In a 24-hour period last week, Mexican authorities found 331 undocumented migrants in two separate incidents.
On Thursday, Oaxaca state officials, the Mexican Navy and the National Guard carried out a raid on a property in the municipality of Juchitán de Zaragoza in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec where they found 74 migrants — including at least 19 minors — being held for ransom.
The authorities apprehended two suspects found on the premises — both of whom were described as foreigners — on charges of kidnapping and extortion. An unspecified number of “high-caliber weapons” was also found and confiscated, according to the newspaper Milenio.
Oaxaca Government Secretary Jesús Romero López said the operation was carried out after authorities received an anonymous tip. Neighbors confirmed that armed men and a large number of vehicles were present in the area in the days before the rescue operation.
A day later on Friday, at a highway checkpoint in the northern state of Chihuahua, National Immigration Institute (INM) agents found a large number of migrants packed into two trailers.
The INM notified the Defense Ministry, which set up a perimeter before moving in on the rig. The soldiers found 257 migrants who were packed into the twin trailers. Soldiers maintained control of the scene while INM agents processed the migrants to confirm their legal status.
The incident at the Sotelo de Juárez checkpoint just south of Ciudad Juárez occurred just two days after Chihuahua police rescued 27 migrants being held in a hotel. The migrants — many starving and dehydrated — were turned over to the INM.
These events occurred as migrants traversing Mexico are being forced to rethink their plans since Donald Trump won reelection as U.S. president on Nov. 5, after pledging to carry out large-scale deportations of undocumented migrants.
According to the news agency Reuters, a migrant caravan of about 3,000 people headed for the United States last week had shrunk to about 1,600 in a matter of days after Trump’s victory.
During his 2017–2021 term, Reuters reported, President Trump established “policies that left hundreds of thousands of migrants stranded in camps along the Mexican border, reshaping U.S. immigration politics.”
Current U.S. President Joe Biden adopted a program allowing migrants to seek asylum appointments before reaching the U.S. by using an app, but Trump has promised to end that program.
Despite the anticipated changes in policy, many migrants will keep traveling through Mexico with hopes of getting into the United States, activists say.
“People will seek new paths; it’ll be more dangerous, but it won’t stop them,” Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest and pro-migrant activist in Chiapas, told Reuters.
