“We can’t survive”: Mexican immigrants protest slow asylum system | Human Rights News

Hundreds of immigrants and asylum-seekers joined the caravan to Mexico City, demanding that the asylum process be expedited.

On Saturday, hundreds of migrants and asylum-seekers from Central America and the Caribbean left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula in a caravan for the country’s capital, where they hoped to speed up the asylum process.

An eyewitness told Reuters that the group of about 500 people included families with children from Haiti, Cuba, Central America and Colombia.

According to local news reports, the caravan was filed days after the immigration protests in Tapachula. They have been demanding that the case be expedited so that they can leave the southern state and relocate to other parts of Mexico or to the U.S. border. Will not risk being deported. .

“We cannot survive in Tapachula,” said Carlos Correa, a 31-year-old Colombian man who joined the University on Saturday after waiting for three months without receiving a response to his asylum application. Caravan.

“We ask the Mexican government to create Humanitarian corridor For us, so we can go to the (US) border,” he said.

According to Mexican law, immigrants must stay in the state where they seek asylum until their case is resolved, a process that can take months or years.

Approximately 500 people who joined the caravan included families with children from Haiti, Cuba, and Colombia [Jose Torres/Reuters]

Mexico and the U.S. have witness This year there have been a large number of immigrants, especially from Central America, where the crisis of violence, poverty and hunger Drove hundreds of thousands to flee.

Since October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have arrested or deported more than 1.2 million immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the U.S. border.

Mexico is facing increasing pressure from Washington to take measures to reduce immigration to the United States.

In recent weeks, the Mexican government has sent thousands of migrants by plane to southern Mexico, and then transported by bus to the border with Guatemala.