Mexican authorities on Sunday evicted about 380 migrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, from a makeshift camp in Tijuana, near the US border.
Migration officials in the North American country said they were planning to relocate them in the area just south of San Diego, California, from the present site near El Chaparral International Garita.
The migrants were told by authorities that they would be allowed to bring only three pairs of clothes but not any additional items, according to reports.
“We came from our country because there is a lot of crime, they take us out of there and now they take us out of here,” a Honduran woman Maritza, who had been putting up in a tent for a year and six months with her two children, was quoted as saying.
“How do they want one to find a way to enter the United States?” she said in protest.
Rosalía Mejía, a woman from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero who had been living in the camp for six months with her three children, said what they were doing to them was “wrong and inhumane”.
After the eviction, the authorities began to destroy the tents as well as the clothing and household items that they had not been allowed to take along.
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A year ago, there were more than 2,000 migrants at the camp who demanded a response to their request for refuge in the US, in a bid to escape violence in their places of origin.
With the passage of time, the number of migrants plummeted to 380.
On Sunday, members of the riot police from the Tijuana Municipal Police arrived at the migrant camp, followed by the mayor of Tijuana, Monserrat Caballero, and the secretary of the Baja California state government, Catalino Zavala, to oversee the eviction.
“This is an area with a lot of vehicular traffic and we did it early so that they could arrive during the day because doing it at night was definitely very dangerous,” Caballero was quoted as saying.
Scores of asylum seekers, who hail mainly from Central America and face violence and poverty in their home countries, have been crossing into Mexico in a bid to make their way into the United States.
Many of them end up being victims of Mexican drug cartels that are involved in human trafficking.
The illegal entry of asylum seekers in the US dropped significantly after the outbreak of coronavirus in early 2020. However, it picked up again in late 2020, before witnessing a rapid surge last January when US President Joe Biden took office.
On December 9, a truck carrying undocumented Central American migrants crashed at about 100 kilometers per hour into a footbridge, killing at least 59, mostly from Guatemala.
