Mexico Threatens Migrants - and Citizens - in Effort to Slow Central American Surge Nina Lakhani - The Guardian
go to original April 5, 2016

Esther Juárez, 15 and her sister Amy, 24 (Nina Lakhani)

Amy and Esther Juárez were edgy with excitement as they boarded the bus full of seasonal workers heading for a farm at the other end of Mexico from their home in the poverty-stricken southern state of Chiapas.

Although their brother Alberto,18, had made the same journey the previous year, it was the first time Amy, 24, and Esther, 15, had left the tiny indigenous community where they had grown up.

But about half-way there, immigration agents boarded the bus, and after checking all the passengers’ papers, ordered the three siblings to get off.

The officials accused them of carrying false documents and lying about their nationality. Then they told the youngsters that they would be deported to Guatemala, a country none would have been able to place on a map.

The baffled youngsters – who speak the Mayan language Tzeltal but very little Spanish – were transferred to an immigration holding center in Queretero City, where the three siblings were held for eight days before a lawyer from an activist group filed a legal complaint and eventually secured their release.

A growing number of indigenous Mexicans are being detained and threatened with expulsion by immigration agents looking for undocumented Central American migrants.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Mexican Police Accused of Torturing Central American Illegal Aliens (Examiner)

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