Shelters Along Mexican Border Strained by Migrants Returning From US David Agren - Catholic News Service
go to original May 29, 2013

La Jornada, or the Journey, was a 5-week long excursion through the Migration Corridor, led by a group of 7 Jesuits. The intent of the program was to better understand, but not replace, the authentic experiences of migrant workers. INN met up with the group on their last day of the journey, in Nogales, Sonora, México. (IgnatianNewsNetwork)

SALTILLO, Mexico - Gerardo Bueso, 26, has been deported from the United States twice. He is trying a third time to reach the United States, where he previously worked as a gardener.

"The (Honduran) economy is very poor so we (migrate) to get ahead," said Bueso, who was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, an industrial city now considered the murder capital of the world.

Bueso is among the more than a million immigrants deported from the United States over the past five years, even as the administration of President Barack Obama presses for comprehensive immigration reform.

The wave of deportees has strained Mexican border cities, many of which already suffer from organized crime violence, and has put pressure on migrant shelters used to serving people headed north, not south.

Alberto Xicotencatl directs a Catholic-run migrant shelter in Saltillo and works closely with colleagues in the border states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas. He said they are concerned about the haphazard nature of deportations, with hundreds of deportees arriving in one border town a certain day and the same thing happening in another locale the next.

They also said the deportees are easy targets for organized crime gangs, whose members steal what little the deportees arrive with. Many deportees stick around border towns in desperate attempts to return to the U.S., said Xicotencatl. Some deportees have been in the U.S. so long that they are desperate to return, while some have only loose ties with the homes they abandoned long ago.

Read the rest at US Catholic

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