Caitlin Donohue, Remezcla, March 2018
Maggie Loredo wishes that she didn’t have to rehash the painful details of her story every time a reporter comes to Poch@ House, the Mexico City center for deportees and returnees she co-directs. As she points out, the injustices of US and Mexican economic and legal systems cannot be reduced to a single face and a single story. But Loredo has also known the loneliness that can result from staying quiet, from thinking you are the only one who’s had their life ripped in two. “It could be because of the fear,” she ventures, reflecting on the silence surrounding life after leaving the United States. “Even the undocumented community never really asks what happens when their neighbor disappears.” So, she methodically answers the same questions over and over in the hope that her words will help others facing the same difficult decisions that she once did.
When Loredo was a high school sophomore in Georgia, she discovered she was undocumented. She’d arrived in the United States with her Mexican parents at the age of two. While she was a diligent high school student, her immigration status barred her from receiving financial aid to attend college, or from entering a professional certification program. “Why do I suddenly stop having rights at the age of 18?,” she asks, remembering the emotional rollercoaster of that moment and the years that followed. “I was angry at the country, but more at the government. They were basically closing the doors on me.”
Maggie Laredo, co-founder of Poch@ House. Photo by Daniel M. Torres for Remezcla.
“Pocho House’’, un espacio para mexicanos repatriados
Gardenia Mendoza, MSN El Diario, 2/4/2018
MEXICO.- En la calle Ayuntamiento número 37, en el corazón del Centro Histórico de la capital mexicana un grupo de jóvenes repatriados tomó al toro por los cuernos y asumió que ya no está en Estados Unidos para ayudarse entre sí a integrarse otra vez a la sociedad mexicana y ayudar a otros en similares circunstancias. Así nació Pocho House’.
“Sabemos que el termino pocho se ha usado mucho de manera despectiva pero queremos reivindicarnos’’, ataja Rossy Antúnez, de 26 años, quien regresó a México hace nueve años, y hoy es parte del equipo.
Una década desde su retorno la convirtió en una veterana en el tema. Ya pasó por muchas etapas, la de estar sola sin la familia que se quedó en Wisconsin, la de que le echaran en cara el acento; la de extrañar, comparar a los dos países, enfrentarse a la revalidación de estudios y la burocracia que ataca con agudeza pidiendo papeles y papeles en su propio país.
MEXICO.- En la calle Ayuntamiento número 37, en el corazón del Centro Histórico de la capital mexicana un grupo de jóvenes repatriados tomó al toro por los cuernos y asumió que ya no está en Estados Unidos para ayudarse entre sí a integrarse otra vez a la sociedad mexicana y ayudar a otros en similares circunstancias. Así nació Pocho House’.
“Sabemos que el termino pocho se ha usado mucho de manera despectiva pero queremos reivindicarnos’’, ataja Rossy Antúnez, de 26 años, quien regresó a México hace nueve años, y hoy es parte del equipo.
Una década desde su retorno la convirtió en una veterana en el tema. Ya pasó por muchas etapas, la de estar sola sin la familia que se quedó en Wisconsin, la de que le echaran en cara el acento; la de extrañar, comparar a los dos países, enfrentarse a la revalidación de estudios y la burocracia que ataca con agudeza pidiendo papeles y papeles en su propio país.
Raised in America, now back in Mexico: 'The country I loved kicked me out'
Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian, Sep 6, 2017; last modified on Jul 5, 2018
Young Mexicans speak out about what they lost by leaving the US before Daca, what they gained, and what faces those who may now lose their protection
Three years after she went back to Mexico, a country she barely knew, Maggie Loredo learned that Barack Obama had created temporary deportation relief for undocumented migrants brought to the US as children.
“I immediately wanted to go to the border with all of my things and go back to the US,” she said.
But because she had left, she did not qualify for relief from the threat of deportation under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), the temporary program that the Trump administration now says it will end.
On Tuesday, attorney general Jeff Sessions said the program was introduced unlawfully and the US could not admit everyone who wanted to enter. The US, Sessions said, was enforcing law that “saves lives, protects communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering”.
The government was acting with compassion, he said.
Young Mexicans speak out about what they lost by leaving the US before Daca, what they gained, and what faces those who may now lose their protection
Three years after she went back to Mexico, a country she barely knew, Maggie Loredo learned that Barack Obama had created temporary deportation relief for undocumented migrants brought to the US as children.
“I immediately wanted to go to the border with all of my things and go back to the US,” she said.
But because she had left, she did not qualify for relief from the threat of deportation under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), the temporary program that the Trump administration now says it will end.
On Tuesday, attorney general Jeff Sessions said the program was introduced unlawfully and the US could not admit everyone who wanted to enter. The US, Sessions said, was enforcing law that “saves lives, protects communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering”.
The government was acting with compassion, he said.
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The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) Report: Mexico’s Southern Border – Security, Central American Migration, and U.S. Policy
KEY FINDINGS
It has been nearly three years since the Mexican government announced its Southern Border Program, which dramatically increased security operations and apprehensions of northbound migrants. This report—based on field research in the area surrounding Tenosique, Tabasco along Mexico’s border with Guatemala—examines migration flows, enforcement, and insecurity in southern Mexico.
THERE HAS BEEN A SHARP INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF MIGRANTS AND ASYLUM SEEKERS WHO INTEND TO STAY IN MEXICO, RATHER THAN TRAVEL TO THE UNITED STATES.
Many are seeking asylum or other forms of immigration status. Between 2014 and 2016, there was a 311 percent increase in asylum requests in Mexico. In the first three months of 2017, Mexico had received more asylum applications than all of 2015. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that Mexico will receive up to 20,000 asylum requests in 2017.
DECREASED MIGRATION FLOWS THROUGH MEXICO AND AT THE U.S. SOUTHWEST BORDER DURING THE MONTHS FOLLOWING PRESIDENT TRUMP’S INAUGURATION ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE.
News of the Trump administration’s hard line appears to have caused a wave of Central American migration before January 20, and a sharp drop afterward. However, until there are improvements in the violence and adverse conditions from which Central Americans are fleeing, people will continue to migrate in large numbers. By May 2017, apprehension levels at the U.S-Mexico border had begun to tiptoe back up, with a 31 percent increase in total apprehensions compared to April, and a 50 percent increase in apprehensions of unaccompanied minors.
ALTHOUGH MEXICO REGISTERED LOWER APPREHENSION LEVELS IN THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS OF 2017 COMPARED TO PREVIOUS YEARS, MIGRATION ENFORCEMENT UNDER MEXICO’S SOUTHERN BORDER PROGRAM REMAINS HIGH.
Total migrant apprehensions increased by a staggering 85 percent during the Southern Border Program’s first two years of operation (July 2014 to June 2016) compared to pre-Program levels. Limited government resources, migrants’ and smugglers’ ability to adjust to new security patterns, corruption among authorities, and an overall drop in migration from Central America since President Trump took office have all likely contributed to the leveling off of apprehensions seen in Mexico in recent months.
CRIMES AND ABUSES AGAINST MIGRANTS TRAVELING THROUGH MEXICO CONTINUE TO OCCUR AT ALARMING RATES, AND SHELTERS HAVE NOTED A MORE INTENSE DEGREE OF VIOLENCE IN THE CASES THEY DOCUMENT.
While Mexico’s major organized criminal groups do not operate heavily in the Tenosique corridor, smaller criminal bands and Central American gang affiliates routinely rob, kidnap, and sexually assault migrants along this portion of the migration route. Migrant rights organizations in southern Mexico documented an increase in cases of migration and police authorities’ abuse of migrants as a result of the Southern Border Program, including recent accounts of migration agents, who are supposed to be unarmed, using pellet guns and electrical shock devices.
THERE HAVE BEEN FEWER U.S. ASSISTANCE DELIVERIES TO MEXICO FOR THE SOUTHERN BORDER PROGRAM THAN ORIGINALLY EXPECTED, BUT BIOMETRIC AND COMMUNICATIONS PROGRAMS CONTINUE APACE.
The U.S. State and Defense Departments are currently implementing a US$88 million dollar program to increase Mexican immigration authorities’ capacity to collect biometric data and share information about who is crossing through Mexico with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The U.S. State and Defense Departments are also funding a US$75 million project to improve secure communications between Mexican agencies in the country’s southern border zone. This program has erected 12 communications towers so far, all of them on Mexican naval posts.
THE MIGRATION ROUTE INTO MEXICO THROUGH TENOSIQUE, TABASCO HAS SEEN A SHARP INCREASE IN CHILDREN AND FAMILIES FLEEING VIOLENCE IN THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE REGION.
Between 2014 and 2016, the number of children (both accompanied and unaccompanied) apprehended in the state of Tabasco increased by 60 percent. The majority of migrants traveling through this area of the border are from Honduras.
No One Talks About Life After Deportation; These Mexican Activists Are Changing That
A network of migrant activists is helping deportees and returnees readjust to life in the country.
Laura Weiss, The Nation, April 28, 2017
https://www.thenation.com/article/no-one-talks-about-life-after-deportation-these-mexican-activists-are-changing-that/
On the night of November 8, 2016, 26-year-old Maggie Loredo, like millions of others, was messaging her friends with growing anxiety. “Watching the election… It just all fell apart,” she recalled two months after Donald Trump’s victory. But Loredo was watching the election results not from the United States, a country where she lived for most of her life, but from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where she had returned eight years before.
Loredo came to the United States as a toddler with her family and decided to move back to Mexico after graduating high school. Barred from receiving financial aid from public universities in her home state of Georgia and with no way to legally work in the United States, Loredo thought it would be easier to attend college in the country where she was born. But in San Luis Potosí, she found that the officials at the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretary of Public Education) were incompetent and unable to give her the appropriate guidance to validate her high-school diploma.
In the meantime, she says she became the victim of labor abuse in a job at an English school that exploited and stole from her. “There was no way I would get another job, because I didn’t have a college diploma or experience or a lot of recommendation letters,” she explains. She says it almost felt like being undocumented again, despite being a Mexican citizen. It would take five years of navigating the government bureaucracy before she would be able to start college.
Laura Weiss, The Nation, April 28, 2017
https://www.thenation.com/article/no-one-talks-about-life-after-deportation-these-mexican-activists-are-changing-that/
On the night of November 8, 2016, 26-year-old Maggie Loredo, like millions of others, was messaging her friends with growing anxiety. “Watching the election… It just all fell apart,” she recalled two months after Donald Trump’s victory. But Loredo was watching the election results not from the United States, a country where she lived for most of her life, but from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where she had returned eight years before.
Loredo came to the United States as a toddler with her family and decided to move back to Mexico after graduating high school. Barred from receiving financial aid from public universities in her home state of Georgia and with no way to legally work in the United States, Loredo thought it would be easier to attend college in the country where she was born. But in San Luis Potosí, she found that the officials at the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretary of Public Education) were incompetent and unable to give her the appropriate guidance to validate her high-school diploma.
In the meantime, she says she became the victim of labor abuse in a job at an English school that exploited and stole from her. “There was no way I would get another job, because I didn’t have a college diploma or experience or a lot of recommendation letters,” she explains. She says it almost felt like being undocumented again, despite being a Mexican citizen. It would take five years of navigating the government bureaucracy before she would be able to start college.
La 72 Hogar Refugio para Personas Migrantes. Informe 2016
En los límites de la frontera, quebrando los límites: situación de los derechos humanos de las personas migrantes y refugiadas de Tenosique, Tabasco.
La 72 Hogar Refugio para Personas Migrantes. Informe 2016. Publicado por El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 26 de abril de 2017
“No podemos negar la crisis humanitaria que en los últimos años ha significado la migración de miles de personas, ya sea por tren, por carretera e incluso a pie, atravesando cientos de kilómetros por montañas, desiertos, caminos inhóspitos. Esta tragedia humana que representa la migración forzada hoy en día es un fenómeno global. Esta crisis, que se puede medir en cifras, nosotros queremos medirla por nombres, por historias, por familias. Son hermanos y hermanas que salen expulsados por la pobreza y la violencia, por el narcotráfico y el crimen organizado. Frente a tantos vacíos legales, se tiende una red que atrapa y destruye siempre a los más pobres. No sólo sufren la pobreza sino que además tienen que sufrir todas estas formas de violencia. Injusticia que se radicaliza en los jóvenes, ellos, «carne de cañón», son perseguidos y amenazados cuando tratan de salir de la espiral de violencia y del infierno de las drogas. ¡Y qué decir de tantas mujeres a quienes les han arrebatado injustamente la vida!” (Homilía del Papa Francisco el 17 de febrero de 2016 en Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua)
Tal parece que la tragedia es permanente; tal parece que nos hemos acostumbrado a escuchar el clamor, los gritos tumultuosos de aquellas y aquellos que van a la intemperie cargando su único patrimonio que han conseguido en su corta o larga, pero nunca dolorosa existencia: el sueño de una vida mejor. Y desafortunadamente, aquellas, aquellos que salen ahora de sus países para, literalmente, sobrevivir encuentran ya desde el inicio del camino en México, persecución, humillación, ultrajes sexuales, extorsión, muerte.
A continuación presentamos nuestro primer informe público.
In Mexico, momentum grows to put out welcome mat for 'Dreamers' search for solutions
David Laconangelo, The Christan Science Monitor, February 24, 2017
Mexico estimates that some 40,000 young people who lived undocumented in the US may move back in the next several years. Many face enormous obstacles in trying to transfer educational credits that are crucial to establishing a foothold in Mexico.
Before Maggie Loredo left her home in Georgia’s Dalton County for her grandfather’s house in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, she called the office of the Mexican public education secretariat.
If I want to apply to a public university, she asked, but I grew up in the United States, which documents am I going to need?
Nothing but your transcripts and diploma, the attendant told her.
Mexico estimates that some 40,000 young people who lived undocumented in the US may move back in the next several years. Many face enormous obstacles in trying to transfer educational credits that are crucial to establishing a foothold in Mexico.
Before Maggie Loredo left her home in Georgia’s Dalton County for her grandfather’s house in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, she called the office of the Mexican public education secretariat.
If I want to apply to a public university, she asked, but I grew up in the United States, which documents am I going to need?
Nothing but your transcripts and diploma, the attendant told her.
More Central Americans are giving up on the U.S. and looking instead to a Mexican dream
Kate Linthicum,
Los Angeles Times, Dec 01, 2016
Click aquí para una versión en español de este artículo
Tenosique, Mexico
Growing numbers of Central American immigrants have decided to stay in Mexico, because it's too hard to reach the U.S. The burden on Mexico is likely to grow under a Trump presidency, officials fear.
Unable to find work and terrified by the street gangs that brazenly roamed the streets, Karen Zaldivar was one of tens of thousands of young people who fled Honduras in 2014.
Caught trying to slip across the U.S.-Mexico border, she was promptly deported.
Last year, Zaldivar set out again, but with a new destination: Mexico. She now lives in a small city just north of the Guatemalan border along with growing numbers of other Central Americans who have concluded that if they can't reach the United States, the next best thing is Mexico.
"I decided to make a life here," she said at a small open-air restaurant in Tenosique, where she works in the kitchen, frying fish. "It's calmer, and safer."
Estimates of how many Central Americans are living in Mexico are hard to come by, in part because some, like Zaldivar, have obtained forged Mexican identity documents. But statistics show more and more are staying legally by seeking political asylum or humanitarian visas.
Asylum applications in Mexico nearly tripled over three years, hitting 3,424 in 2015. Asylum requests this year are poised to be twice that, human rights advocates say, with most filed by Hondurans and Salvadorans.
I decided to make a life here. It's calmer, and safer. Karen Zaldivar, Honduran immigrant in Mexico
Los Angeles Times, Dec 01, 2016
Click aquí para una versión en español de este artículo
Tenosique, Mexico
Growing numbers of Central American immigrants have decided to stay in Mexico, because it's too hard to reach the U.S. The burden on Mexico is likely to grow under a Trump presidency, officials fear.
Unable to find work and terrified by the street gangs that brazenly roamed the streets, Karen Zaldivar was one of tens of thousands of young people who fled Honduras in 2014.
Caught trying to slip across the U.S.-Mexico border, she was promptly deported.
Last year, Zaldivar set out again, but with a new destination: Mexico. She now lives in a small city just north of the Guatemalan border along with growing numbers of other Central Americans who have concluded that if they can't reach the United States, the next best thing is Mexico.
"I decided to make a life here," she said at a small open-air restaurant in Tenosique, where she works in the kitchen, frying fish. "It's calmer, and safer."
Estimates of how many Central Americans are living in Mexico are hard to come by, in part because some, like Zaldivar, have obtained forged Mexican identity documents. But statistics show more and more are staying legally by seeking political asylum or humanitarian visas.
Asylum applications in Mexico nearly tripled over three years, hitting 3,424 in 2015. Asylum requests this year are poised to be twice that, human rights advocates say, with most filed by Hondurans and Salvadorans.
I decided to make a life here. It's calmer, and safer. Karen Zaldivar, Honduran immigrant in Mexico
Secret Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails
"This Man Will Almost Certainly Die":
The Secret Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails
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| http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/9/this_man_will_almost_certainly_die |
A shocking new investigation about private prisons has revealed dozens of men have died in disturbing circumstances inside these facilities in recent years. The investigation published in The Nation magazine documents more than 100 deaths at private, immigrant-only prisons since 1998. The investigation’s author, Seth Freed Wessler, spent more than two years fighting in and out of court to obtain more than 9,000 pages of medical records that private prison contractors had submitted to the Bureau of Prisons. We speak to Wessler about his piece, "This Man Will Almost Certainly Die."
40 percent of the people inside of these prisons are incarcerated for the criminal offense of crossing over the border. In the early '90s, 4,000 people were prosecuted criminally for crossing over the border. By 2013, at the peak of these prosecutions under the Obama administration, 91,000 people were prosecuted criminally for illegal entry or illegal re-entry, for crossing the border—something we usually think of as a civil offense. You know, usually, people are detained and deported as a result of crossing the border without papers. But we've started to incarcerate, sometimes for years, tens of thousands of people.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/9/this_man_will_almost_certainly_die
Migrantes Centroamericanos
Caravan of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants
Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, Americas Program, 10 / December / 2015
Deportation, Detention and Abuse on the U.S.-Guatemala Border
By Laura Carlsen. Americas Program, Sept 8, 2015
Centroamericanos en Mexico: de migrantes a refugiados
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/21/politica/005n1pol
Deportados "repatriados" a Mex 2014 vs Mojados y Deportados de Mex 2014. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/17/politica/012n1pol
Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, Americas Program, 10 / December / 2015
It is estimated that there are between 70,000 and 120,000 migrants missing in transit in Mexico since 2006. There are no reliable statistics that determine their quantity. The puny official figures reflect that the families of the disappeared lack the resources or migration documents to come to Mexico and file formal reports in the public ministries, which are the only door to the official registry system and cannot be considered even remotely adequate. These estimates are based on the second Special Report on Kidnapping of Migrants in Mexico by the National Human Rights Commission, published in February 2011 that counted 214 kidnappings with a total of 11,333 victims in only six months.
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/17946
Deportation, Detention and Abuse on the U.S.-Guatemala Border
By Laura Carlsen. Americas Program, Sept 8, 2015
Mexico’s southern border has become the line of contention of the most powerful country in the world. 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. They try to arrive to USA, but the Mexican Migra stop them.
Centroamericanos en Mexico: de migrantes a refugiados
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/21/politica/005n1pol
Deportados "repatriados" a Mex 2014 vs Mojados y Deportados de Mex 2014. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/17/politica/012n1pol
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