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As the United States begins to enforce border rules making it more difficult for migrants to seek asylum, many will face speedy deportation to Mexico, where they will be vulnerable to criminal gangs and corrupt officials, according to human rights groups.
Mexico’s role as Washington’s enforcement arm to prevent migrants from entering the United States through Mexican territory will become more important with the lifting on Thursday of the Covid-era policy known as Title 42, which prevents the entry of large numbers of migrants at the border and allows US authorities to quickly deport them.
In talks last week with the Biden administration, Mexico said it would accept non-Mexican migrants sent back from the United States under the new rules and would be processed for Mexican asylum.
But if the asylum system in the United States is plagued by backlogs, the situation in Mexico is just as bad, with asylum cases lingering for years without resolution.
And many migrants deported to Mexican cities along the US border face daily terror at the hands of criminal organizations and, in some cases, government agencies similar to Washington to help prevent the flow of migrants at the border, according to human rights. group.
Since President Biden took office in January 2021, there have been nearly 13,500 attacks on people deported to Mexico from the United States or blocked from crossing the border, according to a new report from Human Rights First, an advocacy group.
The report says that, in some cases, Mexican officials have colluded with criminal organizations to extort migrants.
Mexico’s National Institute of Migration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment on the treatment of migrants.
“This country is not a safe country,” Yuri Hurtado, a 26-year-old Colombian migrant, said of Mexico.
He left his country in March with six family members to escape poverty and violence. She spent her days in a migrant shelter near the US border listening to threatening phone messages from members of a criminal group who, Ms. Hurtado, kidnapped his relatives last week while they were on a bus through Mexico.
The shelter where Ms. Hurtado lives, Casa Migrante San Juan Diego, in Matamoros, a northern Mexican city notorious for violence and across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
Ms. Hurtado said the criminal group that held her two sisters, brother-in-law and two nephews, aged 2 and 5, demanded she pay $4,000 to be released or they would start harvesting her organs.
The number was more than Ms. Hurtado said. Local police, he said, did not help him when he tried to file a report, a typical response by authorities, according to migrant rights groups.
“It makes me very afraid of what’s happening at the border and, but I’m also afraid that I’m going to die alone at the border,” he said, adding that he hoped his brother would be released before trying to cross. border.
Stories like Ms. Hurtado’s are not unusual; Criminal groups often impose fees on migrants to travel through Mexico and then kidnap them. More than 2,000 migrants were kidnapped by criminal organizations last year, the Mexican government said last week.
At the same time, migrants are also vulnerable to victimization by Mexican migration authorities.
“The abuses by state officials themselves are systemic,” said Julia Neusner, the lawyer who wrote the Human Rights First report. “We heard hundreds and hundreds of stories from people who suffered direct harm at the hands of these state officials, including kidnapping, rape, sexual assault, robbery, extortion.”
When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office at the end of 2018, he vowed that Mexico would not be used as a cudgel to “do the dirty work” of Washington’s migration policy.
Instead, his administration issued more visas to allow migrants to travel freely to Mexico and to the US border.
But Mr. López Obrador soon discovered, like other Mexican presidents before him, that it was nearly impossible for Mexico to create its own migration policy.
In June 2019, President Donald J. Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Mexico unless Mr. López Obrador stopped thousands of migrants using Mexican humanitarian visas to travel to the United States.
Mr. López Obrador acted quickly, deploying thousands of troops to Mexico’s northern and southern borders to prevent migrants from entering the country or traveling easily to the United States. Mexico’s National Guard, a military police force, is empowered to detain migrants, a power that is largely concentrated in the hands of migration officials.
“The US migration policy has mobilized the Mexican government for its implementation,” Ms. Neusner said. “It’s exporting our own border enforcement.”
The closure of legal routes through Mexico and the road to the United States is forcing more migrants into the hands of ruthless smugglers, rights groups say.
Mexico’s closer alignment with the United States on enforcement also led to a change in the government’s attitude toward migrants, some analysts said.
“The priority is not human rights and development and protection, as it started, but because of the pressure from the United States, arrests, detentions and deportations are prioritized,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, who was the first commissioner of National Mexico. The Migration Institute under Mr. López Obrador until he was replaced by the former head of Mexico’s federal prison system.
“Using the armed forces as your main migration enforcement tool sends a message to migrants, asylum seekers and society that migrants are a threat and should be treated as a security issue, like an invasion,” said Stephanie Brewer, director of Mexico. in the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institute.
“That undermines and undermines protection for physical security,” he added.
At the Casa Migrante San Juan Diego shelter in Matamoros, half a dozen migrants said this week that they or family members had been kidnapped in recent times. They are afraid to come out of their shelters after dark, fearing gangs of criminals who stalk the streets.
The shelter’s director, Jose Luis Elias Rodriguez, said he and his employees have been threatened by criminal groups.
But he promised to continue helping the migrants.
“If we leave, who will help the immigrants?” he asked. “Who gives us a hand when we go? Who raises us when we go? Who will fight them when we go?”
Geisha Espriella Meridith Kohut contributed reporting from Matamoros, Mexico.
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