Crime, Violence Driving Flight from Central America, Via Mexico, Towards US Border Mark Browne - CNSNews.com
go to original June 27, 2016

Migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — has risen steadily as violence has increased. Mary Small of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA and Shaina Aber of the United States Jesuit Conference explain what is driving people to flee for their lives. (Jesuit Refugee Service/USA)

Increased gang violence and extortion in Central America is forcing more men, women, children, and even the elderly to flee to Mexico in hopes of crossing into the U.S. illegally according to a Mexican expert in migration studies.

The Customs and Border Protection agency’s U.S. Border Patrol is also reporting an increase in families and unaccompanied children apprehended along the southwest border this year compared to last.

According to Javier Urbano Reyes, coordinator of the Master’s Degree program in Immigration Studies at the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City, transporting Central American migrants through Mexico to the U.S. border is “big business.”

Urbano said the trade enriches organized criminals who operate buses disguised as tourist vehicles filled with the migrants, even passing through government checkpoints. A single bus trip up Mexico’s eastern coast from the southern state of Tabasco to Tamaulipas in the north typically must pass through between 10 and 15 checkpoints, he said.

Mexican immigration authorities recently reported finding 102 migrants on two “high-end” tour buses rented by migrant traffickers, who collected between $7,000 and $10,000 dollars per person for passage from the Guatemalan border to Reynosa on the border with Texas, according to the Associated Press.

Urbano said the use of the unregistered buses disguised as tourist vehicles to transport undocumented migrants has been going on “for years” and that the price per migrant can now reach as high as $19,000 dollars.

Read the rest at CNSNews.com

Related: People Smugglers Adapting to Outwit Mexican Crackdown on Minors Reaching U.S. (AMI Newswire)

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