Mexico Relocates Migrant Camp

Around 2,000 people from Haiti and Central America were relocated from their migrant camp set up in a park in border city Reynosa to a shelter across the border from McAllen, Texas by Mexican authorities on Tuesday. They ended up in the city after U.S. officials stated that due to the pandemic they could not seek asylum. Most of the migrants are from Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

 They were moved, according to Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, so they could receive better health attention and food services. Despite this statement, a shelter in the border city of Nuevo Laredo announced that there has been a stream of Haitian migrants. The Bishop Enrique Sánchez Martínez also stated for Abc News that the shelters are overcrowded, with people having to sleep outside in tents.

Nuevo Laredo isn’t usually a city where migrants go on their route to the United States, due to its high concentration of violence and the control of the Northeast drug cartel.  The border cities worry that the lack of protocols and government aid to help immigrants will negatively affect the attention shelters can give to immigrants coming to Mexico and the United States from their home countries due to the high levels of violence and lack of opportunities there.