EFE
About 400 migrants managed to force their way to the wall between Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas, this Thursday, after crossing the wire fence and overcoming a group of US National Guard agents, and then being processed by the Department. of United States Immigration.
The group managed to sneak in at gate 40, very close to the Zaragoza-Ysleta international crossing, where the razor wire is minimal and surveillance is less.
“It has been hard, we are waiting for an opportunity, I want to jump in later. I have been traveling here in Mexico for four months now,” Eric Raúl Díaz Aguilar, who did not manage to cross among the 400, told EFE because on the Mexican side the agents of the National Migration Institute of Mexico were pressuring the migrants to dissipate and abort the assault.
“When they were already crossing, Immigration arrived. There's a friend there, he's yelling at me. That wire is dangerous, but there are many who are cutting it,” added Díaz, originally from Honduras and who took more than two months to reach the border Ciudad Juárez.
Likewise, he explained that migrants are forced to flee from the Mexican authorities because when they are captured they are sent to the south of the country and they have to make the entire journey again to reach the border with the United States.
Crossings like this have caused the National Guard to increase surveillance at points such as marker 36, where it has also been reinforced with more mesh fences and more razor wire.
Luis Hernández Zaldaña had a bakery in Ecuador, where he decided to flee after being extorted. On Wednesday he managed to enter United States territory, but was forced by the Texas National Guard to return to Mexico.
“We left Ecuador three months ago, we came through the Darien jungle, it took us more than two months to get here, we arrived in Chihuahua and they returned us. Just yesterday we crossed, the military returned to us. On the other hand, it is chaos, sometimes we find hungry children, they eat almost nothing to try to get somewhere else,” explained the Ecuadorian.
He said that they will continue trying until they get to the other side where he has relatives waiting for him so he can start making a life on that side of the border.
“Unfortunately, they didn't tell us like that, they told us to come and surrender at gates 36 and 45, but I never imagined finding the soldiers and the mesh and all those things, I thought it was just to come and surrender and that's it, But that is not the case, one finds many obstacles to cross,” he added.
The Mexican government has reinforced controls this year after the 77% increase in irregular migration in 2023, when it detected more than 782 thousand migrants in this situation.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last month that daily encounters with migrants on the border with the United States fell almost 55% from December to March.