As Mexico Continues to Tighten Southern Border, Migrants Confront New Threats Whitney Eulich and Tomas Ayuso - Christian Science Monitor
go to original July 16, 2015

Increasing numbers of Central American migrants are being detained and deported by Mexican immigration officers before they achieve their goal of reaching the U.S. border. (Television del Sur)

Last summer, as tens of thousands of unaccompanied children fled their homes in Central America and headed toward the US, Mexico launched Plan Frontera Sur – in part, it says, to help reduce human rights violations against migrants crossing the 750-mile border with Guatemala and Belize, as well as to build a more systematized patrol system.

A year later, deportations and detentions on Mexico’s southern border have risen sharply: Mexico apprehended 92,889 Central American migrants between October 2014 and April 2015. That’s nearly double the 49,893 apprehended during the same period the year prior.

Some see this is a success – illegal migration is expected to be at its lowest level since 1972 at the US-Mexico border, and Mexico appears to be inching toward more formal southern border entry and exit practices. But it has set off alarm bells for shelter workers and human rights organizations, who worry that migrants are being squeezed into taking greater risks to avoid checkpoints and are increasingly vulnerable to organized crime and corrupt officials.

“Central American migrants are still coming, but they are more invisible now, even to shelters,” says Jose Knippen, who researches human rights and migration for Fundar, a Mexico-City based think tank. She found that some shelters along the train routes are seeing fewer migrants this year, as Plan Frontera Sur cracks down on “The Beast,” the freight trains that have carried migrants north for decades.

“Before, there were high risks to traveling on the trains, and gangs would extort migrants to ride,” Ms. Knippen says. But at least it was visible.

Read the rest at Yahoo! News

Related: As Mexico Tightens Its Southern Border, Central American Migrants Find New Routes North (Fusion)

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