore, private and specialized treatment is beyond the financial reach of many migrants.
Caught in these currents are migrants like Karla Matute, the Honduran mother who sought help for her son’s injured arm.
At the clinic, a doctor put a more durable wrap on Joryí’s arm and referred him for an X-ray at the local hospital. Matute said the arm likely isn’t broken – Joryí would be in more pain if it were –but it’s worth checking to be sure.
They left the clinic with painkillers, but instead of heading to the hospital, Matute went to the National Immigration Office (INM). The night before, she had heard the agency might be giving humanitarian visas to the single mothers with children who’ve been sleeping in the park.
For the moment, anyway, Joryí’s arm will have to wait.
She’s hoping to leave soon and make her way north to Monterrey, where she heard there is work.
Additional reporting was contributed by Jennifer Sawhney, Juliette Rihl and Salma Reyes. Translations were done by Jennifer Sawhney and Salma Reyes.
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Mu’taz hoped to be holding his 13-year-old nephew’s hand as they took their first steps into Mexico, marking the end of their long, arduous journey from Jordan. Instead, Mu’taz crossed alone; his nephew is buried back in Panama.
Tens of thousands of migrants, desperate to leave behind the violence and economic turmoil of their home countries, are crossing into southern Mexico by any means necessary for the slightest chance of rebuilding their lives, preferably in the United States.
Tapachula is the first stop in Mexico for this stream of humanity. The city of 350,000 people, in impoverished
Chiapas state near the border with Guatemala, is struggling to accommodate the flood while also benefiting from it.
No matter what route brought them to Tapachula, migrants say their journeys have been marked by fear, danger, uncertainty and even death.
“We came (on this journey) to save the life of the child,” said Mu’taz, who did not want his photo taken or his last name published for fear of reprisals. “We leave the country. We lost our home, everything, for the life of this child. And now we have lost him.”
Tapachula has long been a way station for migrants headed to the United States because it’s Mexico’s southernmost city with offices for the Mexican
Commission of Refugee Assistance (COMAR) and the National Institute of Migration (INM). Only at these offices can migrants begin the paperwork that allows them to work in or leave the state. For many, this process has taken weeks, months, even years. Understaffed and inundated, these offices struggle to process applications as more migrants arrive each day.
Juana Brito Bautista and her three children wait in line outside the National Institute of Migration office in Tapachula. The family, from Venezuela, is seeking better opportunities in the United States.
Bautista and her children walked the mountainous Darién Gap as part of a group of migrants guided by a smuggler. Her three were among about 20 children in the group. For a week, they walked from sunrise to sunset with little to no food or water and slept on the jungle floor at night. Altitude sickness coupled with exhaustion got the best of several in the group. Many times, she said, she watched as people walking ahead of her suddenly dropped to the ground unconscious.
“You get a rapid heartbeat from having to keep pausing because it’s way too high,” Bautista said. “So you had to stop, breathe, and keep walking so you don’t choke.”
People claiming to be police set up makeshift toll stations along routes migrants commonly take through the jungle, she said, demanding payment to proceed, sometimes as much as $100 per person.
“The police at all the checkpoints kept asking for more and more money,” Bautista said.
Now in Tapachula with the little money she has left, Bautista intends to keep moving forward so her kids can begin a life in the United States.
“What we want is to keep going. We don’t want to stay here, we truly don’t,” she said. “I believe that there we will have opportunities. I want them to get an education there. There is no cause if it’s not for them.”
When Mu’taz and his family stepped foot in the Darién, they couldn’t have imagined the pain that awaited them inside.
“The most difficult part was crossing the jungle. It was very dangerous,” said Juana Brito Bautista, sitting outside the INM office, shading her three children with a folder of paperwork.
“The jungle” is the Darién Gap, a horrific touchstone in many migrant journeys. Considered the most dangerous jungle in the world, the Darién is a lawless, 60-mile wide stretch between Colombia and Panama rife with wild animals, human smugglers and members of drug cartels. But many migrants traveling north from South America are left with no choice but to traverse this harrowing passage.
Mu’taz, a Palestinian refugee living in Jordan, fled with his sister and nephew, Aziz, to save the 13-year-old from an uncaring, negligent household.
Aziz’s father died when he was 2, leaving Mu’taz’s sister and her son alone. Mu’taz opened his home to them, but under Jordanian law, if a child’s father dies, the mother is bound to surrender full custody to the father’s family once the child turns 14.
Since Aziz’s father died, Mu’taz said, the father’s family has paid little to no attention to him.
“The family of the dad, they never even ask about him or if he needs something for school, or clothes. We always
look after him,” Mu’taz said. But as Aziz’s 14th birthday drew closer, the boy’s paternal family began to threaten to take him by force if the mother did not give full custody.
In 2020, the three made the decision to flee and apply for refugee status in Latin America. They wound up in Ecuador, a country often chosen by migrants because of relatively easy visa requirements. But before they could begin the application process to stay, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and all government services were shut down.
Unable to leave, they were forced to find a small apartment. But life in Ecuador was difficult, Mu’taz said. Living expenses only grew and since neither he or his sister could apply for a job, they struggled to buy food.
One day, a group of migrants talking about Mexico asked whether he and his family wanted to join.
Two months later, on Jan. 21, they boarded a small raft buckling under the weight of 15 people and headed for Colombia. The night they arrived, Mu’taz remembers the smuggler telling the group to sleep in a nearby field and be ready to start walking at 5 in the morning.
The journey through the Darién Gap began with days of cutting through dense jungle to reach the summit of the aptly named Mountain of Death.
Climbing was only part of the journey, though; the descent was just as brutal.
“Going down was harder than going up,” Mu’taz said. “We start walking down, down, down, down. It was at this time, my nephew fell.”
Aziz had slipped trying to descend a slope of large boulders.
“The rain is falling. It’s like when stairs are wet, and he fell like 3 meters (10 feet) down,” Mu’taz said.
Group members helped Aziz get to his feet and they continued. They reached the river two hours later, when Aziz took another fall, but one much worse.
“My nephew was covered in blood,” Mu’taz said, gesturing toward his ribs. “So we put him in the river and we cleaned him.”
Aziz never revealed how much pain he was in.
“He never told us, I think because he felt guilty for falling,” Mu’taz said.
Aziz now was limping and struggling to keep up with the rest of the group. His injury slowed the group, and stretches that should have taken an hour to cross took four hours, and the jungle canopy made sunlight scarce. Eventually, the trio was separated from the main group. A few hours later, a member of the group came back and apologized but said the group would continue without them. He promised, however, to send help from the first village they came to.
“‘Better to wait until sunshine, when you can see the road well,’ they told us,” Mu’taz recalled, adding that the three pitched their tent for the night.
“Each time my nephew woke up, he felt thirsty,” Mu’taz said. “He kept looking at me and saying, ‘I can’t. I can’t.’”
At 2 p.m. the next day, a group of migrants following the same path came upon Mu’taz and his family. He told them Aziz was injured and needed help.
“‘You are lucky,’ they said, ‘We are all medics from Cuba,’” Mu’taz said.
The Cubans said a doctor was part of a migrant group just behind them, but they offered to check Aziz and prepare him for the doctor.
When the doctor arrives, he said, “She had one medicine and put it in his mouth. After like 50 seconds, he start vomiting blood. His mouth, everything. Blood.
“She said to me, ‘This child could die if we don’t find a way.’”
Later that day, another group of migrants approached them.
“We stay one night there, we sleep without food without anything; we drink the water from the mountain,” Mu’taz said.
The next day, they came upon a nearby military post and were told the nearest hospital was three hours away, but a nearby village had a clinic. The family got there in 30 minutes, but it was too late.
“Before we arrive, all the blood in his body, he took it out,” Mu’taz said.
“We tried to save his life. The doctor came and he checked, he said, ‘No. Nothing.’”
Mu’taz was devastated.
“I asked if I could put my heart in his body,” he said.
Mu’taz remembers a procession of police, medics and court officials passing in and out of the room to confirm the death and fill out paperwork.
“We left the 21st of January. My nephew died the first of February,” he said.
The local Arab community offered to help with the burial in the village cemetery. They laid Aziz to rest in an unmarked grave, next to rows of crosses.
Aziz’s mother was numb with shock.
“My sister, she don’t want to continue,” Mu’taz said. “‘I will stay close to where he is,’ she said.”
“One of them walking was from China, and he had packed an air mattress,” Mu’taz said. “‘Take it by the river,’ he told me. ‘If he can’t walk, lift him and float him on the river.’”
The rushing waters tossed Mu’taz and his nephew around and nearly pulled them under.
“I stand on everything. The stone, on everything. The river become more deep. I couldn’t control,” Mu’taz said. “I try to push his body with the mattress to one area, I can’t.”
“I’m close to his head. I try when he needs something – to put some water in his mouth, everything, until we arrive,” he said. “I look at him and my sister and the others, I said to them, ‘I can’t.’”
They decided to stop for the day and pitched their tent along the swampy river bank.
Mu’taz hugged his sister for what could be the last time, and continued the journey.
He boarded bus after bus and faced dozens of toll stations on the way.
“Because all the bus was migrants, they stop us,” he said. “And they ask ‘Which came from Cuba? You have to pay 50. Which people from Venezuela? 40. From Haiti? What you have.”
“The people on both sides of the border, it’s their business, the immigrants, it’s their business.”
“It was in Guatemala where they took the last dollar I had,” said Carolina Del Valle, sitting with her husband, Pedro, and their two young children on the floor of an outdoor chapel.
This chapel has been home for more than a month. It’s in the center of the Belén shelter for migrants, one of the few in Tapachula. They’re forced to stay there because of overcrowding at the shelter.
Toys and blankets lay strewn about the chapel’s pews as rain battered the tin ceiling. A weathered portrait of the Virgin Mary watches from a wooden frame.
Pedro, Carolina and their children, Ángel and Nicole, share a single quilt to sleep on at night. All their belongings are stored in a plastic grocery bag stashed under the edge of the quilt.
The family fled Venezuela in recent months to escape President Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, which they said had shuttered all businesses and slashed salaries and services.
For example, Pedro said, electricity was available only two days a month. Families were assigned numbers that corresponded to the day of the week they were permitted to buy groceries. The Del Valles were in group 6, which could only shop on Wednesdays. They survived on rations of rice, oil and sugar.
They left Venezuela with the little money they had, but the journey eventually took every penny. Corrupt law enforcement officials stopped them repeatedly, demanding payment to continue.
“From Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala to Mexico, they asked for money in all of them. All of them,” Pedro said.
“The police kept asking for money, money, money, money. As you can see, by the time we arrived here to Tapachula, we arrived without a single dollar. We didn’t even have enough to buy a slice of bread.
“It was truly terrible because many times we were left without any money. We didn’t have food to give to the kids.”
Discrimination against migrants was a constant in the countries they passed through. The majority of their journey was by bus, with tickets being more expensive for migrants.
for help, and after a few days they had enough money for the coyote.
In Mexico, they were admitted to the Belén shelter to wait for an appointment with COMAR to request a humanitarian visa. Because shelter rules don’t let residents leave unless they have an appointment regarding their visa, the Del Valles were in a tight spot.
“We need to work. We need to shower. Look, we are sleeping on the floor,” Pedro said. “It is not humane, the way that we’re here just thrown on the floor.”
The shelter only serves lunch. Sometimes a passerby will slide a plate of rice or a banana under the gate, but that’s rare, he said.
The family, who received a humanitarian visa April 4, intends to continue north toward the United States, hoping to find a refugee shelter once they reach Texas.
Despite the horrors of the journey to Tapachula, thousands of migrants face additional months – perhaps years –impoverished and trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s an untenable situation that won’t change until Mexico’s immigration officials address the problem of documentation.
“At the terminal leaving Honduras, they told us, ‘Only 10 foreigners can board, and the rest must be Hondurans,’” Pedro said.
Many times after paying for passage at a makeshift checkpoint, their bus was met by police just down the road demanding more money. To cross into Nicaragua, Pedro paid $150 per person.
“In Guatemala, it was especially terrible because we didn’t have a way to cross the border into Mexico,” Pedro said.
Then they were approached by a coyote, who offered to take the family over the border for $540 – which the Del Valles obviously didn’t have. The coyote threatened to kill them all if they couldn’t come up with the money the next day. Pedro and Carolina hid the family and began sending messages to family members begging
TAPACHULA, Mexico – The wide street leading to the Instituto Nacional de Migración is lined with bright and bold murals affirming the human rights of all people without regard to their country of origin.
However, many of the hundreds of Black migrants from Africa and Haiti who daily wait outside the office of INM say immigration officials, and the Mexican government in general, have failed to live up to those words.
Migrants from across the globe can be seen on this street, clutching folders with immigration documents, hoping to expedite appointments with INM that are scheduled six to eight months out.
Without proper documentation from Mexico, they’re stuck in Tapachula, more than 1,200 miles south of their U.S. destinations.
But particularly among Black migrants, the tension, anxiety, frustration and, in a growing number of cases, anger, are the only things more palpable and intense than the humid heat. They believe that their applications for humanitarian visas or asylum, which would potentially allow them to pass through Mexico or find legal work and assistance, are being delayed because of the color of their skin.
Because of these delays, many migrants and their families sleep in parks near the INM building or just outside it, hoping to save their place in line for a chance to make their cases to immigration authorities.
“We are suffering here! We don’t have no money, we sleep out in the street!” said Sidike Kamora, 17, a migrant from Liberia among the throng waiting outside the INM office one afternoon.
“They only take white people,” he said. “I don’t know why Black people suffer everywhere, when you go inside you only see White people. It’s not fair.”
In 2019 and ’20, Mexican authorities detained more than 10,000 African and Haitian migrants passing through Tapachula on their way north, according to a report by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization that conducts research and analyses regarding world migration and provides insight into migration policies for countries around the world.
Migrants from Cameroon, Congo, Eritrea and other parts of Africa are fleeing violence, political instability and persecution. Haitians have left their island nation – already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere – in waves since an enormous earthquake in 2010 that killed more than 200,000 people. After another earthquake in 2018 and the assassination of Haiti’s president last year, Haiti has descended into chaos, where kidnappings are common and local gangs, vying for territory and power, shoot it out in the streets.
Before 2019, most migrants entering Mexico through its southern border were detained and issued an exit permit requiring them to leave the country within 20 to 30 days. However, in the summer of 2019, then-U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Mexico with stiff economic tariffs if the country did not take serious action to halt migration into the United States.
In response, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador deployed the Mexican national guard to enforce what has been referred to as an ad-hoc immigration policy that essentially
uses Tapachula as a holding bay, thereby preventing migrants from continuing north.
The Biden administration has attempted to reverse some Trump era policies that kept migrants stalled in Mexico, and in June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Biden can stop the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, but
it’s not clear what immediate effect the ruling will have for migrants now stuck in Mexico.
Although all migrants in Tapachula have been affected, Black migrants say they face additional hurdles: racism and xenophobia.
Their claims are supported in an October 2021 report by the Migration Policy Institute. “African
Migration Through the Americas” found that African migrants face unique challenges compared with migrants from Latin America.
“African migrants face myriad difficulties rooted in differences between their nationalities, languages spoken, religions practiced and their race and ethnicity and those of the societies through which they travel,” the report said. “Racism, a lack of interpretation and translation services, and a lack of understanding of cultural and individual practices make transit and longer term settlement particularly difficult for African migrants in the Americas.”
Lawyers and human rights activists who are on the ground in Tapachula say immigration officials prioritize migrants from Spanish speaking countries. Black migrants complain
they’re routinely targeted by police and immigration officials during nighttime roundups of unauthorized immigrants, leaving them terrified to go out after dark. When tensions build and the migrants protest this treatment, they are accused of being violent. Dozens of protests and demonstrations have broken out in Tapachula, and videos show the Mexican national guard using force against mostly Black migrants.
“They don’t care about Black people,” said Frantz Joseph, a migrant from Haiti who now works for the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an advocacy group that provides services to Haitian migrants in Tapachula. “I don’t understand what’s going on, but there’s no privilege for Black people here.”
Current and former government officials in Tapachula defended the
government’s treatment of Black migrants. They said the system is simply overwhelmed and lacks resources, including translators who can help those who don’t speak Spanish.
Last November, the Mexican government held a conference on the mistreatment of migrants, sponsored by Mexico’s commission for refugee assistance (known by its Spanish acronym COMAR), in which it denounced racism and xenophobia aimed at migrants.
“People in transit have historically faced prejudices and stigmas that have caused the normalization of false beliefs that are an attempt to justify them receiving unequal treatment and injustice,” the commission said in a news release. “Their vulnerable situation increases because of the language
and attitudes of xenophobia that they experience in this country.”
The news release said the government is committed to eradicating stereotypes, prejudices and stigmas against migrants – through training and education.
In mid-July, COMAR responded to Cronkite News’ request for comment.
“On the part of COMAR, there is no difference in treatment for those seeking access to the refugee recognition process,” COMAR official Cinthia Perez Trejo said in an email. “Their reception and attention is the same according to the law, which determines for us what actions must be carried out in order to process a case. Aside from that, if there is any indication of something that could be interpreted as discriminatory
treatment, there are procedures within the office of the Secretary of Governance of Mexico for sanctioning any public official who commits such acts.”
“The process is fast for Central American migrants. They are seen within two or three weeks. But for Haitian migrants, it’s slower,” said Melus Morvensky, a Haitian migrant who arrived in Tapachula with his family on Sept. 15, 2021.
Morvensky sits on a bench opposite his family, looking at the park behind him and just trying to pass the time. His daughter, 2½, prances around as her mother makes sure
she doesn’t wander too far from the group.
“She’s been sick with diarrhea, and a fever,” said Morvensky, gazing at the girl with concern. He couldn’t afford the doctor’s visit plus the medication she needed.
Morvensky, along with his wife and two children, left Haiti because of political and economic strife. Their first stop was Chile, where they lived for about five years before leaving because work was hard to find and neither he nor his wife had the necessary work permits.
“If you don’t have residency in Chile, you don’t have work, you have nothing,” he said. They decided to try their luck by traveling to Tapachula, with the
goal of eventually settling down in the United States.
However, like the tens of thousands of other migrants stuck in Tapachula, Morvensky discovered the immigration process was slower and more complicated than he expected. By early March 2022, he had been waiting five months for his first appointment with COMAR.
This isn’t the first time immigration authorities in Tapachula have been accused of favoring migrants who speak Spanish. Black migrants repeatedly claim that immigration authorities, notably the INM, will confiscate or destroy their immigration documents alleging they’re fake. In more extreme cases, Haitian migrants say, they are threatened with deportation to Guatemala or physically assaulted by the national guard. Others are pressured to pay money to these authorities or run the risk of being arrested and even deported. Although some of these claims are shocking, historians and civil rights advocates say Mexico has a long history of racism toward Black people.
According to Colin Palmer, author of “Slaves of the White God,” which examines the history of Blacks in Mexico from the 1500s, Africans initially were brought to colonial Mexico as slave labor to replace Indigenous laborers, who had been decimated by smallpox, diphtheria, measles and other European diseases unknown in the New World.
“The introduction of African slaves into Mexico was in part a response to the labor shortage stemming from the decline of the Indigenous population during the 16th century,” Palmer wrote. “Spanish mistreatment of the Indians and a number of disastrous epidemics contributed to this demographic catastrophe.”
Although Mexico formally outlawed slavery in 1837, the Spaniards left behind a legal caste system that put Africans and their descendants at the bottom of society. (Graphic by Hector Adames, Associate Department Chair at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology)
As the Indigenous population continued to plummet, the Spanish increasingly needed a new labor source to work in its silver mines and sugar cane plantations. To solve the labor shortage, the Bishop of Chiapas, Bartolome de las Casas, a Spaniard known for his opposition to enslaving Indigenous people, suggested importing Africans. In 1521, the first
African slaves touched the coast of Mexico in what today is the state of Veracruz. According to Origins, a website created by historians at Ohio State University, the prevalent belief at the time was that Africans were hardier and less susceptible to disease and death.
Data from SlaveVoyages, a collaborative website that logged the transatlantic and intraAmerican slave voyages dating from the 14th century, at least 153,000 Africans were imported into what was then called New Spain, which at its peak covered all of Mexico, Central America and the Isthmus of Panama.
Slavery in Mexico formally was outlawed in 1837, 16 years after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. But even with the abolition of slavery, the Spanish left behind a legalized racial caste system, a hierarchy determined by familial ancestry, according to a 2009 article by Herbert G. Ruffin, an associate professor of African
American studies at Syracuse University. At the bottom of this hierarchy were African slaves and their descendants. By law, Africans were barred from holding many positions within Mexican society and generally held no power or standing, the article states.
In many ways, the remnants of that caste system still are evident in Mexico. For example, Black Mexicans, who now mostly live in the coastal states of Veracruz, Oaxaca and Guerrero, finally were able to self-identify as AfroMexican in the 2015 intercensal survey and the 2020 national census, but only after repeatedly
petitioning the government. In 2019, the Mexican constitution was amended to officially recognize AfroMexicans. However, even with these advancements, Afro-Mexicans still must deal with racial discrimination. In a 2014 study published in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, a quarter of Mexicans said they would not rent to a person of African descent, and darker skin overall often is associated with a lower quality of life in Mexico.
“It’s very difficult,” Morvensky said through a Spanish translator. “I can’t spend too much time thinking about (discrimination). The most important thing is how we can survive here.
How do we buy food? Pay rent?”
Morvensky said he briefly worked as a vendor at a supermarket, but he was paid only 150 pesos a day –equivalent to $7 – which is Mexico’s minimum wage.
Seeing no hope for a future where he can provide for his family in Tapachula, Morvensky still is waiting for his appointment with COMAR to receive the documentation to move to other states in Mexico in order to find work.
Finding work, however, may be the least of Morvensky worries. He
must also hope that neither he or any of his family members are arrested by Mexico’s immigration authorities and taken to any one of Tapachula’s numerous detention facilities.
The city’s main migrant detention facility, Tapachula Estacion Migratoria, known locally as Siglo XXI (Spanish for “21st century”), sits off a narrow road surrounded by grass and brick walls. At its front doors, people pace anxiously back and forth, waiting to hear about the condition of friends and loved ones inside.
According to the Global Detention Project, a nonprofit that promotes the human rights of those who have been detained for reasons pertaining to their immigration status, Siglo XXI has a standard capacity of 960 detainees. However, multiple reports, including from the Migration Policy Institute and several news networks, have reported that the facility faces severe overcrowding and flea infestations.
A report by the project in February 2021 also lists instances of discrimination experienced by Black immigrants in detention facilities in Mexico.
“In Mexico, for example, Africans have experienced worse detention conditions than other migrants and are more easily targeted for extortion,” the report states. In more serious cases, it says, African migrants are regularly denied food until all migrants from Spanish speaking countries have eaten first.
In a separate report, conducted by researchers for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Black migrants were told that detention was necessary for the regularization of immigration status in Mexico, but “this isn’t the case” for non-Black migrants. Black migrants also tell of denial of water and medical care and general abuse from jail officials.
“Black people are dying in detention and the Mexican officials do not even care enough to allow us access to proper medical care” the report quoted one detainee.
Naseri Loderick, an immigration and human rights attorney in Tapachula whose work has focused on getting migrants released from Siglo and other lockups, said the facilities regularly violate international law and human rights. He contends that migrants should not be arrested solely because of their immigration status.
“On which grounds are you detaining someone for an ordinary paper he does not have?” he asked while standing outside Siglo XXI. “You cannot detain someone that doesn’t have any papers because at the end of the day, migration is a civil issue, not a criminal one. Nobody should be punished for not having an ID card.”
Loderick recounted some of the complaints he hears from clients and other migrants at Siglo.
“Every time I talk to a client,” he said, “I ask them three important questions: Have you eaten, have you been able to contact your consulate in your home country, and have they informed you of your rights as a migrant? The answer to all of these is always no.”
Loderick said detention officers often help Central American migrants fill out paperwork and explain it to them, but that courtesy is not offered to Black migrants, who may not fully understand the process because of language barriers.
“They will take the time to teach Central American migrants about the process, and they will tell them to do it and to do it now,” Loderick said.
Asked about his personal experience with racism in Tapachula, he became emotional.
“Because I’m a Black man myself … they don’t even respect me,” he said. “So you can imagine a migrant who doesn’t even speak Spanish, who doesn’t even know his rights.”
Loderick said serious international intervention is needed, and soon, before the situation gets worse.
“I am calling on the entire international community, the European Union, the United Nations, African Union, because it really is an issue,” he said. “People die. People lose their lives for a simple reason that we have the solution to.”
The Cronkite News Borderlands Project witnessed multiple protests while in Tapachula in March, including one that turned violent. Black migrants set fires in the streets, threw rocks at police and national guard. They held their hands crossed over their heads, symbolizing the breaking of chains. Protesters said they desperately wanted to leave Tapachula so they could provide for their families.
Earlier in the year, one of the INM offices in Tapachula was temporarily shut down because of a skirmish that broke out in which some INM employees were injured. The office has since reopened for operations.
Andrew Bahena, a researcher for the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, a Los Angeles organization that advocates for immigrant rights, gave some insight behind the protests.
“The protests are always about the tramites (formalities), the bureaucratic processes not working, and people always protesting the length of time that they need to wait
to go through the process,” Bahena said. “That’s what it’s always about, how bad the conditions are here in Tapachula and the fact that some people just don’t want to be here.”
And when it comes to Black migrants in particular, Bahena said, the blowback for protesting these conditions is swift and harsh. Black migrants are “proven leaders” in these movements and demonstrations, he said, and as a result have suffered disproportionate
violence at the hands of Mexican authorities or migration officials.
“There’s like this hierarchy of migrants. The good migrants are the Guatemelans and the Cubans,” Bahena said. “But then you get to the Black migrants and it’s immediate hostility. And then when you take into context that they’ve been there for a while and they start to demand better treatment. Like, if you’re already starting from super hostile, just imagine how quickly that escalates.”
And it has escalated. Countless videos showcasing clashes between migrants and the national guard have gone viral, even after President Lopez Obrador promised a more humanitarian approach toward migrants in Tapachula.
African migrants, recognizing that they have no one to rely on but themselves, at one point in 2019 created an ad-hoc group to mobilize and address their treatment at the hands of authorities in Tapachula. The Assembly of African Migrants released a list of accusations and demands against the Mexican government. The accusations ranged from rampant racism and extortion at the hands of state forces to outright violations of human rights and cases of repression by the national guard and immigration authorities. Their demands included urgent humanitarian aid to Black migrants, free and safe passage to other states in Mexico or to the United States and Canada, and international protection for those who choose to stay in Mexico.
Despite the group’s list of strongly worded grievances, not much has changed in Tapachula. The Assembly of African Migrants no longer is active. African and Haitian migrants continue to stick together in enclaves around the city, pooling resources to survive as they anxiously await the day they can leave Tapachula.
In mid July, UNHCR, the United Nations agency for refugees, said it was taking steps to improve conditions for Haitian migrants in Tapachula, including providing
Creole translators to COMAR and helping COMAR expedite appointments.
Although the situation looks bleak, some migrants, like Djiby Samb from Senegal, vow to maintain hope and a vision for a future beyond Tapachula.
“There’s nothing else we can do here but wait and pray for a blessing from Allah. But we are strong, and we are going to get through this.”
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Around the world, millions of people are leaving their homes to seek refuge or asylum in safer, more prosperous countries. From Syria and Ukraine to Venezuela and Haiti, about 82.4 million people who have been forcibly displaced must leave everything they’ve known to seek a better life.
Tens of thousands of them end up in Tapachula, an ancient city of 350,000 people less than 20 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala. It’s also more than 2,000 miles from Nogales, Sonora, on the U.S. border.
Tapachula is a gateway into Mexico for thousands of migrants moving north every year. Many have plans
to reach the U.S., but all have to wait in Tapachula for Mexican immigration offices to process their requests for documents to work in the country or leave the city.
‘All I can do is wait’: Children make up a third of migrants in documentation limboA young boy lines up with his family outside the refugee assistance office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 9. Later in the day, a protest erupted outside the office, with dozens of migrants demanding their paperwork be expedited. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project) (Video by Mikenzie Hammel/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
The crush of migrants and refugees is overwhelming the immigration system, so it often takes months to get the necessary appointments with them. While the process grinds on, public parks are sleeping grounds, local shelters are at capacity and tensions seem only to rise.
In Tapachula, the site of one of the largest humanitarian crises in the Western Hemisphere, about a third of those stranded are younger than 18, according to UNICEF.
Some kids traveling with parents or older family members are able to find space in one of the city’s shelters.
(To protect identities, everyone in this story will be referred to by first name only).
Carlos, 16, who’s from Honduras, is one of those fortunate enough to have a place to stay. In March, Carlos had been in Tapachula for a little more than a week, traveling with his 23-year-old cousin to join Carlos’ parents and sisters in Puebla, Mexico, further north.
“My case has been difficult, it was sudden, but with God’s help I’ve kept going,” he said.
Carlos spends his days at Hospitalidad y Solidaridad, a
shelter for refugees and asylum seekers. He and his cousin walked from Honduras through Guatemala to Mexico in a day and a half.
“Two or three days ago, I had an anxiety attack or depression because I hadn’t had time to process everything
that had happened,” he said. “Then it hit me; running out and not being like a locked up prisoner. But now, thank God, I have calmed down, and I have no choice but to come here … and because of the circumstances, I can’t return” to Honduras.
His parents and sisters, who had left home eight or nine months earlier to get permanent residence and documentation, also passed through Hospitalidad y Solidaridad on the way. At a picnic table outside the shelter, Carlos talked about what brought him here.
“Gang threats,” he said. “My dad apparently had problems with them, but it had been mostly because of misunderstandings. … And I had no choice but to come here to look for my dad.”
Directors at the shelter said Carlos’ father must come to Tapachula from Puebla to go through a formal family reunification process with immigration officials.
In 2021, Tapachula reported receiving more than 130,000 asylum seekers. The monthly number of refugee-status applications received by COMAR, the Mexican office for refugee assistance, went from about 6,000 in 2019 to almost 11,000 in 2021.
A large number of migrants stuck here are from Haiti. Some left their Caribbean nation recently, but many had worked in Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela over the past decade. In 2019, COMAR reported that less than 10% of asylum seekers were Haitian. By 2021, 51,000 Haitians were seeking asylum, making up nearly 40% of all such applicants in Mexico.
All migrants, but especially Haitian migrants, say it has been extremely difficult waiting in Tapachula for weeks, sometimes months, to get permission to stay and work in Mexico or continue to the U.S. or Canada.
“They sell us everything more expensive,” said Freddy, 42, a Haitian migrant who arrived in August 2021. “Even the house, the apartment. The rent is much more expensive because you’re a migrant.”
Freddy is one of two Creole translators working in Tapachula to help others through the Mexican immigration process.
“Most of them, you know, have been here for eight month, one year, so if you have no documents, you are not able to go to school, to get proper health care, you have nothing,” he said. “It’s like they tell you here: You are not a person.”
For parents of young kids, Freddy said, securing a safe place to sleep or even finding their next meal are daily challenges. And enrolling in school isn’t an option until their documents are in order.
“Not even 5% of migrant kids go to school,” Freddy said.
Haiti has seen more than its share of political and environmental disasters in the past year, including the assassination of Prime Minister Jovenel Moïse and an enormous earthquake, quickly followed by tropical storm Grace. An earlier wave of Haitian migration to South America was spurred by a 2010 earthquake that displaced more than 1.5 million people.
In southern Mexico, Haitian migrants face extreme xenophobia and racism from locals. Many Black immigrants say they face discrimination when looking for jobs, housing and immigration services. They also say Mexican officials help migrants from Spanish-speaking countries navigate the complex immigration system.
Officials in Tapachula defended the government’s treatment of Black migrants. They said the system is simply overwhelmed and lacks resources, including Creole translators.
Last November, the Mexican government held a conference on the mistreatment of migrants, sponsored by COMAR, in which it denounced racism and xenophobia aimed at migrants.
“People in transit have historically faced prejudices and stigmas that have caused the normalization of false beliefs that are an attempt to justify them receiving unequal treatment and injustice,” the commission said in a news release. “Their vulnerable situation increases because of the language and attitudes of xenophobia that they experience in this country.”
The news release said the government, and COMAR specifically, is committed to eradicating stereotypes, prejudices, and stigmas against migrants – through training and education.
In mid-July, COMAR official Cinthia Perez Trejo told Cronkite News in an email there is “no difference in treatment” for migrants seeking refugee status. Perez noted “procedures within the office of the Secretary of Governance of Mexico for sanctioning any public official who commits such acts.”
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides legal aid and other resources to some migrants, depending on their vulnerability. That office has said it
is adding Creole interpreters, scheduling and facilitating appointments with COMAR, and building a labor integration program to alleviate some of the pressure.
We’re sitting in the small chapel outside Casa del Migrante Scalabrini Albergue Belén, a shelter that has exceeded its 150-bed capacity. It’s midday, and cots are strewn about
the chapel floor and backpacks full of clothes fill the pews. Several families sit under the chapel roof in the rain.
Nati, 28, of Haiti, has been in Tapachula for nine months awaiting documents. She and her family were denied humanitarian visas in December, and had to start the application process over again. Those visas would have cleared them for travel through Mexico.
“It was difficult at COMAR because of so much waiting, they gave me a negative result. It was very difficult for us. … It’s like we are here with nothing because we have nothing, because we are without papers.” Nati said.
“When a Black person goes to get help, they don’t give it to you, and if you’re white, they do give it. I’ve asked UNHCR for help three times, all three times they’ve told me no.”
Nati, her husband, Panchi, and 2-year-old daughter Ana spent two years in Brazil before traversing the Darién Gap, the extremely dangerous jungle between Colombia in South America and Panama in Central America.
“We encountered many things, a lot of danger to get here,” she said. “In all the countries it was hard, but here it is the most difficult – everything takes longer. … This country has been the hardest. We have passed through ten countries and had the most difficulty here in Mexico. They (children) don’t understand that to get here we have come far, we have been in the jungle, in the rain, risked our lives – they don’t understand this.”
Nati and her family want to make it to Tijuana, south of San Diego, but all they’ve been able to do is wait and watch as others, mostly Central Americans, pass through the shelter.
“When you’re here you have to wait, appeal a case for another year – that’s going to be two years, and wait a year just to be told no. … It’s unfair,” she said.
In March, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
(known by his initials AMLO) visited Tapachula. As a couple hundred migrants protested outside the news conference tent, AMLO presented a plan to address the crisis by stimulating the economies of the countries of origin. An immediate solution to the mass of refugees sleeping in public parks wasn’t mentioned.
AMLO did commit to giving out 950 humanitarian visas to refugees (a status that takes months to achieve), but the National Institute of Migration and the U.N.’s humanitarian aid offices continue to draw crowds by the early hours of the morning, as thousands of refugees demand action.
All remain without work or clearance to leave the city; otherwise, they could be arrested and detained. Nati said she’s left with no options.
“All I can do is wait, and wait for them to give me another result,” she said.
Freddy said he and other Haitian refugees will be continuing to work together over the next few years to help one another to navigate daily challenges and parents
detained at the migrant detention center known as Siglo XXI.
“We don’t want kids keep leaving on (their) own because a parent (is) in jail in Siglo XXI, we want kids able to go to school, so somehow we have to keep fighting,” he said.
Carlos said he’s hopeful for his future, with more opportunities for education in Tapachula than in Honduras.
The shelter where he stays has a minischool with a teacher who teaches kids and adults throughout the week.
“Personally, my goal is, first of all, to be with my parents. Second, finish the school cycle, go to high school and then study a trade,” Carlos said.
Until he reunites with his father, he’ll be in his room.
“In my opinion,” he said, “it is better to know people from afar. That is, to see them and how they behave. See them as they are and not interact so much with them. Because in my experience, in my life, I have had quite a few people who have hurt me.”
Despite stacked odds and untenable delays, young adults and child migrants in Tapachula have no choice but to remain resilient, still waiting and hoping to make it out of the city.
By Jennifer Sawhney Aug. 10, 2022
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Each night, Eduardo Rojas sleeps on flattened cardboard boxes over sand-colored dirt in this city of 350,000 near the border with Guatemala.
He has been sleeping in Parque Bicentenario for more than six weeks as he waits to continue on his journey north to seek asylum in the U.S.
Rojas, 21, who’s from Venezuela, said the park is better than staying at an uncomfortable shelter where there are rules about coming and going. And renting a place is not an option.
“We don’t have money. What I had, I spent,” he said. “So I have to stay here in the streets because here there’s no work, there’s nothing.”
Rojas is traveling with fellow Venezuelans he met crossing the dangerous Darién Gap, a wild
and lawless stretch of jungle that straddles the border of Colombia and Panama. All had similar stories about why they left home to seek their American dream: There’s no future in Venezuela.
For them and tens of thousands of migrants from all over the globe who’ve passed through Tapachula in recent years, it’s supposed to be a temporary stop. They never expected to stay long, never thought they’d have to find shelter here for weeks or even months. And
Tapachula, an old city in a state that is among Mexico’s poorest, never expected to have to house them.
The city of more than 350,000 permanent residents is only about 20 miles from the Guatemala border, and it has a long history as a gateway to Mexico and the United States. Nearly 90,000 people applied for asylum in Tapachula in 2021, a status that would allow them to receive public benefits and either settle in Mexico or continue heading north. Joining the stream of humanity are tens of thousands of migrants intent on reaching the U.S. or Canada.
Nearly 60% of Tapachula residents lived in poverty in 2020, and 60,000 lived in extreme poverty, according to a 2020 government report. The city has difficulty supporting its own residents, let alone migrants seeking basic care.
“Be aware that Tapachula was a city that was poor, that was forgotten, that was behind with respect to many things before the migrant crisis” began in 2019, said Yamel Athie a psychologist and activist for Yo Te Cuido Tapachula (I Take Care of You Tapachula), an aid group that serves the poor regardless of migratory status.
Considering the dire situation, why must migrants stay in Tapachula?
There is a simple answer: asylum applicants are required to stay in the city where they’ve applied.
Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados, or COMAR –the government agency that handles migrant cases – has been overwhelmed with applicants and Tapachula’s housing market has reflected those waves.
In 2021, Mexico reached a record high of more than 130,000 people applying for asylum. In December that led to major housing concerns in Tapachula, where the bulk of the applications were filed. There
were reports of people renting roofs and patios, overwhelmed shelters, and thousands of people living at the city’s Olympic Stadium in unsanitary conditions.
“We’ve never lived what we’re living through now,” Athie said. “It’s just that Tapachula is like the house of a low-income family
humanitarian groups could provide to migrants.
UNHCR, UNICEF, Jesuit Refugee Services, Médecins du Monde and other international organizations are working to fill gaps in providing necessary services to migrants. Access to health services, legal guidance, toiletries, wash stations,
who, from one day to the next, is obligated to open its doors for a whole community.”
In the first three months of 2022, 65% of applications seeking asylum in Mexico were filed in Tapachula – 19,288 people, according to COMAR.
Government funding to help migrants is inadequate to keep up with the steady influx. Adding to the lack of resources, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced in February 2019, that his government would no longer fund nonprofit NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in Mexico, which severely limited the scope of work that local
food and water are just some of the needs NGOs are working to meet.
UNICEF, for example, set up a few hand washing and shower stations in Tapachula, and it provides toiletry bags to shelters with toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap and other necessities for migrants.
But the most difficult challenge could be providing places for migrants, including many families with children, to live. In Tapachula, local shelters are crucial to providing free food and housing for migrants who must stay in the city as they await the next steps of their migration. But there are only a few shelters.
Migrants who live in Parque
Bicentenario must rely on a few water taps city officials periodically turns on and off, and jerry-rigged electrical lines to charge their cellphones.
“Between the international community and projects that we have in mind,” said Roberto Fuentes, the general secretary of the Tapachula General Council, a local government body, on the migrants living on the streets, “we have tried to channel this to other institutions that can support them (migrants) and keep them moving. But in the street we cannot do anything for them.”
Migrants have dramatically reshaped Parque Bicentenario. On Google Maps, a snapshot from August 2012 shows a park
with green grass, shorter trees and a roofed area on one side that includes 15-foot-tall kiosks for small businesses. Visitors could sit at round tables and benches near the shops to relax and enjoy the tranquility.
Nearly 10 years later, some of the kiosks are gone and those that remain are empty, supplanted by tents where migrant families sleep. These families, many with small children, congregate under the roof. In other areas of the park, adults sleep under trees that have grown wide enough to offer some protection from the sun and sometimes the rain. Some sleep on the benches, others lean against the walls of an adjacent cathedral.
The park offers one protection –
freedom to move in a place where local officials usually don’t detain them.
Migrants with money might be able to afford a place to rent. Others choose to stay at shelters that offer a roof, some food and additional services, but their daily movement can be monitored and often is limited.
Tapachula has three shelters specifically intended for migrants: Albergue Belén, Jesús el Buen Pastor and Hospitalidad y Solidaridad. The shelters offer varying levels of services and accommodations, but residents often have less freedom to come and go.
Also available are Albergue Ejercito de Salvacion A.C. and two shelters that collaborate with DIF, which is Mexico’s child and family protection agency: Albergue Infantil la Esperanza and the Albergue Temporal Para Menores Migrantes. Unaccompanied minors are placed at shelters run by DIF.
This shelter, on the northeast side of Tapachula, is reserved for families with children. It’s run by the local Roman Catholic diocese of the same name, although it was previously
Belén can house up to 600 migrants, but when the population exceeds 400, accommodations become less comfortable, said the shelter’s main administrator, Juan Carlos Cañaveral.
The shelter employs 15 people full time and provides a small school, psychological services, a generalpractice doctor, a kitchen run by the migrant residents, 24-hour security and lawyers. For the most part, many of the migrants’ basic needs are taken care of on the premises, Cañaveral said, and as such, the shelter has a “semi-open door policy.”
are assigned rooms within one wing of the main campus. Beds are limited, and when Cronkite News visited in March, about 200 guests were using sleeping pads.
Kionmy Garcia, 39, from Maracay, Venezuela, had arrived at the shelter two nights earlier with his two sons, 11 and 13. Together they slept on a pad near an open-air chapel on the men’s side of the shelter.
Garcia intended to go to COMAR the next day to fill out his paperwork.
Migrants staying at the shelter can stay as long as needed if they apply for asylum through COMAR within the first three days of their arrival. Otherwise, they can only stay three days and two nights, but some have stayed as long as six months, Cañaveral said.
Of the three migrant shelters, this one provides the most robust services, though Cañaveral noted it needs a pediatrician, food that fulfills the nutritional needs of small children and more beds.
Garcia, sitting on a plastic chair next to his sons, said he misses the food from Venezuela. He said he hadn’t stayed in many shelters along the way, and the previous three weeks he stayed in the parks with his sons. But to get beyond Tapachula, he, like so many others, has to apply for asylum with COMAR and then wait for his request to be processed.
administered by the Catholic Scalabrini order, which assists migrants.
In 2021, Belén started turning away single men because of concerns about the safety of children. It does not take in unaccompanied children, who are transferred to DIF’s shelters.
In March, 350 people were at the shelter, 140 of whom were children.
“Yes, they can leave, but only to do their (documentation) procedures, to the store, to do some personal activities,” Cañaveral said, adding that the decision was made by the diocese out of safety concerns voiced by neighbors. “But the majority of the time, the people are staying here 24 hours.”
Albergue Belén’s sleeping quarters are separated by gender. LGBTQ+ migrants
“If I could advance, the rest is nothing,” Garcia said of the journey ahead.
Garcia, who came through Colombia, the Darién Gap and Central America, now waits for this clearance so he can finally reach the U.S.
The choice to leave Venezuela was his; the choice to leave Tapachula is out of his hands for now.
Near the southwestern outskirts of the city is Jesús el Buen Pastor, one of the longest-running shelters for migrants in Tapachula. Close to the shelter’s bright blue entrance is a life-size statue of Jesus Christ, which juts from the wall and is caged in metal bars and wire. People mill about the entrance, which is always guarded.
Buen Pastor has a capacity of 800, but about 1,000 people are staying there, said Herbert Bermudez, a migrant from El Salvador who has been at the shelter for nearly a year and assumed a leadership role.
Founded in the 1990s by Olga Sanchez, Buen Pastor originally was a shelter for migrants who’d been injured on La Bestia, a train that once bisected Tapachula and tempted many migrants to hitch a free but dangerous ride north.
During the day, guests are allowed to leave and return only once – and many choose to leave. But as dinner time approaches, the passageways swell with guests waiting for their free bowl of black beans before
they retire for the night behind the shelter’s locked door on the mats on the tile floor.
In El Salvador, Bermudez said, he owned a construction company whose success caught the eye of local mareros – gangsters – and he became the target of extortion. He fled north through Guatemala and arrived at Jesús el Buen Pastor at the end of April 2021.
The night Bermudez arrived, he was rained on as he slept on a pad in the open courtyard. He resolved to use his skills to lead construction and remodeling projects at the shelter as payment for his accommodations.
Residents can stay a maximum of three months if they don’t help out at the shelter, and it only has so many jobs to fill. Some residents monitor the comings and goings of other guests. Some tend to the kitchen. Others help gather and break down firewood. Some join Bermudez to work on construction projects.
“I’m constructing with the idea that this place will have more space for women and children,” Bermudez said. “It’s been days since I started it, but the funds ran out and that’s where it’s stopped.”
He estimates that the shelter, which primarily relies on donations, will need 150,000 to 200,000 pesos – about $7,500 to $10,000 – to finish a second floor.
“Sometimes we arrive at the point where we don’t have enough (money) for the flour to make the tortillas for the people,” he said.
The water well they rely on is running dry and water needs to be rationed. Propane is expensive, so guests use firewood to cook food in an open-air kitchen near the back of the shelter.
Bermudez wants to add a mini hospital to provide better medical care.
“But they’re only plans, right, because money first. That’s the most important,” he said. “It would be a dream come true.”
Two medics are available full time Monday through Friday to address health needs. For education, Buen Pastor offers two-hour classes three days a week.
Migrants who previously stayed there complained about the crowding and poor food. They also objected to being expected to buy
goods from the on-site store, which made no sense for those without money or work permits.
The Escobar-Rivas family from Honduras stayed at Jesús el Buen Pastor their first three nights in Tapachula. They stay at Parque Bicentenario now.
Juan José Escobar, 43, said the family left the shelter because of questions about their kids’ safety there. He and his wife, Kenia Rivas, 33, have four children, ages 4, 6, 8 and 10. They motivate him to keep living in the park and to patiently wait for their paperwork to be processed.
“It’s for the children. For oneself, you cannot, you’re too old,” Escobar said. “But you make the effort so that they have – that they will experience other new things tomorrow. So that they can have a good education to move forward. That’s why you do it. Because, more than anything, it’s for the children.”
On the road toward the airport, about a 10-minute car ride south of town, lies Hospitalidad y Solidaridad A.C., the newest shelter for migrants in Tapachula.
Accel Emadiel Ruiz Mencias, 18, from Honduras, was staying at Hospitalidad y Solidaridad with his mother, siblings and aunt.
“It’s very comfortable to be here. The beds are also good,” said Ruiz Mencias, leaning against a plastic chair with his legs spread out and his hands folded between. His feet were halfway into faded black Puma slides.
He said his family fled Honduras after gang members threatened them multiple times, including dumping a corpse at their home.
Since arriving in Tapachula, they
have lived in multiple spaces in the eight months: first on the streets, one night at the main immigration detention center, a stint at Jesús el Buen Pastor and a month in a rented house, thanks to aid from UNHCR.
Now they’re at Hospitalidad y Solidaridad, which has a capacity of 300, with separate housing for men, women and children, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Most remain about 45 days, but some have stayed as long as six months. Migrants must be actively seeking asylum, said Angélica González, head of liaison and advocacy coordination for the shelter.
“It’s calm, and not (just) any person enters,” Ruiz Mencias said.
UNHCR provided the family with a card to help pay for one month’s rent plus food as they awaited the answer to their asylum application. When the card ran out, they asked UNHCR for more help.
“They told us that they couldn’t help us, and there were shelters where we could go to,” Ruiz Mencias said. “So, we thought hard about it and asked around to see which was the best. Because this one is the best. And they told us this one. And well, here is really nice. I like it.”
Guests can come and go as they please, but Ruiz Mencias prefers to stay in.
Each person is assigned to a team that assists with upkeep, which includes cooking, serving food and cleaning the grounds. Ruiz Mencias wakes up at 7 a.m. to clean the men’s restrooms and his own room. After breakfast, the team cleans the school, theater and one other building before lunch. He enjoys having things to do.
He goes to school, which also keeps him happily occupied.
Classes are divided into four age groups, with each group receiving six hours of instruction per week from one instructor.
“When the children leave, we give them a certificate that does not have official validity,” said Fernanda Acevedo, who oversees the general coordination of the shelter. “But it has worked so that when the children leave the shelter, in certain cases the professors call us and (we say) ‘Oh, they took so many hours on this project.’ So, yes, it has helped.”
As of March, Ruiz Mencias and his family’s asylum and residency had been approved. They were planning to leave within a few weeks, but the plans weren’t solidified.
The family never wanted to leave Honduras; they weren’t wealthy
but they had enough to live. When they settle in their next place, Ruiz Mencias hopes to go back to school, get a job and help his mom out with the bills.
“Arriving here in Mexico is like starting over from zero. But it’s done. We have to continue now,” he said.
Money determines who rents space in Tapachula.
In December 2021, rumors swirled of migrants paying upwards of 1,000 pesos for a single space in a crowded room, and renting backyard patios or even rooftops.
“The people rented their rooftops,” said Athie, the community activist. “People paid to live on the rooftops. And they covered it with nothing more than plastic. The people charged for that.”
For most migrants, money is scarce, which has led many to peddle a range of items on the streets. Other migrants have family or friends back home who can send them money.
In some instances, UNHCR will pay rent for migrants, but the UNHCR spokesperson in Tapachula, PierreMarc René, did not confirm how much, how frequently and what criteria are used to provide rent assistance.
In March, migrants in Tapachula were paying about 2,000 pesos (roughly $100 dollars) a month for a room in a two-bedroom apartment.
The city government has some role in regulating shelters and governmentrun accommodations, but it has no authority over the private housing market.
“Private accommodation both in hotels and houses … is regulated in the dealings that homeowners have with the same migrants,” said Fuentes of the Tapachula General Council.
On posts and in front of modest houses across the city, homemade signs advertise rooms and apartments for rent.
Some of these spaces are referred to as cuarterillas.
“They are places where they rent rooms,” said Acevedo from Hospitalidad y Solidaridad. “Many times they rent, say it’s a room of 10 people, and for each person they charge 1,000 pesos. It’s not for the room, rather it’s per person.”
Jocelito Laporte, a gay man who left Haiti because he feared for his safety, lives in Las Vegas, a neighborhood not far from the Instituto Nacional de Migración on the city’s west side.
Laporte is a devout Christian who realized that his family and greater community could not accept him for who he is. From Haiti, he went to Argentina, then to Brazil. He arrived in Tapachula on Oct. 14, 2021, after traversing the Darién Gap.
Laporte stayed about a week with a family member of a friend he met in
the jungle, then found a room to rent in a neighborhood called Rosario. He arrived as the city swelled with migrants and housing costs skyrocketed. He said he first rented a space for 3,000 pesos a month in a room shared by five people. He slept on a green blanket folded on the floor.
From there, he shared a room with one other person and paid 2,500 pesos per month. He slept on that same green blanket.
In mid-March, Laporte was living in a two-bedroom apartment with a fellow Haitian migrant who doesn’t know about his sexuality. He pays about 2,000 pesos a month for a single room plus utilities, 500 pesos less than the previous place.
It has a bed – his first since he arrived in Tapachula five months before.
“This is a phase of my life,” said Laporte, who turned to prostitution to make ends meet.
“It’s very sad. This bothers me a lot to do something with someone that
never in my life I could believe would happen,” he said. “But, for the money, (and) out of necessity I need to do some things that are horrible, horrible, you know?”
By mid-April, Laporte had left Tapachula for Aguascalientes, a city in central Mexico, where he works as a waiter and rents a room for 2,500 pesos – 500 more than what he last paid for in Tapachula.
He said he’s happy in Aguascalientes and could stay there for a while, but his dream is to go to the United States.
He is confronted, yet again, with the choice of leaving or staying. This time, however, the circumstances are not as urgent as when he left Haiti. In Aguascalientes he can be open about his sexuality and he has a steady income. Plus, he has the legal documentation that allows him to work and stay in Mexico.
And if he does leave Aguascalientes for the U.S., he’ll face yet another formidable challenge: the U.S. immigration system.
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Of the thousands of migrants who pass through Mexican shelters each year, at least 1 in 3 are children.
Children and teenagers are fleeing north in droves, from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala and a host of other countries. Some come with extended families or older siblings. Others travel with friends, but at least half attempt the journey alone, according to UNICEF.
Young migrants live in stark conditions, often sleeping in
the open air or next to strangers in crowded shelters. Most don’t go to school in Tapachula – where all migrants must wait weeks or months for documents allowing them to continue heading north – because they must earn money for their families or care for younger siblings.
Wendy Pineda, 31, traveled with her children to Tapachula from Venezuela, traversing Panama’s treacherous Darién Gap along the Colombia-Panama border. Despite being one of the most dangerous jungles in the world, the Darién is a regular but highly dangerous route for migrants traveling north from South America. It’s notorious as the scene of rampant sexual violence against women and children.
‘Growing up in trauma’:Heidi Yohana Mejía Umanzor laughs and lies on a bed across from her daughter Tatiana and her niece, Sandra, at the Jesús el Buen Pastor shelter in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 6, 2022. Women and girls face immense risk while migrating to North America. Amnesty International says that for every 10 migrant women and girls who journey north, six will be raped. ( Photo by Taylor Bayly/Cronkite Borderlands Project; audio by Athena Ankrah)
But that was only the first of many challenges for Pineda and her family. In Tapachula, she and her young girls must sleep in a public park, where they are exposed to prostitution and drugs. Medical care is hard to come by, and there’s no money to pay for it. All the while, her children can’t attend school.
“If there was a school system here that could at least orient us, the kids could at least be away from this environment for a little bit,” Pineda said. “It would help us create a new future for them because these children are growing up in trauma.”
Experts say the toll of the journey and residual traumas brought from their home countries put children in particularly vulnerable positions.
Iván Francisco Porraz Gómez, a professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (the College of the Southern Border) whose research has focused on Central American teenage migrants in Tapachula, said many migrant children never had a stable life in their home countries. On the journey, they seek something they’ve never experienced before: a childhood.
“You can’t imagine being in your home place if there is brutal violence nearby, when you coexist with violence, with death and everything else that is possible,” Porraz said. “It’s as if they’re absent from the places where they were born and grew up and they’re searching for a way to recuperate something that they’ve never had before.”
Abril Moreno, who facilitates a therapy group for teenage migrants at the Jesuit Refugee Services office in Tapachula, said her participants arrive with a variety of traumatic life experiences: sexual violence, gender-based violence and gang kidnappings, among others things.
Moreno’s group helps youth migrants work through difficult emotions and offers them a chance to be young and curious again through such activities as music lessons, hands-on crafts and service projects. But working with a young migrant population walks a fine line between addressing the needs of children while also recognizing the adult roles that migrant adolescents – especially those who travel alone – too often are forced to assume.
“I think that even though they’re teenagers,” Moreno said, “they have this goal of telling themselves: ‘I have to wake up and get to another level mentally, make myself do adult things.’ Because some also come alone – the majority.”
Some eventually receive asylum status in Mexico after a bureaucratic wait that can take months. But many minors never even apply for fear of being
detained, according to a report by Kids in Need of Defense and the Fray Matías Human Rights Center.
Meanwhile, children and teens find themselves stuck in southern Mexico, growing up amid a humanitarian crisis they can’t fully comprehend.
At midday on a Wednesday in March, a handful of teenagers crowd around a school table at the Hospitalidad y Solidaridad migrant shelter in Tapachula, watching curiously as their teacher Eva Cruz introduces them to the world of coffee. Cruz teaches them how to look for the distinct “notes” in a batch of coffee and encourages the teens to run their fingers over beans and smell a bag of grounds.
Cindy, a 15-year-old from Honduras, volunteers to be first up when it comes time to pour hot water through a coffee filter to wet the grounds. Gregarious and energetic, she takes her responsibilities seriously, watching intently as the coffee drips into the pot below.
Cindy has also taken on the role of big sister for a new arrival to the shelter, 13-year-old Daniel. For migrant youth, there are many levels of displacement: from a physical place, as well as from family and friends they were forced to leave back home. When they arrive in Tapachula, youngsters often befriend people from other parts of the world and establish camaraderie with migrants from their countries of origin.
“It’s as if we’re brother and sister,” Cindy said. “You see, I never had a younger brother, because I’m the youngest.”
Daniel agreed. “She was the first person that talked to me,” he said. “So I consider her my sister.”
Daniel traveled to Tapachula from Honduras with his family, and Cindy traveled from Honduras with her older brothers, leaving behind many family members. Cindy said she left home so she could earn money to support relatives in Honduras, especially her mother, who requires expensive cancer treatments.
The journey from Honduras through Guatemala was treacherous. She and her brothers trekked through mountains for several days in variable weather, often without food. At border crossings, corrupt officials took the 2,000 lempiras – about $80 – they’d brought with them. When they first arrived in Tapachula, they slept in a park until there was room in a shelter.
Cindy hopes to someday return to Honduras to see her family again. And if she does make it home, she hopes her relatives don’t recognize her as the same person who left.
“When I return to Honduras again, I want to return as a transformed girl,” she said, “something different from what they might think.”
Teenage migrants often feel a sense of responsibility either to family back home or younger siblings traveling with them. But economic drivers rarely are the sole reasons for migrating. In a study by UNICEF and UNHCR on migrants fleeing northern Central America, half of all migrant families seeking asylum in Mexico and an even larger proportion of unaccompanied minors reported fleeing home primarily because of violence, including death threats, extortion and gang recruitment.
Cindy’s “little brother” Daniel escaped Honduras with his family in secret at 4 o’clock one morning after a gang tried to recruit him, which is common among young male migrants from Central America.
“I left because they wanted me to join a gang, and if I didn’t, they were going to kill me and all of my family,” he said. “It was really hard because we had to leave in just two days.”
Carlos, 16, who’s also sheltering at Hospitalidad y Solidaridad, remembered a panic attack that came on after memories surfaced about his escape from Honduras.
“I hadn’t had time to process everything that had happened. Then it hit me, to run away. Not be like a locked up prisoner,” he said. “But now, thank God, I have calmed down.”
Carlos fled Honduras over a fear of extortion related to what he called a misunderstanding between his father and a local gang. After traveling to Tapachula with a 23-year-old cousin, he plans to reunite with family members who already have permanent residency in Mexico.
This wasn’t the first time Carlos dealt with gang threats. A few years ago at school, Carlos said, gangs tried to coerce him into acting as a spy for them. To avoid the pressure, he switched schools.
For Carlos, life was terrifying in Honduras, which he said “has an atmosphere like that of a war.”
After what he went through, Carlos has difficulty trusting people.
“In my opinion, it is better to know people from afar,” he said. “Because in my experience, in my life, I have had quite a few people who have hurt me.”
For another Honduran boy, Jose, 14, who had been at Hospitalidad with his family for a few months already, leaving home felt almost surreal.
“It was new.” he said. “I had to get across the border and go through periods of hunger. It feels like I’m on vacation, just that it’s a permanent vacation. Permanent and unexpected, since I’m not going back to my country and I won’t be able to see my friends again.”
Children who have fled have mixed emotions about returning home.
“I miss it in terms of visiting my relatives, but on the other hand I don’t because there’s this fear that something could happen,” Jose said.
Carlos professed no such misgivings.
“If I could return right now, I’d already be there,” he said.
She doesn’t speak
For Vilma, 36, a mother of two from Guatemala who asked that only her first name be used because of safety concerns, the thought of returning home is out of the
question. She and her children fled their home in January after a sequence of traumatic events that she said included the rape of her daughter, the robbery of money she had been loaned to sustain her family and a subsequent attempt on her children’s lives after she couldn’t repay the loan.
Vilma said they were forced to live in one room for over a month, defecating in a trash bin and unable to step onto the patio for air because they were being monitored by their would-be assassin. Her children still get scared when they hear a motorcycle or car whiz by.
Violence is pervasive on the journey, with sexual violence particularly common among women and girls. Experts say most of the women and girls migrating through Mexico have experienced sexual abuse and violence since childhood. In many cases, they normalize incessant gender-based violence as a coping mechanism. Latin American countries make up more than half the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world, according to the United Nations. Only 2% of genderrelated killings are ever prosecuted.
Vilma’s 13-year-old daughter stared blankly ahead as she waited near her mother. She doesn’t like to talk anymore, Vilma said. Not after the rape.
“She’s quieter,” Vilma said. “She remembers what happened in our country and she doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Still, being in Mexico has improved things for her kids – at least a little.
“My children felt calmer when we entered Mexico because they know that their lives are in danger in our country,” Vilma said. “Arriving here, they’re already a bit calmer. Not 100%, but they’re a little calmer. We can go out in public.”
Unlike Vilma’s two children, many young migrants do not have the support of family to help them escape. Half of all child migrants in Mexican shelters are traveling without parents, one of the highest recorded proportions in Mexico, a UNICEF report said.
The statistics are pegged against them: Amnesty International reported that in 2019, 9 out of 10 unaccompanied youth from Central America that came into contact with Mexican authorities were deported. As of June 2021, Mexican authorities had reported deporting half of all Central American unaccompanied child migrants in their custody.
One unaccompanied minor, Gaby, 17, spends her time in Bicentenario Park. The Honduran teen, who identifies as LGBTQ, perhaps finds some solace in the park, where some of the other migrants visibly buck gender norms, donning bright lipstick or wearing dresses and long hair.
Gaby said she sometimes goes up to five days without eating because she can’t afford food. The park is the only place she can go to.
She left behind a culture that would not accept her, where her life was in jeopardy for being herself. Except for a sister who lives in the United States whom she hopes to reunite with, her family doesn’t love her for who she is, Gaby said.
“My father doesn’t accept me for who I am,” she said. “My siblings don’t love me, they just abuse me. They kick me out of the house, throw me to the streets. I’m forced to go sleep in the parks.”
Gaby fled Honduras after an attack left visible wounds. She kept photos of the wounds on her cellphone to use as proof in her asylum application, but she lost important evidence of the abuse after her phone was stolen during her migration.
But if she returns to Honduras, friends have warned Gaby that she could be murdered. And she isn’t alone. One out of five unaccompanied child migrants from northern Central America report having fled death threats, according to UNICEF and UNHCR.
Still, Gaby knows that there’s a chance she won’t receive humanitarian protections in Mexico, which could mean larger consequences for her.
“The truth is that they could deport me back to Honduras again,” she said, “but I don’t know. And if I go back there, they say that I’m going to be killed.”
Gaby planned to apply for asylum in Tapachula. If she takes such a step, her migration journey could be
significantly altered until she turns 18.
Unaccompanied minors identified by Mexican authorities are sent to government-run shelters, which are segregated by age and gender. According to shelter protocols, at such institutions, adolescent males are separated from their female siblings with no possibility of reunification while they remain there. Unaccompanied minors who identify as transgender are forced to stay in the shelter associated with the gender they were assisgned at birth.
Mexican state shelters for unaccompanied minors have come under criticism from some human rights organizations for allegations of abuse and discrimination, although officials deny the reports. Ivonne Bautista, a child psychologist at Fray Matías Human Rights Center in Tapachula, called the shelters for unaccompanied minors traumatizing for migrant children.
“It’s like a prison. They’ll often see it as: Why am I here? Why won’t they let me leave?” Bautista said. “It can traumatize them, and when they experience trauma, there are other major long-term implications.”
Nora Raquel Soto-Soto, director of the Tapachula office of the National System for Integral Family Development, the
federal agency in charge of shelters for unaccompanied minors, acknowledged that some migrant children do attempt to escape the shelters soon after they arrive. But she said it isn’t because of anything wrong with the way the shelters operate.
“They usually come with the intention of getting further north,” Soto-Soto said. “That’s the reason that they don’t want to be here because there’s someone waiting for them or they’re motivated for some other reason.”
The migrant journey is grueling, and for many young people who migrate unaccompanied, it isn’t their first attempt to leave home. UNICEF and UNHCR report that a quarter of them already have tried to reach Mexico or the United States at least once before.
But whether alone or with family, young migrants who have made it to Tapachula have one purpose: They will continue on, their sights set on the promise of a better life in a place that isn’t the one from which they came.
In a cramped room full of twin-size beds at the bustling Jesús el Buen Pastor shelter in Tapachula, 31-year-old Heidi Yohana Mejía Umanzor watches over her daughter Tatiana, 14, and niece Sandra, 16. She left two younger children, a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, in Honduras, where they are staying with an uncle.
Umanzor’s tight black curls bounce as she describes her two earlier attempts to reach the U.S. after fleeing domestic violence. Umanzor said she’s determined to see her journey to the U.S. through this time, despite the risks.
“They rob you of your belongings. You run the risk that they’ll do harm to you as a woman, whether or not you’re a woman or a man,” Umanzor said. “It’s not easy. But all of this that happened to me – if I manage in the situation that I was in, I will be able to do it. I will make it there.”
The journey, she said, has weighed heavily on Tatiana and Sandra, but the fact they’ve made it this far is enough to keep her moving forward.
“I already made it through all this and I’m still alive, my children are with me. I have to keep going,” Umanzor said.
Tatiana, too, said she’s much happier in Tapachula. At Buen Pastor, she spends her days sleeping and scrolling through Facebook on a phone while her mother works at a nearby cafeteria.
Tatiana doesn’t miss anything about home except her family, especially her younger brother and sister.
“It’s very hard,” she said. “I remember them and know that something could happen to them. I feel a heavy weight in my heart or in my chest. I can feel that they aren’t OK.”
But she’s also grateful to be safe and with her mother, and hopeful that better days lie ahead.
“Thanks to God that we are here again,” Tatiana said. “And that we are OK.”
By Alyssa Marksz Aug. 31, 2022
TAPACHULA, Mexico –
Tapachula’s location near Mexico’s southern border has made it a city of migrants.
“We are a border city that has historically received migrants in different stages and in different ways,” said Roberto Fuentes, general secretary of the city council.
“Those migrations practically formed our city.”
But something has shifted, Fuentes said.
The sound of marimbas still rings through the main square, but now barefoot children from countries all over the world congregate in shaded corners to take refuge from the blazing sun. The bright storefronts of local merchants
are hidden behind the makeshift marketplaces of migrants. Hourslong lines form each day outside overwhelmed government offices as migrants apply for the documents required to find work or continue their journeys north.
According to Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM), the average number of annual migrant encounters in Chiapas state from 2007 to 2014 was 39,000.
This refers to migrants’ encounters with federal migration officials, not individuals – the same migrant could be encountered twice. In 2021, INM recorded 76,333 migrant encounters.
There was a spike in 2015 and 2016, and then another in 2019 before numbers hit a low 28,498 in 2020 because of COVID-19 restrictions.
In the first three months of 2022, Chiapas reported 24,294 migrant encounters, 11,886 more than encountered in those same months in 2021, according to Mexico’s interior ministry.
These data reflect migrant encounters for Chiapas state, of which Tapachula is the largest city and where the vast majority of migrants are registered, processed or detained.
“Even though we’ve always had migration, it has worsened in this crisis because it has become worldwide,” Fuentes said.
Migrants from Central America and Caribbean nations made up 92% of migrants encountered in a mobility tracking survey conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2021.
Of these respondents, 46% said the principal reason for their migration was violence or persecution. 42% cited economic reasons.
“The city is in a state of siege, a state of chaos,” Fuentes said.
According to the IOM survey, 55% of migrants encountered by authorities in Tapachula planned to continue their journey rather than stay in Chiapas.
To stay in Mexico or even travel north, however, migrants must first obtain a humanitarian visa from federal immigration offices
that locals say are understaffed and unprepared for the crisis they’re facing.
“They (Tapachula residents) never expected so much migration all at once,” said Román Mijanga Reyes, a native of the city. “There are migration offices here, but not
enough for so many migrants – and all of the migrants want a prompt solution.”
According to an International Organization of Migration report, 75% of the migrants in Tapachula have been there for more than a month, and frustrations are growing
as migrants begin to feel there is no way out.
“They think that it’s discrimination that they’re not giving them papers quickly,” Reyes said. “Unfortunately, that’s how it is. Politics are slow here. Unfortunately, our processes are slow in general.”
With frustration has come protests and, in some cases, violence. There have been reported physical altercations between immigration officers and migrants, and many downtown merchants reported an anecdotal increase in violence in the city.
“With what they are going through, there are times when these people are aggressive,” said Maibely Zurema Perez Verdugo, an employee at Bissú, a cosmetics store in the heart of Tapachula.
“I understand that they’re coming and going as usual, but it affects us in
many ways,” she said. “Now we try to avoid those who pass by because the same thing happens in the streets. We try not to say anything to them because they can be very aggressive.”
Fuentes, however, said city officials have not observed an increase in violence since 2015, the approximate
beginning of the current influx of migrants in Tapachula.
“They do not go out or attack the people of Tapachula,” Fuentes said. “Even looking at the crime rates in the city – the crimes committed have not worsened due to the migratory presence for the amount of people we have.”
Tapachula has a population of 350,000, not including the thousands of migrants living there.
Crime rates in Tapachula have shifted dramatically over the past five years, according to data from the National System of Public Security.
“79% of the resident population of Tapachula considers it to be an unsafe city, giving the city one of
the highest insecurity perception rates in the country,” an IOM report from early 2021 said.
Data provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography shows that 36% of men and 28% of women older than 18 felt secure in Chiapas state; no data are available at the municipal level.
People who live close to immigration offices or areas where migrants set up their sidewalk businesses also have complaints.
“The locals, well, they have always had a certain tolerance,” Fuentes said. “In the case of the migrants, because of their needs, they have opened up business in certain areas and there has been a clash with the streets that they’re on. They’re overtaking their places.”
José Roberto Cigarroa Silva, an employee at an artisanal shop called Colectivo Xóchitl in the center of Parque Bicentenario – which has become a makeshift campsite for many migrants – said the impact of migration on the local economy is clear.
“There are many complaints about the central park area because the government actually gave a space to the migrants to set up their businesses, which is fair, it is valid,” Silva said. “But obviously, the local people who have public spaces there that they pay for do not like it.”
Not all Tapachula residents are upset with the shift, however.
“There are merchants who are very happy,” Fuentes said. “There are people who rent houses who may be happy.”
According to IOM, 28% of surveyed migrants were renting spaces, with 67% paying an average of $89 U.S. a month.
“The people, in spite of how small this city is, are very, very open,” Fuentes said. “We offer our hands to everyone of any condition, of any nationality, even to our local people.”
Silva said that cultural differences between migrants and locals has led to some tension. Additionally, he said some fear migrants are taking away job opportunities.
“It’s like the migrants are discriminated against a little bit,” Silva said.
“There is more cultural shock here that we do not understand in aspects of language, culture and behavior,” Reyes said.
Fuentes said that the municipal government has provided the most assistance with lodging.
“We have our shelters and above all we focus on women and children who are more vulnerable,” he said.
Silva said that when migrants have issues, he doesn’t think they approach the government for help, but instead rely on human rights
organizations and non-profit, nongovernmental organizations.
“I don’t think it’s the government that has been supporting the migrants as much as it has been the NGOs,” Silva said. “When they suffer, they pick up the phone –
not to call the government, but an authority on the outside.”
Silva said migrants worry that the government will not act or offer support.
Fuentes said that the government was “not equipped to receive” the migrants, but the situation still “has not gotten out of control.”
“We did not expect this,” Fuentes said. “Even so, there are stages where we have shown moments of crisis – there are sudden marches among migrants and there are events that block facilities – but they don’t go out of control.”
Fuentes said he hopes this crisis will bring Tapachula good in the long run.
“We are looking to lay the foundation so that it will be easier for the city to manage in the future,” he said. “We must be prepared to face them (migrants) in a better way in the future with the support of the state, federal and municipal efforts.”
By Geraldine Torrellas/Cronkite News
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Migrants throughout this southern Mexico city are living in crowded conditions, with little access to food and clean water. Many live in parks, where it’s not only difficult to obtain basic necessities, but also to use a restroom.
Others are renting out rooms, staying in shelters – and being detained in the main immigration facility, Siglo 21, where many migrants claim to have been treated poorly.
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Juan Carlos, a gravedigger at Panteón Municipal, the City Cemetery, pointed to the barren plot of dirt beneath his feet.
“I buried 17 people here,” he said, referring to the unclaimed and often unidentified bodies of migrants who died in this city of 350,000, which is a conduit and holding center for migrants heading north from Central America.
The plot was strewn with used menstrual pads and empty chip bags. Unlike the rest of the cemetery, where bright pink and blue mausoleums are adorned with paper flowers and proclamations of devotion from loved ones, there are
no remembrances, no tributes, no grave markers for those buried here.
“We don’t get paid for the bodies we bury down here,” said Carlos, raising his voice to be heard over the squealing of pigs at a makeshift butcher shop on the other side of the cemetery wall.
Because of its location less than 20 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala, Tapachula long has been an entry point for migrants passing through Central America, most of them headed for the United States to claim asylum or risk entering illegally. But in recent years, migrants from across the globe have been delayed and blocked from continuing their journeys north by Mexico’s immigration authorities and the National Guard, partly at the urging of the United States.
And like the migrants who die unidentified and unclaimed in the deserts of Arizona, people are dying in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas – as well as in the streets of Tapachula – adding to an already untenable nationwide problem of identifying murder victims found in mass graves or the remains of other migrants found throughout the country.
In April, the U.N. Human Rights Office reported that unidentified remains of more than 52,000 people – many of them murdered by crime cartels – are lying in mass graves, forensic service facilities, universities, forensic storage and safeguard centers across the country. This “forensic crisis” is playing out in a smaller but no less tragic way in Tapachula.
“We know the process that an unidentified body undergoes; unfortunately, it is very undignified in handling the bodies when they are buried in those (mass) graves,” said Francisco Reyes, manager of the Casa del Angel Funeral Home. “The entire process of identifying bodies is very scarce, since it (the government) does not have all the personnel or equipment necessary.”
There is an apparent lack of protocol for the treatment of bodies after they leave the medical examiner. The local government contracts funeral homes for burials but there is little regulation. If the person is unidentified or unclaimed by family the body can end up in a mass grave,
“Each mass grave can hold up to 10 bodies,” Reyes said, “they are … dragged depending on the state they are in, and they are thrown into the grave without sensitivity, as if they were garbage bags.”
Across the city, at Panteón Jardin – Garden Cemetery –gravedigger Cristan Cruz Medina, a migrant himself, said migrants deserve to be treated with at least a bit of dignity when they reach their final resting places.
“I feel it helps them a lot,” he said. “Apart from the fact that they are no longer, how should I say it, laying there as if they are animals. We are giving them a place where they will turn to dust normally, rather than having animals arrive and destroy them. In my opinion, it is better to have them there, buried, their bones turning to dust normally as they should rather than rather than having them disintegrate here and there.”
which is said to be common practice at local cemeteries. Gravediggers said some of those burial plots were reopened at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the victims of the disease were piled on top of the remains of earlier migrants.
Mass graves at the Panteón Jardin in Tapachula, Mexico, were reopened to bury COVID-19 victims. “The first migrants got buried low and then the ones that are put on top are the ones who died of COVID,”
Medina, 24, fled El Salvador when he was 16, made it as far as Oaxaca state and returned home. But tending livestock didn’t pay enough, and at 18 he left again to try and make it to the U.S. in hope of finding steady work. Traveling mostly by foot, he made it as far as Tapachula, where he has lived for six years, settling down with a girlfriend and digging graves for the past two years. He considers himself fortunate to have completed his journey by choice rather than by death.
“That could be me,” he said, pointing with a rusty machete to a dirt pile along a cemetery road, yards from the regular cemetery plots.
Even those migrants whose names are known to authorities and whose families were able to say their goodbyes often don’t receive dignified burials.
Samson Saint Rosier is buried in Panteón Jardin. He and his wife, Juverson, two sons and his sister-in-law, traveled from Haiti through eight countries, with the U.S. as their ultimate destination, before he died in Tapachula in November 2021. The family now is in Coahila state, still hoping to continue north.
In late March, Juverson Saint Rosier told her story via text transcribed by her sister-in-law. She said Samson used to tell her “if God allowed him into the U.S., he would trust him to make our boys successful.”
Falling in and out of poverty, the Saint Rosiers were driven by hopes for their childrens’ futures and the fear of being returned to Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, which has been plagued by natural disasters, government corruption, gang violence and political assassinations.
“I suffered a lot when I was a child, I will never want my child to suffer, too, that’s why it’s the first thing that pushes me to leave Haiti,” Saint Rosier said.
Of the two years they traveled, she said, the dark week spent in the treacherous Darién Gap will never leave her mind.
A 60-mile-wide no man’s land between Colombia and Panama, the Darién Gap has become a common route for migrants traveling from South America to the U.S., despite the forbidding terrain, wildlife and merciless bandits. During that week, Saint Rosier said, she felt like a character in a movie. She helplessly witnessed the sexual assault of other migrants, and the near-drowning of her sister. She watched robbers empty the pockets of her husband, after striking him over the head with a revolver.
He traveled for weeks with increasing swelling and pain in his head and stomach before he died in a Tapachula hospital.
Reflecting on her husband’s death, Saint Rosier cited the Bible verse Hebrews 9:27: “Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.” She said she is comforted knowing Samson was so caring he will go to heaven and she will see him again.
Unable to stay in Tapachula with Samson’s body, the family had to mourn on the move. Navigating travel with no money and a devastating loss, Saint Rosier said, they trust God will help them cross the U.S. border, and that Samson will continue to guide them.
“It was hard to leave but we couldn’t just stay behind,” said Juverson, in a separate phone interview, with her son translating. “There’s no work in Tapachula, so we just said our goodbyes and left it with God.”
They reached Juarez, a city categorized as one of the most dangerous for migrants, across the Rio Grande from El Paso,Texas. The family’s dream persists. After losing her husband, Saint Rosier worries about being deported back to Haiti and having to start over again.
Others who’ve lost loved ones along the migrant trail have been able to bury them in the places they grew up. But the pain is no less.
In El Salvador, Lilian Alvaregaz visits the graves of her daughter and granddaughter in a local cemetery – Leydi Alvaregaz and her daughter, Fatina, died in an accident while traveling north in a migrant caravan in December 2021. Their bodies were shipped home with the help of the Salvadoran embassy.
When her daughter and granddaughter left the home she shared with them to migrate to the U.S., Lilian Alvaregaz was convinced she would never feel greater pain.
“The last time I saw them was the day they left, leaving a great void in my heart and soul,” she said, holding back tears as she typed Leydi and Fatina’s stories on Whatsapp, in hopes their stories will not be forgotten.
By Geraldine Torrellas/Cronkite News
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Every day, people on both sides of the Suchiate River, which separates Guatemala and Mexico, float across or wade through the water to eke out a living. They do a number of things, such as transporting goods, and rely on one another economically. The relationship between these towns is similar to that of “Ambos Nogales,” the cities in Arizona and Sonora along the U.S.-Mexico border.
By Mikenzie Hammel Sept. 13, 2022
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Cristofer Josue Rivera, 9, hasn’t been to school since he and his father left Honduras more than two years ago. His father, Arnol Sorto, said they traveled to Tapachula in search of a better life, whether in Mexico or the United States.
Cristofer, who wants to be a firefighter, went to school in
Honduras, but once he started the journey, it was difficult to enroll in schools along the route.
Cristofer said he misses his teachers, although he now can’t remember their names.
Arnol Sorto said he grew up working to pay for his own schooling because his mother couldn’t afford it. He wants his Cristofer’s life to be different.
“Growing up, I would like a better
level of education, good for him,” Sorto said. “He is going to decide what he would like to study. … Like everyone, I want the best for him…a house, everything.”
Cristofer is one of many kids in this city of 350,000 near the Guatemala border who struggle to go to school because of their migrant status.
Migrant children in Tapachula spend more time in the city and its few shelters than the system is designed for – often more than
seven months – and they face many barriers to education, including having to move from shelter to shelter, lacking proper documents to enroll in local schools and needing to work to help support their families. The situation is the same at other locations along the trails migrants use to make their way north from Central America.
Some shelters offer limited schooling, but most facilities are too overwhelmed to accommodate everyone for long periods of time.
But on the far northern edge of Tapachula, one school is hoping to make a difference, despite the huge odds against it.
Each year, thousands of migrant children, with or without families, arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum. Historically, under U.S. law, they have been allowed to enter the country while their cases were decided. They come from Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador and many other countries.
Gang violence, civil unrest, natural disasters and domestic violence are just a few of the reasons migrants all over the world seek asylum in the U.S., but a backlog of nearly 1.6 million asylum cases dims hope of obtaining a better future.
The wait times, already years long, have been stretched even more by the COVID-19 pandemic, now
reaching 4.5 years. And that’s just the average time for asylum seekers to be heard in U.S. court.
During the Migrant Protection Protocols – known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy – implemented by the Trump administration as a response to the pandemic and continued by the Biden administration, asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their cases were being processed, regardless of nationality. In August, the Biden administration won a court battle allowing it to end the program. Asylum seekers again are allowed to wait in the United States for their cases to be resolved.
But many who have not made it to the U.S. border, whose cases are complicated, or who haven’t yet disenrolled from “Remain in Mexico,” have to wait in areas like Tapachula and have little-tono access to basic education for their children. Children make up almost one-third of all migrants and asylum-seekers waiting in Tapachula for Mexico’s permission to move north.
In 2019, Mexico reported a 131% increase of migrant children in the country. With more processing
delays resulting in overcrowded shelters some kids wait up to eight months to receive a decision on whether they receive assistance from COMAR, Mexico’s refugee agency.
Kesia Yairanieth Chirinos Báez, her husband and two children, Román, 12, and Karina, 9, had been staying at the Jesus el Buen Pastor shelter for less than a week when they spoke to reporters in March.
The family was escaping political persecution in Venezuela after they were forced from their home for criticizing the government. Chirinos Baez said she worked many odd jobs in Venezuela but never made more than $5 per month, barely enough to buy a week’s worth of beans and rice for her family.
Neither of her children has ever been to school, but they have aspirations.
Karina said she wanted to be a ballerina and would love to learn how to read. Román said he wants to be a police officer but couldn’t pinpoint his favorite school subject.
“I don’t know … anything. School is beautiful,” he said in Spanish.
Migrant children often are behind in their education and affected by the rigors of their journey. Many, experts say, should be receiving specialized attention. Studies also show that “trauma informed” schools can reduce the negative impact of traumatic experiences on children.
But any school, much less one that might offer specialized trauma therapy, is hard to find for migrant families who have suffered horribly along their journey.
This is something the Chirinos Baez family knows all too well.
Chirinos Báez said that on their journey to Tapachula, they crossed jungles where family members
suffered injuries, struggled with diarrhea and other health issues, and witnessed fellow migrants die.
“But they’re used to it,” she said when explaining why the children don’t seem fazed by this. “They’ve seen death before.”
In 2018, the family survived a massacre in the mines where Chirinos Báez and her husband worked. The ownership of the mines changed, and Venezuelan employees lost their jobs. After refusing to leave, she said the government sent in armed men to remove the trespassers – one way or another.
Chirinos Báez remembers having a gun pointed to her face, and the only reason she survived was because the gunman saw she had children.
“He just told us to run.”
Parents who want to enroll their children in the local school system often are stymied by the required documentation, such as
identification cards and school records from their home countries. Many families, and especially unaccompanied minors, do not carry such papers.
“Students have access to education, but it’s important to have documents,” said Mitzi Gómez, protection assistant of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Tapachula.
“Sometimes they get robbed of their documents, but schools are supposed to welcome them, and they take a test to see their level of reading and writing.”
But according to local activists, some migrants – especially Haitians – are being denied services, even by federal organizations.
Freddy Castillo, a Haitain migrant who works closely with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of Black immigrants, said Haitians are getting no educational opportunities.
Castillo and other Haitians allegedly were told they can’t get help because there is too much
demand from other migrants for food, housing and jobs.
“I don’t see our children in school,” Castillo said.
Some Tapachula shelters offer limited education services, but that only covers a fraction of families who need and want their children to be in school.
Buen Pastor has an on-site day care and school area at the back of the shelter, where the walls are painted teal and covered in artwork. In the far corner sits a plastic playground set, much too small for the older children.
Fray Matias de Cordova B.C., an organization that provides resources to displaced women and families, has a children’s play space but does not host formal schooling. The group also cites too much demand and too few resources for not having the capability to educate migrant children.
Another shelter, Hospitalidad y Solidaridad A.C., offers a more formalized version of school for those in the shelter, but the program can only handle 100 kids at a time.
Despite limited opportunities, one school off the beaten path is trying to overcome these obstacles and provide for the children left behind.
La Escuela Primaria Fernando Montes de Oca Rodriguez is located down a rocky, unpaved road in Las Gardenias – one of the last neighborhoods on Tapachula’ north side. Beyond it is mostly jungle.
The school focuses on educating migrant children. It’s the only registered school in Tapachula that does not require paperwork or entrance exams to enroll.
Principal Maria Guadalupe Verdugo Escobar, who has worked at Fernando Montes for four years, said she runs the school based on
what she would want for her own daughter. Her goal is to inspire change in others.
“My objective is for more schools and institutions to be aware of the function we have. Likewise, seeing that the school is accepting kids, I would also like the others to do so,” Escobar said.
“In this case, our school will be known as one with open arms. We do not reject.”
Escobar said she doesn’t require documents because it would exclude children who need the education and caring environment.
“Unfortunately, not all teachers have the patience, the time and above all, love towards the children,” she said.
Two years ago, a team from Fernando Montes school traveled around in caravans to reach kids, but they couldn’t meet the demand, she said.
In Mexico, the average class size is about 20 students. In the caravans, classes could hold as many as 45 at a time, the majority of them being Central Americans or Haitian.
The school has since moved away from teaching caravans and now recruits migrant children by knocking on doors and searching the streets for kids in need.
Escobar reports that enrollment is increasing again since the pandemic eased but teachers still struggle with scant resources and instructional materials. Fernando Montes school requested funds from the government, as they are a registered school in the city of Tapachula, but the only response they have received so far is that there’s nothing to give.
“I can only ask for change, but here, these are my babies. It doesn’t matter whether they’re 10, 15 years old, they will always be my kids,” Escobar said. “I don’t care if your dad is an assassin, I don’t care if your mom is a radical. What I care about is you. You are the future of tomorrow.”
In the present, educating migrants in Tapachula remains an enormous challenge despite the best efforts and intentions of Escobar and others.
By Taylor Bayly Sept. 22, 2022
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Migrants have gathered in the thousands in Tapachula, seeking to apply for asylum or humanitarian visas to stay in Mexico or continue their journeys north. Protests outside Mexico’s immigration office have become more frequent as applications bog down and migrants struggle with limited access to social services and basic needs.
A young man sits clutching his immigration paperwork in front of a National Guard barricade that separates migrants from the National Migration Institute office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 7, 2022. Tens of thousands of people, from Africa to Central and South America, have arrived at Mexico’s southern border seeking asylum from persecution, political instability and a lack of economic opportunities. Immigration policies have left people stranded and vulnerable as the massive backlog of immigration and asylum applications only grows. (Photo by Taylor Bayly/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
An official with National Migration Institute reaches to inspect a migrant’s paperwork on March, 8, 2022. Refugees often wait months for their scheduled appointment at INM, where immigration officials will determine whether they have sufficient evidence to make an asylum claim. Only a small fraction of those waiting are granted an interview each day, and they aren’t allowed to continue traveling north without the documents.
A woman rests her head on her paperwork and a metal barrier that prevents refugees from spilling into the street outside the federal immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March, 8, 2022. There are a handful of migrant shelters in Tapachula, but occupancy requirements and overcrowding restricts access and forces many to sleep on the streets or in parks. Those who can afford apartments face rent hikes meant to price out migrants, especially Haitians. Migrants who choose to work under the table without permits are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers. (Photo
Reino Fuentes arrived in Tapachula, Mexico, in early February, having fled from persecution in Venezuela with his wife and young son. In 2021, Human Rights Watch concluded that Venezuela is facing a “severe humanitarian emergency, with millions unable to access basic healthcare and adequate nutrition.” The same report noted that Venezuelan authorities and security forces targeted opponents through extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances and torture. Photo taken March 8, 2022.
Daniela Cisneros and her young child, Mesias, rest outside the National Migration Institute office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. Most migrants here will seek entry to the United States, and many will apply for asylum or refugee status. According to the Migration Policy Institute, nearly 12,000 people were granted refugee status in the U.S. in 2020, which represents a tiny fraction of the current 1.7 million immigration cases backlogged in U.S. courts. (Photo by Taylor Bayly/ Cronkite Borderlands Project)
Protesters walk toward a barricade of Mexican National Guard members on March 4, 2022, outside immigration offices in Tapachula, Mexico. Some shout and make threatening gestures, others drop to their knees and raise their arms in a sign of nonviolence. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador formed the National Guard in late May 2019, to replace the federal police force, which was largely seen as corrupt. López Obrador then quickly deployed thousands of guardsmen to Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Human rights organizations criticized the mobilization, with Amnesty International arguing that the deployment of some Mexican security forces coincides with “an increase in human rights violations and in levels of violence.” (Photo by Taylor
A migrant lobs a chunk of concrete at national guardsmen in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 4, 2022. Migrants dislodged pieces of loose concrete from a sidewalk and bashed them against a curb to break it into smaller pieces. Guardsmen threw the pieces back at the migrants; it wasn’t clear whether anyone required medical attention. (Photo
Migrants in Tapachula, Mexico, attempt to reach a consensus on the strategy of the protest on March 4, 2022, with some migrants trying to restrain others throwing chunks of concrete at security forces. Many of the migrants are from Haiti, which was devastated by a magnitude seven earthquake in 2010 – forcing thousands to relocate to Central and South America. Since the loosening of COVID-19 travel restrictions and the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, many Haitians –both in Haiti and abroad – are traveling north seeking humanitarian visas and asylum status. Haitians made up nearly 40% of all migrants seeking protection in Mexico in 2021. (Photo by Taylor Bayly/ Cronkite Borderlands Project).
At the height of the demonstration in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 4, 2022, protesters hold a stainless steel chain to form a line in front of the National Guard barricade. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced that migrants traveling north through Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala would be required to first apply for asylum in those countries before being eligible for asylum in the U.S. The policy drew criticism from advocacy groups, as these countries lack the capacity to shelter migrants. The Biden administration ended the agreements in February 2021.
Migrants in Tapachula, Mexico, yell at members of the national guard in a tense confrontation on March 4, 2022. According to Human Rights Watch, it’s common for Mexican cartels, criminals and “sometimes police and migration officials to … rob, kidnap, extort, rape or kill” migrants traveling through Mexico. Many migrants in Tapachula allege that Mexican immigration officials accept bribes from migrants to fast track asylum applications.
A member of Mexican security forces in Tapachula, Mexico, braces her shield as the demonstration escalates on March 4, 2022. More than two-thirds of all refugee applications filed in Mexico come from Tapachula, where the lack of access to shelter, health care, economic opportunities and safety leave many desperate and vulnerable. (Photo by Taylor Bayly/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
As brush fires die and the migrant demonstration ends on March 4, 2022, members of the National Guard continue to defend the immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico. Two weeks later, Tapachula’s immigration office suspended its operations after staff members were injured during a violent altercation with migrants, according to a UNICEF report. As of March 19, there were an estimated 30,000 people in Tapachula applying for asylum or humanitarian visas. (Photo by Taylor Bayly/Cronkite Borderlands Project)
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