Migrants from El Salvador Fleeing Danger Find More of It in Mexico Nina Lakhani - Al Jazeera
go to original October 14, 2015

Mexico, US arrested 40,000 child migrants since 2010 (CCTV America)

Guadalupe Aguirre, an admin worker, and her boyfriend Juan Soriano, a bus driver, were forced to flee El Salvador after receiving death threats that they believed to be genuine and imminent. They left behind three children.

The first leg of their passage through Guatemala was relatively uneventful. The trouble started as soon as they crossed the picturesque River Suchiate into Mexico. The country's authorities detained and deported almost 170,000 Central American migrants from July 2014 to July 2015 - double the number from the previous year.

Mexico's clampdown on undocumented migrants was launched amid pressure from the United States, as it struggled to cope with a surge of unaccompanied children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador seeking refuge at its border.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto announced measures known as the Southern Border Plan - or Plan Frontera Sur in Spanish - shortly after his US counterpart Barack Obama declared the surge in migration to be a humanitarian crisis in July 2014.

Pena Nieto pledged to curtail illegal migration in order to protect people from predatory criminal gangs and the dangerous freight trains that thousands of men, women and children were boarding in Arriaga.

Since then, about 5,000 Mexican federal police, army, and navy officers have been deployed to help stem the flow of northward-bound migrants.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

Related: Mexico Government Violates Its Own Migration Law (Mexico Voices)

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!