Mexican migrant shelters are bracing for a massive influx in deportees after President Trump’s recent executive orders.
Senda De Vida Casa Del Migrante, a migrant shelter located in Reynosa, Mexico, told KRGV News reporters that it is facing challenges in handling the huge spike in illegal immigrants deported from the U.S. and being transferred to its shelter.
A manager at the Mexican respite, Hector Silva, claimed that the U.S. has been deporting between 60 to 80 people daily in recent weeks.
Silva also reported that the shelter received nearly 160 deportees on Thursday, many of whom are noticeably distraught and “cannot sleep” after being separated from their families still residing in the U.S. He said, “They can’t handle the situation because they are so far from where they were living.”
One deportee at the shelter, Oscar Martinez-Rosas, told reporters that he was living illegally in Jacksonville, Florida when ICE agents showed up at his construction job last month “trying to find someone else and they took me.”
Martinez-Rosa spoke about the difficulty of being separated from family and returning to his native country, which he does not identify as home.
“It’s hard because I don’t know about Mexico. It’s different. I hear about cartels, mafias and all that. So, yeah it’s bad news,” he said. He hopes that his stay at the shelter will be short-lived. As far as returning to the U.S., he has no plans to do so until he can reside their legally.
Martinez-Rosa lamented, “You can go to Canada if you are from Mexico and you have a passport… You can go there and work and be legal because Canada is different from the United States.”
The report states that shelter residents fear the ramifications of illegally entering the U.S. again, but the idea of staying in Reynosa is also very unsettling. Many of them claim they do not have the resources to return to their native Mexican or Central American hometowns.
As for Silva, who is overwhelmed by the tidal wave of deported illegal immigrants, he is asking the Tamaulipas government for support to help deportees safely return to their homeland countries and to also help shelters provide a more comfortable stay for them.
With numbers quickly rising, Silva said they are running low on food and provisions to help deportees coming through. “If we have more people, we are going to have more problems with food, clothing, and hygiene. We are preparing to give support to all these families,” he said.
According to KRGV News, the director of the respite center said he is anticipating a flood of more deportees in the coming weeks.
Ref.: http://dailyeb.com/index.php/2017/02/27/mexico-overwhelmed-tide-illegal-aliens-returning/
