Ciudad Juarez, Mexico:
Mexican authorities have begun constructing a huge tent shelter in the city of Ciudad Juárez in preparation for a possible influx of Mexicans deported under US President Donald Trump's promised mass deportation.
The temporary evacuation center in Ciudad Juárez can accommodate thousands of people and should be ready within days, city official Enrique Ricon said.
“This is an unprecedented situation,” Mayor Licon said Tuesday afternoon as workers unloaded a long metal pole from a tractor-trailer parked in a yard on a large open stretch of the Rio Grande that separates the cities of El Paso, Texas. spoke.
The tents in Ciudad Juárez are part of the Mexican government's plan to prepare shelters and reception centers in nine cities in northern Mexico.
Local authorities will provide expelled Mexicans with food, temporary housing, medical care and help obtaining identification documents, according to a government document outlining the strategy, called “Mexico Takes You.”
The government also plans to prepare a fleet of buses to transport Mexicans from reception centers to their hometowns.
President Trump has vowed to carry out the largest deportation program in U.S. history, removing millions of immigrants. But an operation of that scale would likely take several years and cost a significant amount of money.
Nearly 5 million Mexicans reside in the United States without authorization, according to an analysis by Mexican think tank El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) based on recent U.S. census data.
Many come from areas in south-central Mexico that are plagued by violence and poverty. According to a COLEF study, approximately 800,000 undocumented Mexicans in the United States are from the states of Michoacán, Guerrero, and Chiapas, and violent fighting between organized crime groups has forced thousands to flee in recent years, sometimes leaving town. Sometimes the whole thing is abandoned.
Mexico may struggle
The Mexican government said it was prepared for the possibility of mass deportations. But immigration advocates have doubts, fearing that the combination of mass deportations and President Trump's measures to block immigration could quickly overwhelm Mexican border cities.
The Trump administration on Monday ended a program known as CBP One that allowed some migrants waiting in Mexico to legally enter the United States by making an appointment on a government app. The government announced Tuesday it would reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which forces non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be resolved in the United States.
On Monday, José Luis Perez, Tijuana's then-head of immigration affairs, became one of the few Mexican officials to voice public concerns about whether Mexico was truly ready.
“Basically, with the cancellation of CBP One and the deportation, the government is not able to coordinate to accommodate them,” he said.
Hours later, he was fired in what he said was retaliation for issuing such a warning.
The city government did not respond to questions about his firing.
“Mexico will take all necessary measures to take care of our compatriots and allocate whatever is necessary to accommodate those who will be repatriated,” Mexico's Interior Minister Rosa Isera said at a regular press conference Monday morning.
But with economic growth expected to slow this year, Mexico may struggle to absorb the millions of Mexicans expelled from the United States, and a significant drop in remittances could reduce those revenues. He said it could cause “severe economic disruption” to dependent towns and villages across the country. Wayne Cornelius, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego;
On Thursday evening in Ciudad Juarez, about 20 soldiers were in a tent bunker near the tall black cross where Pope Francis held an open-air mass in 2016, warning of the humanitarian crisis and praying for migrants. I was working at In the deepening darkness, soldiers began construction of an industrial kitchen to feed the exiled people.
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