“My dream is gone,” a Honduran migrant said. “We don’t know anyone. We don’t have any money. We don’t have a place to sleep. The only thing we can do is go back to our country.”
When U.S. officials walked about 200 asylum seekers south across the bridge from Texas last week, the migrants were clutching court paperwork, planning to stay in Mexico as they pursue their cases.
“It’s like a psychological thing they’re doing, trying to make us go back to our countries,” he said. Nowhere is safety more of a concern than in Nuevo Laredo’s Tamaulipas state, where 3,000 migrants have been returned despite U.S. State Department warnings against traveling there due to kidnappings and other violent crimes, according to José Martín Carmona, head of the state government’s Institute for Migrants.
Vendors, meanwhile, have swooped in to gouge the returnees stranded in the parking lot for cell phone charging, diapers and clothes, among other things. Couriers, who charged a fee to pick up money relatives had wired to those waiting in Nuevo Laredo , sometimes vanished with the cash. Some families said they had spent $500 in four days on food and water alone.
Honduran Ines Posas, 27, said that being sent here with her 7-year-old autistic son felt “like a punishment.” She said that’s what a Border Patrol agent told her it was. The single mother had hoped to join her father in Louisiana or her mother in South Carolina, but said now: “I just want to go back to my country.”
On Thursday, Mexican officials in Nuevo Laredo recovered the body of an unidentified man from the Rio Grande near the bridge where migrants awaited buses south. On Monday, officials in El Paso found the body of Vilma Mendoza, 20, a Guatemalan migrant who entered the U.S. on the Fourth of July. She was returned to Juarez and drowned trying to cross again.
Breast cancer survivor Patricia Paiz, 43, decided to send her 14-year-old son back to Guatemala with a friend’s family while she tries to reach Monterrey, find work and pursue her asylum case.Many more migrants stranded in Nuevo Laredo had decided to give up on asylum and leave. At his shelter Thursday, migrants were signing up for free flights home from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. The group has also offered free bus rides to returnees in Juarez.
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