Ted Hesson: Is Mexico Doing Enough to Secure Its Southern Border? Ted Hesson - Fusion
go to original July 15, 2014

Guatemalan migrants often cross into Mexico on inexpensive rafts, even when they could enter Mexico legally through checkpoints. (AP/Moises Castillo)

Sneaking north into Mexico wasn’t easy, according to Brandon, who was 14 years old when he left his hometown in Guatemala last April to rejoin his parents in the United States.

A smuggler hired to get Brandon across the border led him on a five-hour hike across rough terrain and through sweltering heat to avoid Mexican border checkpoints.

“I suffered a lot,” Brandon told Fusion during a recent interview in Virginia. “It was really hot. There were a lot of thorns and my shoes broke. I got blisters on my feet.”

The month-long trip didn’t get any easier after that. The coyote warned Brandon’s group that capture by the Mexican federal police meant deportation or bribery. “He said that if they found us, they would arrest everyone.”

Still, Mexican immigration enforcement was no comparison to what he faced when he entered the U.S. After crossing the Rio Grande border into South Texas, Brandon was immediately apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol.

Brandon, who now lives in Virginia with his parents and is awaiting an appearance in immigration court, is part of a new wave of immigrants fleeing poverty and violence in Central America, often aiming to reunite with relatives and find work in the U.S. From last October to mid-June, more than 181,000 “other-than-Mexican” crossers, as they’re called by the federal government, were apprehended along the Southwest border, many of them from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Every Central American immigrant that arrives in the U.S. had to first pass through Mexico, which raises the question: How should Mexico respond?

Read the rest at Fusion

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