Néstor Jiménez and Arturo Sánchez
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, November 28, 2024, p. 5
Contrary to the speech of the next president of the United States, Donald Trump, who has criticized that migrants have arrived in his country en masse through Mexico, Mexican government figures show that arrests of foreigners in national territory increased 10 times , when comparing this year’s data with that of 2017, when the Republican’s first term began.
In 2017, 93 thousand in an irregular situation were arrested, and this year there are already 925 thousand, as of August. In total, almost 3 million migrants were detained in seven years. In contrast, visitor cards for humanitarian reasons totaled 444 thousand in the same period. It is linked to an increase in the migratory flow in recent years. According to SRE estimates, irregular entry through the southern border increased 285 percent between 2022 and 2023.
According to statistics from the Migration Policy Unit of the Ministry of the Interior, in 2017 93,846 events of people in an irregular immigration situation in Mexico
that is, these are the cases of foreigners in an irregular immigration situation who had an immigration administrative procedure (PAM) initiated before the National Migration Institute (INM) for not proving their situation
.
In 2024, with figures until the end of August, there are already 925,085 migrants detained.
Arrests have also had a constant increase for eight years. In 2018 there were 131,445; in 2019, 182,940, and in 2020 there was a decrease during the start of the covid-19 pandemic, with 82,379. However, the following year 309,692 were reported; In 2022 there were 441,409 and last year it closed with 778,907.
In contrast, visitor cards for humanitarian reasons that are granted to refugee applicants in the same period total 444,781, of which just over 3,000 are reported this year.
The increase in arrests is linked to an increase in the migratory flow in recent years, mainly from Central and South America. According to reports from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, irregular entry through the southern border skyrocketed between 2022 and 2023. From 399 thousand it increased to 439 thousand. And if it is compared to the 71,860 irregular entries registered in 2018, the increase for 2023 was 555 percent.
During the first years of the administration of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, most of the irregular crossings through southern Mexico were migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Starting in 2021, the number of Venezuelans on the southern border grew from 1,010 to 49,943 between 2021 and 2022. Likewise, in 2023 this figure increased by 126 percent.
Meanwhile, between January and September 2024, the US authorities returned to Mexico 154,203 Mexicans who were in its territory irregularly, while the Canadian authorities did the same with 1,564 Mexicans, according to official figures.
