Yumili Acosta and Yaniel Ponce de León lost their jobs after the local government’s temporary program for migrants ended in May.
14ymedio, Angel Salinas, Mexico City, 5 June 2025 — Unemployed and unresponsive to their request for asylum, Yumili Acosta, Otmara Arencibia Bustamante and Yaniel Ponce de León hold the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (COMAR) in the border state of Chiapas responsible for lengthening the procedure and not giving them a date for obtaining asylum.
Acosta has been looking for work for five days. “The Oxxo [chain of shops open 24 hours] do not accept migrants,” says the woman who was part of the temporary program that the government of Chiapas reactivated in February to hire 500 people with paperwork at the Comar to sweep streets, collect garbage and paint public spaces.
On 30 May, Acosta received the last weekly payment of 1,250 pesos ($61.59). “There is work in the markets, but they pay 80 to 120 pesos (4 to 6 dollars) per day. It’s 10 hours with food,” he says.
Acosta is unaware of the existence of the Southern Border Commission, made up of deputies who this Wednesday made a tour of the vicinity of the Suchiate River and offered to regularize this group of people to integrate them into jobs on the southern border with Guatemala. “There are better paying jobs, but that’s for people with papers.” In the morning he went to the COMAR, where officials asked him to wait for a message.
Arencibia still hasn’t received the notice to go to the COMAR headquarters in the Fraccionamiento Las Vegas, in Tapachula, to make a video to complete his regularization process. Last week was critical for his health.
The legal appeal that he filed last May with the COMAR to justify asylum, says Arencibia, allowed him access to the offices and a staff member to take care of his case, but “the process has stopped, and they aren’t telling me why”.
Yaniel Ponce de León, another of the Cubans who saw his American dream truncated with the arrival of Donald Trump to the US presidency, tells 14ymedio that it is stressful to be stopped by the police to review your temporary CURP (unique population registration key), which is granted upon the initiation of proceedings in the COMAR.
“If you forget the document, they take you to immigration prison, and there you can be incommunicado for a week,” he says, referring to the immigration stations. “I complied with the eight requests for care they asked me to sign; I was part of the temporary project that gave work to migrants; I rented a room; I had no problems. But that is not enough for them to grant me asylum.”
In April, the municipal president of Tapachula, in Chiapas, Aaron Yamil Melgar Bravo, proposed that migrants from Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti who are stranded in the municipality could be used in different construction projects for the Maya Train, the Interoceanic Corridor and the factories. No agreement has been reached so far.
“I asked if there was work on the train construction in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, but they told me that they didn’t need people for now,” says Ponce de León.
Between February and March, the state of Chiapas promoted two temporary employment programs for migrants. There were 890 places opened during this period. The most recent is for fumigators to stop the spread of diseases such as dengue, malaria, zika and chikungunya.
Each of the 390 migrants is paid a salary of just over 2,300 pesos every two weeks, which is less than the average wage of 3,350 pesos for a worker. Also, they do not have medical services or other benefits stipulated in the Federal Labor Law such as the payment of benefits, a savings fund, ration vouchers and food.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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