The victims of this extraterritorial policy are Central American migrants who cross every day, seeking to save their lives and their families from the violence and hunger plaguing their countries.
Paradoxically, from their status of limited mobility—both as unauthorized migrants and as individuals with injuries—the members of AMIREDIS demand the rights of human mobility, the right to cross borders with dignity, and the right of all to live with dignity in their homeland.
This report developed in the fields of San Quintín about indigenous workers from Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz and Guerrero migrating to agricultural fields to be used as laborers. There is no public policy to protect the human rights of these migrant farm workers who are subjected to labor abuses and low wages because they can not speak Spanish.
The San Quintín Valley, one of Mexico’s highest producing agricultural areas with a market aimed principally at export, is also one of the places with the most abusive, unsanitary and harmful working conditions for day laborers.
We are a group of social scientists with decades of research experience with the very populations targeted in Biden’s plan. We are painfully aware that Central America’s rural and urban poor need support. But Biden’s package is guaranteed to deepen—not alleviate—the problems faced by Central America’s poor majority.
Adrián Rodríguez Garcia and Wilson Castro, who provided food and other aid to migrants in Mexico State were shot to death in their pick-up truck on Nov. 23. A criminal gang for its assaults on migrants in the town of Tequixquiac, north of Mexico City, fired a round of bullets into their truck.
Paola Quiñones, a Honduran migrant, has become an advocate for Central American migrants in Mexico who suffer brutal conditions in their passage through the country. She is part of a group of migrants in Mexico who have taken the struggle for “Free Transit” and dignity for migrants into their own hands, based on lived experience.
Susana (name changed to protect her identity) will have try again to make the journey to the United States with her son Daniel, 16. Both left everything they had in El Salvador to escape because a gang threatened to kill the boy for refusing to be a gang member.
Officials at the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry do not have accurate data on the number of children who are traveling to the United States illegally at the hands of smugglers. The Vice Minister for Salvadorans Abroad, Liduvina Magarín, recently visited 12 sites that function as shelters, detention centers, and migrant processing centers located in the southern U.S. border. In a single day, these places received 310 Salvadoran children. Given the traffic and movement of people in recent months, it is speculated that the daily number of children passing through that border is between 500 and 600 Salvadoran children who have been sent with coyotes to the United States.
There’s been a blitz of stories over the past couple of weeks on child migrants arriving on the U.S.’s southern border. It’s important that these children do not remain invisible. But most of these mainstream press stories are telling half-truths about child victims, while muddling or downright manipulating the question of who and what is responsible.