Mexican officials clear border tent camp as US pressure mounts to stem migrant influx
Mexico already has over 32,000 soldiers and National Guard troopers — about 11% of its total forces — assigned to enforcing immigration laws.
MATAMOROS: A ragged migrant tent camp next to the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, is a long way from the country’s National Palace, where a top-level U.S. delegation met with Mexico’s president seeking more action to curb the surge of migrants reaching the U.S. border.
But as Mexican officials in Matamoros worked with bulldozers Wednesday to clear out what they claimed were abandoned tents, it was probably a sign of things to come.
The United States has given clear signs — by temporarily closing key border rail crossings into Texas — that it needs Mexico to do more to stop migrants hopping freight cars, buses, and trucks to the border.
Mexico, desperate to get those crossings reopened to its manufactured goods, is starting to give signs it will crack down a bit.
That was on display in Matamoros as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City.
Migrants set up the encampment in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas in late 2022. It once held as many as 1,500 migrants, but many tents were vacated in recent months as migrants waded across the river to reach the United States.
Segismundo Doguín, the head of the local office of Mexico’s immigration agency, said, “What we are doing is removing any tents that we see are empty.”
But one Honduran migrant who would give only his first name, José, claimed some of the 200 remaining migrants had been practically forced to leave the camp when the clearance operation began late Tuesday.
“They ran us out,” he said, saying migrants were given short notice to move their tents and belongings out of the way and felt intimidated by the bulldozers moving through the tents. “You had to run for your life to avoid an accident.”
Some migrants moved into a fenced-in area of the encampment where immigration officers said they could relocate, but fear pervaded.
About 70 migrants flung themselves into the river Tuesday night and crossed into the U.S. They remained trapped for hours along the riverbank beneath the layers of concertina wire set up by orders of the Texas governor.
Few options exist for the migrants asked to leave the encampment, said Glady Cañas, founder of a Matamoros-based nongovernmental group, Ayudandoles a Triunfar, or Helping Them Win.
“The truth is that the shelters are saturated,” Cañas said.
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