Photo: Joebeth Terriquez / EFE
For: EFE Updated 06 Feb 2022, 14: 16 pm EST
Hundreds of migrants were peacefully evicted this Sunday from a camp near an international port of entry in the Mexican city of Tijuana, on the border with the United States, and relocated to shelters.
Migrants, Central Americans, Mexicans and Haitians, among others, occupied the site near the El Chaparral International Garita, since February 2021.
In the beginning there were more than 2,000 migrants whose main requirement was prompt attention to the request for refuge in the United States, in order to flee the violence of their places of origin.
Over the months, the number of residents in the camp was decreasing and currently there were 381 people sleeping in tents, which were removed by cleaning personnel from the municipality of Tijuana in the early hours of this Sunday.
Agents from the National Guard and riot police from the Municipal Police of Tijuana arrived first at the camp, located in a federal zone, all unarmed and with the intention of controlling order in the place.
Subsequently, the mayor of Tijuana, Monserrat Caballero, and the secretary of the government of the state of Baja California, Catalino Zavala, appeared to supervise the eviction.
Without the use of violence and under strict order, the migrants began to gather their personal belongings and boarded trucks that were conditioned for the transfer to shelters enabled for them.
One of these shelters is the State Center for Attention to Migrants, while others chose to go to another site that they had already planned.
“This is an area with a lot of vehicular traffic and we did it early so that they could arrive during the day, because doing it at night was definitely very dangerous,” Mayor Caballero justified when questioned by the media. about the operation at dawn.
For his part, Zavala explained that there was coordination between the municipal, state and federal governments “to carry out this operation safely,” and both Officials shared that whoever wants it will be paid travel expenses to return to their place of origin.
“In what has to do with With the transfer and relocation to the shelters, they will have the support and legal advice for their process that has to do with political asylum,” said Zavala, adding that organizations and lawyers will be able to enter the shelters.
According to organizations, in the camp there were currently 381 persons, of which 59 were families made up of mom, dad and children, 27 were single mothers, 33 single men, four single women, eight babies, two pregnant women, two older adults and two members of the LGBTI community.
Currently, the region is experiencing a record flow to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office detected more than 1.7 million undocumented immigrants on the border with Mexico in the fiscal year 2021, which ended on 30 of September.
Mexico deported more than 114, foreigners in 2021, according to data from the Political Unit ica Migratoria of the Ministry of the Interior of the country.
While the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (Comar) received a record of 131.735 refugee applications in 2021. Of these, more than 30,000 are Haitian.
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