Fermín doesn’t even take time to think about it. “Yes, in Michoacán there is war”.
He has just turned 14 years old, but when “I was still 12, one night we got a very strong knock on the door. My mom opened it and found a message, that we had 18 hours to leave Apatzingán, or they were going to shoot up our house”.
In a shelter in Tijuana, Fermín told Real America News that they left the kitchenware one afternoon, and her mom didn’t wait for dawn. “We left very early in the morning, and we are not coming back, nor do I think we are going to return.”
The neighborhood where Fermín’s family lived was in the midst of clashes between two drug cartels that disputed the area.
By the time the family had to flee, “relatives had already killed us, besides my uncles and aunts had already left”.
He said that his mother saw him “as if I was almost old enough to be taken to fight”, that is, forcing him to recruit as part of one of the factions , “and that’s also why we just left, we left everything.”
The family has been in Tijuana for about five months and has approached the officers at the San Ysidro port of call to ask them to Mom reports that they are seeking asylum, that they have sent her messages telling her that they already know they are in Tijuana and that she does not feel safe, but they have ignored her.
Fermín knows that Ukrainian migrants they have crossed “lots every day” and that this is because they come from a country at war, “but if they went to Michoacán, they would see that the shootings start every so often; I say it’s war,” he said.
Luis Guillermo, a Salvadoran father, has been in the same shelter in Tijuana for more than eleven months. He says that the brutality of the gangs in his country is also equivalent to a war zone.
He lived with his family near the border with Guatemala , where he had a family business of pupusas, but “the gangs demanded that we give them money, a war tax, they said”.
When the business began to prosper, despite this extortion or collection de piso, as it is known, the gang members increased the pressure, demanding more and more money. “We reached a point where we were no longer earning what they were demanding of us and we decided to close.”
But then “the maras” or gangs threatened them with death if they did not reopen the business and they gave money “Three times they threatened us and made us reopen”, but after the third time, the father of the family decided to file a complaint with the police.
The gang members found out that he had informed the authorities and in retaliation they gave him a choice “because they said that you pay someone from the family, that is, we had to decide who they were going to kill.”
The family left El Salvador, “because the gangs are everywhere there”, and arrived in Tijuana where they have tried to apply for asylum, but the border officials have told them that “the asylum process is closed” by the sanitary measure Title 23, which presumably prevents potential Covid infections that migrants could supposedly carry.
Luis Guillermo knows that, Title 42 is about to expire. The administration of President Joe Biden announced that the 23 of May will officially end, and with the announcement come new concerns for the Salvadoran parent.
“We are seeing that hundreds of Ukrainians pass by every day without any problem, and that is fine, but if you want to accept us for coming from a war, I invite you to go live in El Salvador for a few weeks, so that you can see the war,” he said.
The Department of Security has unofficially reported that it anticipates that “until 20,000 migrants” will try to cross the border daily when it loses vigor Title 42.
Pastor Gustavo Banda, director of the Knights of Jesus Temple shelter, with about 1,200 migrants, reflected for Real America News that “United States two is promoting illegal migration, by leaving no other option for so many people waiting for asylum, who are already desperate”.
“That they have past 9, Ukrainians and every day more pass by, well that’s good; but here at the hostel we have families who have been 12 months, 15 months, some who continue to receive threats on their cell phones, others desperate for health issues, already serious, “said the pastor.
“We have parents whose wives were killed, widowed wives with their children, families who left their places of origin with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing in order to save their lives, we have many orphans due to violence , persecuted”, Pastor Banda abounded.
“Human suffering is the same for those from Michoacán, Honduras, Guerrero, Haiti to Ukraine”, he exclaimed, but said that in his shelter, where “ families already feel desperate”, “here we only have black families, Haitians, and all the rest are brown; but the human suffering is the same”.
Doña Leticia does not want Real America News to take a photo of her, not even to make her face diffuse.
“It’s just that, look, just two weeks ago, close to where we lived, from where we had to flee, they killed 18 people”, he commented.
He said that a few days ago when he learned from a newscast that an attack in the Ukraine left a dozen dead, he began to think “well, if this is the same as in Michoacán; maybe not the same weapons, but the result and the deaths are the same”.
“Perhaps the government does not want to call it war but if it is. I think that they should take that into consideration here on the line (at the border) when we go to ask for asylum, just like they do with the Ukrainians,” said Doña Leticia.
Refugees fleeing the Russian invasion arrive at the US-Mexico border
The growing tide of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion is also expanding rapidly in Tijuana, north of Mexico, from where these people seek to cross the United States Seeking Asylum.
Currently in Tijuana there are 2,000 Ukrainian refugees waiting to enter the United States, says Enrique Lucero Vázquez, municipal director of Attention to the Migrant of the City Hall of this city.
Mazur wants to come to Massachusetts because he has relatives there. She is originally from Odessa, a port city in southern Ukraine that, according to local media reports, has been the target of heavy airstrikes by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops.
The arrival of Ukrainians to Tijuana skyrocketed in mid-March, after the US Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, announced the creation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by 15 months for Ukrainians. To this was added the announcement from the White House, days after the United States would receive 100 thousand refugees from Ukraine.
According to Lucero, the Ukrainians, mostly women, children and older adults , enter Mexico as tourists on flights to Cancun and Mexico City from European countries such as Germany and Italy. According to the official, Russians seeking asylum in the United States are also arriving in Tijuana, but on a smaller scale and they stay in hotels, not in the hostel.
Once in Tijuana, the Ukrainian families are late 20 hours on average to be able to cross into the United States, where 400 Ukrainians enter each day.
Unequal treatment
Although the opening towards Ukrainians has been applauded by pro-immigrant activists in the American Union, it has also revealed the enormous differences in the treatment of refugees of other nationalities, such as Central Americans and Haitians, who both in Mexico and in the United States have denounced mistreatment by the immigration authorities.
Since March 6, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned that the exodus of Ukrainians would be “the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War”.
Currently, according to the UNHCR, there are 4 million Ukrainian refugees, which is why it qualified the case as a level emergency 3, the highest in this institution.
The UNHCR data indicates that the 50 percent of Ukrainian refugees go to Poland, while a third go to neighboring countries, such as Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia. About 7 percent of those who flee Ukraine go to Russia and Belarus.
In addition, more than 6.48 Millions of people have been internally displaced in Ukraine, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.
A large part of the Ukrainian refugees are women, children and older adults, since men among the 18 Y 60 years must stay in the country. For this reason, emotional family farewells at transport stations are common in Ukraine.
This is the case of Larysa Koltsova and her son André, from 10 years, who say goodbye, between caresses and tight hugs of her husband and father, Konstantino Makruha, at the main bus station in Lviv, Ukraine. Larysa and André go to Poland. Konstantino stays to defend his country.
In their last moments together Konstantino gently caresses Larysa’s face, they communicate with a look what no one dares to say out loud: they don’t know if they will see each other again André clings to Konstantino in a long hug while Larysa’s expression indicates that she is holding back tears.
Most of the Ukrainian refugees with whom we spoke in Ukraine, Poland and Tijuana for this journalistic work, does not want to live in the United States, prefers to stay in European countries and return to his country when the war is over.
However, “ in terms of refugees, the situation is not going to improve”, according to Octavio González Segovia, a researcher at the Center for International Relations of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the UNAM.
González, who carried out studies in Ukraine, points out that the war is entering “a second stage in which Moscow redefines its objectives as a result of the strong Ukrainian resistance it has encountered on the ground, especially in kyiv”.
Putin’s troops, according to González, will concentrate on the corridor that goes from Crimea to the Donbas region, but without forgetting kyiv, the capital of the country, “because it is an element of pressure”.
In this context, affirms the academic, the number of 10 million Ukrainian refugees. “The blood will continue to run and, I think, the worst is yet to come.”