The Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid reports that the number of applications decreased in 2024, with 78,975, including 17,884 citizens from the Island.
14ymedio/EFE, Mexico City, 8 January 2025 — The Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (Comar in Spanish)) claims that applications from migrants fell by almost 44% in 2024. According to official figures, it served 78,975 migrants that year, or 43.8% less than in 2023, when a total of 140,720 foreigners went to one of the commission’s nine offices.
For many Cubans, however, asylum applications have not really dropped, but rather Mexico is responding negatively to them. Thus, Osiel Rodriguez, reports that the Comar rejected his asylum application just as it did for at least 30 other Cubans the day he went to the office in Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala. The Mexican authorities, he tells 14ymedio, told him that “he was not a politically persecuted person” and considered that he had left the island because of “economic problems.”
Rodriguez was instead granted a safe-conduct with which he can remain in the country for a maximum of 20 days. In his account, the Cuban insists that he left because of the “persecution” he suffered and the “threats of the regime” when he made public his discontent with the situation in the country. “In Cuba, there is no freedom, they put you in jail for thinking differently.”
Osiel Rodriguez is desperate to go to the U.S.: “Whatever it takes, paying a coyote or in a convoy, but I have to be at the border at Piedras Negras on the 16th and be able to cross before Trump is sworn in.”
He said he has not been able to log in to the CBP One application. “It’s crashing, I keep trying, but I don’t know if I will be able to log in.”
Donald Trump warned that he will toughen immigration laws from day one of his term in office. One of the measures is to close the CBP One application. Since its implementation, also in January 2023, until last December, more than 904,500 people have been able to schedule their appointments to appear at the border.
In Tapachula, the National Migration Institute set up 12 checkpoints to prevent the nearly 30,000 migrants in the state from moving forward. “They are closing the roads, holding us and returning us to Tapachula,” denounces Guatemalan Tonatiuh Gomez. “They don’t want trouble when Trump becomes president, that’s what the soldiers say.”
Local authorities claim that the concern in Chiapas is to tackle human trafficking networks. This Tuesday 30 video surveillance cameras were uninstalled on the Hidalgo and Suchiate border, which criminal groups used to monitor migrants to “extort and kidnap them,” the state prosecutor’s office said in a brief statement.
Meanwhile, in the United States, civil rights and immigrant organizations criticized the Laken Riley Act, approved Tuesday by the lower chamber of the new Congress, considering that it will facilitate President-elect Donald Trump’s massive deportation plan and eliminate due process for those charged with non-violent crimes.
The initiative, if passed this Friday by the Senate, will strengthen Trump’s position, who takes office this coming January 20, to unleash mass deportations and will allow racial discrimination when it comes to punishing non-violent crimes, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stressed on Wednesday.
The bill requires immigration authorities to detain undocumented migrants accused of committing theft and other non-violent crimes so they can be deported.
Translated by LAR
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