Mexico reported a reduction in the flow of people seeking to reach the United States on Friday, hours after that country tightened restrictions against illegal migration.
“The flow is going down today. We have not had confrontations or situations of violence on the border,” Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said at a press conference.
The United States lifted Title 42 this Friday, a measure activated in 2020 to supposedly stop Covid-19, but which in practice was used almost 2.8 million times to expel migrants by preventing them from requesting asylum.
In his absence, Title 8 will continue to apply, which in addition to expelling those who enter without a visa or without authorization, vetoing them to obtain asylum, prohibits them from entering again for five years and exposes them to legal proceedings.
During Ebrard’s intervention, a sheet was presented in which it is read that the National Institute of Migration (INM) ordered all its offices “not to grant Multiple Migratory Formats, or any other document that authorizes transit through the country.”
Those papers allowed migrants to move from southern Mexico to the northern border with the United States. The government did not specify since when this regulation is in force or when it will end.
Mexico: “No more than 1,000 per day”
The Mexican foreign minister said that his country will not receive more than 1,000 migrants a day deported from the United States, since it does not have the capacity to care for them nor the will to accept them.
“Mexico lets them know that it could not receive more than 1,000 people in a single day in any case, we could not, we do not have the capacity nor would we accept it and that was in force, not now, since Title 42. They know it, We are not going to accept more than that number because we couldn’t,” Ebrard said.
US President Joe Biden had anticipated a “chaotic” situation at the border due to the end of Title 42, while his government deployed some 24,000 agents in the area.
But citing a report from the Mexican army, Ebrard assured that groups of migrants continued in the same numbers and in “calm and normal situations” on the borders of Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros (north).
According to its figures, the Mexican government counted 26,560 migrants in the main border cities in the north of the country. Of them, 10,000 in Ciudad Juárez, 7,000 in Reynosa and 5,500 in Matamoros. The rest are distributed between Tijuana, Nogales, Piedras Negras and Ciudad Acuña.
