Into the Arms of the Cartels: Deported Mexicans Sent to City Ruled By Fear Kate Kilpatrick - Al Jazeera
go to original October 16, 2014

An unmarked bus stops at the Juárez-Lincoln bridge in Laredo, Tex., after dark to drop off migrants who will be sent back to Mexico. The deportees will cross the bridge into Nuevo Laredo, where criminal groups are ready to put them to work. (Al Jazeera)

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — As the sun goes down, an unmarked white bus with tinted windows backs up against an iron gate on a small back street that stops short at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge, which connects Laredo, Texas, to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. The gate is opened just enough to allow the men who step off the bus to slip through one by one as they’re escorted across the line on the bridge that marks the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico.

This little alley offers a snapshot of the hazy world of U.S. immigration policy along the southwest border, where zero-tolerance deterrence programs like Operation Streamline, which prosecutes border crossers with punitive criminal rather than civil charges, and the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP), where immigrants are repatriated to border cities up to 100 miles or more from where they crossed, create disparate and seemingly arbitrary penalties for immigrants who enter the country illegally. Both programs fall under Custom and Border Protection’s Consequence Delivery System.

The explicit goal of ATEP is to disrupt immigrants’ connections to specific smuggling networks by transferring them to a different border sector and presumably unfamiliar terrain. But according to a 2013 Border Security report from the Congressional Research Service, “lateral repatriation appears to do little to discourage people from reentering the United States.”

Instead of deterring future migration, advocates say, ATEP increasingly places desperate and penniless deportees into the hands of ruthless criminal organizations eager to prey on them.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!