Deportees in Mexico Face the New Year Without Hope of Return to U.S. Latin American Herald Tribune
go to original December 31, 2016

Teenagers in the Road is a shelter in Mexico City for migrant children making their way to the U.S. The journey is dangerous for anyone, but especially so for children traveling alone. The shelter hopes that travelers apply for refugee status and stay in Mexico for their own safety. (AJ+)

Hundreds of deportees will spend New Year’s Eve packed into the improvised inns of Mexico’s border cities, still entertaining the dim hope that 2017 will satisfy their longing to return to the United States, the country they call “home.”

A tearful Jose Ricardo Godinez recalled that he lost everything last year after being deported. Now back in Mexico, he finds his family there has forgotten him and his dreams are reduced to cooking for hundreds of people at the Cobina Migrant Inn, which shelters some 600 destitute deportees from the US.

He had a sad Christmas, and like thousands of others among the undocumented, he awaits a not very prosperous 2017 because of threats that the U.S. will toughen its measures to keep out illegal immigrants.

Altagracia Tamayo, founder of the Cobina, told EFE that she has taken in 4,200 migrants since last August.

She said the tactic employed by the U.S. government is to deport them as far away as possible from their states of origin, so they have little chance to get the funds necessary for another attempt to get back into the United States.

“Because here there are only two ways to cross – you pay $12,000 to a coyote or you get through with a backpack filled with drugs,” said Tamayo, who has been helping emigrants for 23 years.

This smiling woman, 54, knows what it’s like to wander the streets without food or shelter. At age 16 she left home, and life was hard for her in Mexicali, where she sometimes had to eat “leftovers thrown out by Chinese restaurants, drink water out of a faucet and suffer diarrhea.”

But her struggle to do good to others led her to take a degree in Social Work.

Read the rest at Latin American Herald Tribune

Related: U.S. Officials Sending Asylum Seekers Back to Mexico (Houston Chronicle)

Related: One Cuban Family’s 6,600-Mile Trail to America (KERA News)

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