Reuters.- Mexican authorities on Thursday dissolved a makeshift camp in the south of the country, near the border with Guatemala, where hundreds of migrant families, some with minors, waited for months to regularize their immigration status, Reuters witnesses and officials said.
The National Migration Institute (INM) authorized the migrants to process their residence documents in various states of the country, with which they were able to leave the camp, installed in an ecological park in Tapachula, minutes from Guatemala. The city was classified by human rights organizations as a “prison.”
Since Wednesday, about 3,000 people left with a QR code pass and will have a month to complete their immigration process in 14 states of the country, some of them bordering the United States, a federal source and migrants who showed your document.
“I am going to Sinaloa to obtain the humanitarian visa with my own resources,” confessed a Cuban woman who waited more than two weeks in the Tapachula camp to obtain her QR code and continue her way to the United States.
Do not miss: Authorities rule out a new wave of Covid-19 in CDMX
In early December, the Mexican government accelerated the transfer of tens of thousands of migrants to various regions, promising to regularize their stay, amid a record number of people who arrived in the country in 2021 seeking to reach the United States after fleeing from poverty and violence.
However, dozens of migrants who did not reach a QR code or be transferred so they will have to continue waiting in Tapachula, Lester Centeno, a 25-year-old Nicaraguan migrant who arrived in Tapachula seeking asylum, told Reuters.
“They told me they were going to take me deported if I didn’t leave here (from the camp),” the man said, referring to immigration agents.
Human rights organizations have questioned the treatment that Mexico has given to migrants, after episodes where migration officials are seen beating some and the overcrowding of shelters.
Follow us on Google News to stay always informed