Cubans deported by the United States are being transported overland to Mexico’s southern border by the National Migration Institute (INM), the migrants themselves reported.
William Herrera Roque, from Cuba, says he had been living in the United States for 32 years, but was detained during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in Marathon, Key West, Florida, and taken to the Alcatraz prison.
He was later flown to Arizona, where U.S. authorities handed him over to the INM in Nogales. There, he boarded a bus and finally arrived in Tapachula last January after a three-day overland journey, explains the 54-year-old.
A fisherman by trade, he says he had built a life in the United States with a wife, children, and grandchildren, and even though he is ill—he partially lost his sight and three fingers while working in a sawmill—the administration of President Donald Trump showed him no consideration.
Now at the southern border, he says, he doesn’t know what to do. He has tried to leave Tapachula to go to Quintana Roo—where he has family—but was detained by the National Migration Institute (INM) and taken to the Siglo 21 Station, where they told him that next time they’ll “throw him into Guatemala.”
“We are desperate. I have family in Cancún who want to help me, but they can’t because we don’t have the documents to take a bus or a plane to get there,” he said.
According to the Center for Human Dignity (Centro de Dignificación Humana AC), there are more than a hundred Cubans in this situation in Tapachula, but they have also documented cases in Palenque, in northern Chiapas, and in Villahermosa, in the neighboring state of Tabasco.
Due to the new migration crisis on the southern border, with foreigners deported by the United States and many more who have been stranded for months without a response to their regularization procedures before the Mexican authorities, protests are being prepared at the end of March with a “Migrant Way of the Cross”.
Source: jornada
