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Members of the caravan of migrants who reached a US border crossing near San Diego were greeted with an icy welcome in Tijuana this weekend. The group wakes up Monday realizing that they could be stranded for months on this unwelcoming side of the fence entering America in a legal manner.
Adding to the growing certainty of the group's situation, the US Border Patrol temporarily closed all northbound lanes at the busy San Ysidro port of entry, while the United States continued to "position hardening materials". additional for the port ".
With increasing attention to the caravan and the insistence of senior US officials that migrants not just be allowed to enter the United States, the crowd in Tijuana may have to wait six months before asylum are heard.
"We have to wait – for how long?" Lenin Herrera Batres, a 20-year-old teenager who left Honduras with his wife and 2-year-old son, asked the New York Times. "We do not have the money to stay here for a month or two."
Another migrant, José Adan Núñez, aged 24, told the newspaper "If I die on the way, at least I will fight for something" after spending a few days in a shelter in Tijuana.
Protesters whose placards say in Spanish: "More caravans" and "Save Tijuana, no caravans" stand under a statue of the Aztec indigenous ruler Cuauhtemoc to protest the presence of thousands of Central American migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, the Sunday.
(AP)
According to the Associated Press, US border inspectors already handle only a hundred asylum applications a day at the Tijuana-San Diego border. Asylum seekers record their names on a ragged notebook run by migrants with more than 3,000 names, even before the arrival of the first members of the main caravan last week.
Arrivals should continue Monday and the coming week. Most of the 3,400 migrants, who were in the last border town of Mexicali, are expected to travel to Tijuana on Monday, a New York Times rights organization said.
The mayor of Tijuana, Juan Manuel Gastelum – described the arrivals as "tramps" and asked if a referendum of 1.6 million people would be needed to determine whether they should be allowed to stay or not – would have estimated that migrants may have to wait six months to process their asylum application.
The Mexican Ministry of the Interior announced Friday that just under 2,700 Central American migrants had sought asylum in Mexico as part of a program launched last month that was held in Mexico. is committed to providing them with work and residence permits more quickly.
Central American migrants leave a migrant shelter as anti-immigrant protesters protest a block away in Tijuana, Mexico on Sunday.
(AP)
However, authorities predict that arrivals of migrant caravans in Tijuana will soon exceed 10,000 – and will need to be accommodated longer – for which the Mexican government is short of resources.
The majority of migrants, who have been marching for more than a month, sleep on a clay baseball field at an outdoor sports complex in Tijuana, near the newly fortified barbed wire fence that separates Mexico from the United States. United.
And they did not receive a warm welcome from the people of Tijuana.
On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered around a monument in the city to protest the arrival of migrants, waving Mexican flags and chanting "Out! Out!", Reported Associated Press.
"We do not want them in Tijuana," shouted protesters.
Juana Rodriguez, a housewife, told the AP that the Mexican government needed to conduct a background check on migrants to make sure they had no criminal record.
A woman who called Paloma also criticized the migrants who she said came to Mexico for documents. "Let their government take care of them," she told reporters covering the protests.
Hollie McKay of Fox News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
