From January to November of this year, 16,376 Cuban nationals have requested asylum, a total of 22% of all cases
14ymedio, Mexico, 5 December 2024 — According to statistics from the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR ) published this Tuesday, from January to November of this year, 16,376 Cubans formally applied for asylum, a total of 22% of all cases. This means that nationals of the island have become second largest group to apply for asylum in Mexico during 2024.
This is the second time in three years that Cubans have become the second largest group to to request asylum. This also happened in 2022 when 18,181 requested asylum. In both cases, Hondurans headed the list with 31,436 two years ago and 22,550 in 2024. Only in 2023 did a variation occur when 44,110 Haitians formally applied, surpassing 41,848 Honduran citizens and 18,450 Cubans
This year, applications for asylum in Mexico fell by 50%, from 140,725 to 73,317. Nevertheless, in the case of Cuba, the number has been stable in the last few years.
COMAR also reported that it completed processing for 5,124 applications submitted by Cubans, of which 3,514 were granted refugee status. In this sense, Cuba is second in the list of nationalities with a favorable outcome and is fourth if data from 2013 onward is taken into account because this adds 10,400 in more than a decade, behind only Honduras ( 73.095 ), Venezuela (25,683), and El Salvador (21,200).
Of the nine offices where the Commission for Aid to Refugees receives applications, the office in Tapachula, in Chiapas, a border state at the southernmost point in Mexico, is where the most applications are gathered, a total of 47,032 (64%). In this city, one of the primary stopping points for migrants in Mexican territory, in the last two months six caravans have formed bound for the United States, motivated by the pending arrival of Donald Trump to the White House in January of 2025.
The last two caravans have been dissolved by the Mexican authorities
Although the Ministry of the Interior has assured that at the end of November there will be an “open route” for migrants in transit through the country, the last two caravans have been dissolved by the Mexican authorities. The Fray Matías de Córdova Center for Human Rights in Chiapas denounced that a common procedure is that Immigration Agents “coerce families to get in their cars and in exchange they offer a document that allows regular transit for the next 20 days. But we have not seen this document and from experience we know that, in the end, they don’t give them anything, that it is only to break up the caravans,” the Center asserted.
The Center has also documented: “acts of intimidation by the National Immigration Institute and the National Guard aimed at migrant families and defenders of human rights.”
For Irineo Mujica, leader of the Peoples Without Borders Organization and one of the organizers of the migrant caravans, with these actions “the government of Mexico is sending a message to Trump.” In an interview with 14ymedio the activist asserted that: “immigration is used to negotiate.”
“They create a bottleneck in the south of the country , they take immigrants out of the route and put them at risk.” She added: “they bet on the exhaustion and breaking the spirit” of people and their main motivation she continued “is political and the immigrants always end up losing.”
Ever since taking power, the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum promised a “humanitarian migrant strategy” and the development of an industrial center in the south of the country although she did not provide more details. Nevertheless she did report in the past month that the daily crossing of immigrants at the United States border had fallen by 75% from December of 2023, owing to action by the Mexican government. This statistic was issued in response to threats from Donald Trump to impose tariffs on exports from Mexico to the United States if Mexico does not find a way to reduce the migratory flow and organized crime.
Translated by William Fitzhugh
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