Standing at the border between Guatemala and Mexico.
Up there on the bridge,
there's a normal border crossing with migration; people stamping passports, but
you go down these wobbly stairs, you notice that right under the bridge these
guys are trafficking people across the border, technically illegally.
You can't tell that there's been an immigration crackdown here, but there has.
And it was the U.S. that paid for it.
These guys are doing it under the noses of immigration
officials who clearly don't care that much.
You only start to feel this
crackdown when you start moving north, where you run into a new network of
military infrastructure and checkpoints meant to stop migrants.
But this crackdown was never meant to keep Central Americans out of Mexico, it was
meant to keep them out of Texas.
In 2014 the United States sent an influx of
money to Mexico, helping them militarize and fortify their southern border region.
To understand why, you have to look at this chart: the red line represents the
number of Mexican migrants apprehended while they're crossing into the United States
and the green line is for non-Mexican migrants. Look at 2014: that's when the
number of non-Mexican migrants outnumbered Mexican migrants for the
very first time. What pushed this number up were the migrants coming from
Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. And these people fleeing from Central America aren't just
looking for jobs, they're running away.
So, there's a war going on in Central America
right now, it's actually not just one war it's a ton of micro wars,
"Unbelievable violence." "Nearly one homicide an hour".
"Three of the five highest homicide countries in the world:
Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador."
"Carved up the city into warring factions".
Residents of these towns are
at major risk of dying and so people are fleeing.
While riding with U.S. Border Patrol on the Texas border, I watched them apprehend a 22 year old and
his son as they just made the three-week journey up through Mexico from Honduras.
These refugees walk into Mexico mostly hoping to make it to the U.S.
Many come here, to this town called Tapachula, just north of the border where they can look
for a migrant shelter to lie low and get support and at this vulnerable point in
their journey, many don't want to show their face on camera. And there were
these threats just constantly came and came and came to me and then one day I
just said the hell with this I'm gone. Mm-hmm. I burned my little Rancho and and
I took off at two o'clock in the morning.
The exodus out of Central America came
to a head in 2014, when the U.S. saw a huge spike in the
number of Central American kids and teens arriving to the border without a parent.
"It is a huge humanitarian crisis on the border right now".
"52,000 unaccompanied children have been caught at the US border with Mexico: double the
number recorded last year". "Children from Honduras traveling into Guatemala, then
Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande, and just now arriving in Texas."
As soon as it became clear that this year's migration to the border was different than in past
years, I directed FEMA to coordinate our response at the border. Obama declared an
urgent humanitarian situation at the border.
He discussed it with Mexican president Peña Nieto.
Peña Nieto walked away from that meeting and immediately implemented a policy called
"El Programa Frontera Sur", the southern border program. "And earlier this week
Mexico announced a series of steps that they're gonna take on their southern
border to help stem the tide".
For Peña Nieto, the plan had two main objectives:
In short, the plan was supposed to make
life better and safer for both migrants and those living in the border region,
which includes Mexico's most impoverished state, Chiapas.
This migrant protection plan for the southern border had been in the works for years, but it
was rushed into implementation apparently in response to American pressure.
Many of the long-term plans that were meant to give migrants legal
support and protection fell away. Instead, the implementation focused almost
entirely on enforcement and security.
"What's easiest to do, I think, is enforcement because
you already have the infrastructure set up. Like it's harder to create jobs, right,
than it is to hire more immigration agents to detain people."
Mexico's quick solution to this was to militarize, to start raiding buses to
start putting up checkpoints, to start cracking down on Central Americans who
are coming into their country. A perfect symbolic representation of this are
these huge multi-agency complexes that they built in order to house the
immigration officials alongside the Army, and the Marines, and the Federal Police.
Mexico fortified its southern border region and to help in the effort, the
U.S. sent an influx of money and equipment, using resources from an
existing security partnership it had with Mexico, dating back to 2007.
This partnership was originally created to combat drug trafficking and organized crime.
The money was used here for things like inspection equipment, k9 teams,
observation towers, training for immigration enforcement officials,
communication networks to support enforcement activities, and gear to
collect biometric data like fingerprints and photos of detained migrants.
In short, the U.S. helped militarize the southern border region of Mexico.
The U.S. got what it was looking for.
"In part because of strong efforts by Mexico
including at its southern border, we've seen those numbers reduced back to much
more manageable levels."
Apprehensions on the Mexican side went up and people
arriving to Texas or other parts of the U.S. border went down, but this was all
temporary. The number jumped back up in 2016, so the crackdown isn't actually
stopping people from getting to the United States, but it is making their
journey much more dangerous.
Behind me is the train that Central Americans take to get from here in
southern Mexico, up to the border of the United States. If it were 2014 this area
would be completely packed with migrants.
Migration officials targeted this train.
They started conducting extensive raids and the train companies hired guards,
increasing the speeds of the trains and installing concrete posts and walls to
make it harder for people to jump aboard and now gangs are a constant threat to
the few travelers that remain.
Here are the main routes that migrants took to
get to the United States: they mainly follow the train routes. These paths were well
supported with migrant shelters and clinics and most importantly large
groups of other migrants, making it less likely that people will be robbed or
assaulted. Migrants often don't know where their next meal will come from or
where they're gonna sleep each night. They depend on this network of usually
church-sponsored shelters as they move north. The 2014 crackdown targeted these
routes, looking for migrants in popular places like shelters and train stops.
So migrants moving north have shifted into unfamiliar, unsupported routes that
multiply the dangers that they are already subject to on this journey.
Pushing these refugees away from well trodden routes and into the shadows has
made them more vulnerable to assaults by criminals and gangs in this region.
During this time the U.S. Border Patrol started putting out public service
announcements, about how dangerous the journey through Mexico had become.
This, in spite of the fact that U.S. policy contributed to those risks.
All of the shelter directors I talked to have noticed an uptick in crimes against
migrants since this crackdown. A study by dozens of migration organizations in
Mexico found that, of the 5,824 investigations into crimes against
migrants, less than 1% had led to any sort of sentence.
And many crimes go
unreported altogether. There's not a lot of trust in the Mexican justice system
for migrants.
Most migrants are now left on their own,
navigating this remote region where both gangs and corruption-prone
police are looking for ways to profit off vulnerable migrants.
But perhaps the most egregious offence of the Mexican state in this crackdown, comes down to
what they didn't do for these people entering their country. When a Mexican
immigration official detains a migrant, that officer is required to inform them
that they have the right to ask for refugee status or asylum if they're
fleeing for their lives. Everyone I talked to said that isn't happening.
There were 40,000 children who entered into Mexico in 2016, and these children
aren't looking for jobs, they're not smuggling drugs, they're looking for protection.
Of the 40,000 that came here, only 1% applied for asylum.
That's a dangerously low number for a country that has said that it protects asylum seekers.
Migrants who feel a threat to their lives in their own
country have to fill out an application and submit it to an agency that has the
power to grant asylum or refugee status in Mexico. This allows them to avoid
being deported, to stay in the country, but this agency that's in charge of
processing these applications only had 15 caseworkers dedicated to interviewing
these applicants and while applications are on pace to be 12 times what they
were in 2013, this group's budget only grew 5% during the crackdown.
The year the southern border program was implemented, Mexico detained around a
119,000 Central Americans. It granted refugee status to
only 460 of them, not even a half a percent. That same year
Mexico started deporting a lot more Central Americans, so the southern border
program made Mexico a lot better at detaining and deporting people, but it
definitely didn't make Mexico a safer place for refugees like it said it would.
Now let's get one thing straight, Mexico has the right and the sovereignty to
fortify its borders and to control who's coming in and out.
That is their right as a sovereign nation.
And some will wonder why is it Mexico's
problem to deal with you know the problems and challenges of
citizens of another country? The problem is Mexico has signed all of
the international conventions that promise that they will take care of
asylum seekers or refugees and give them the legal protection so that they can feel safe.
A report by the Migration Policy institute found that in 2014,
The U.S. deported just 3 of every 100
unaccompanied children that it apprehended on the border. Mexico on the
other hand deported 77 for every 100 kids it apprehended. And yet when
thousands of unaccompanied children arrived at Texas' border in 2014 the U.S.
turned to Mexico to handle the delicate and difficult work of screening and
protecting these refugees fleeing for their lives. The U.S. is paying Mexico to
do its dirty work, knowing full well that doing this will result in a much more
dangerous situation for refugees.
It drove them into the shadows, worsening their vulnerabilities.
And in most cases,
deporting them back to the violent places from which they came.
One of the questions I know I'm gonna get a ton is:
What is the name of this waterfall?
Southern Mexico's full of a lot of very beautiful scenery,
and I got to see a lot of it as I was traipsing around the region, reporting this story.
But this waterfall, it's called El Chiflón and it's in the state of Chiapas in Southern Mexico.
It ended up being one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen,
in all of my Borders reporting this summer.
Especially once I got the drone up in the air and saw it from above.
El Chiflón, in Chiapas. It's a beautiful place.