This post is also available in: Spanish
Doña Francisca* keeps a photo of herself and a young relative, Kevin*, on her phone. In the photo, Doña Francisca is wearing a mask, but Kevin is bare-faced, clean-cut and smiling. He looks like a good kid. “He’s the kind of person that, if he sees something dirty, he’ll stop what he’s doing and clean it up,” she tells me. I’m not surprised: Doña Francisca is the same way. After our interview, she takes all our coffee cups to the sink and washes them up, laughing with the staff of the migrant shelter where we met.
Doña Francisca showed me Kevin’s photo because we couldn’t meet him ourselves. At the time, he was in a detention centre known as La Mosca, located on the outskirts of nearby Tuxtla Gutierrez, which has been described by detainees as overcrowded, unsanitary, and “a terrible place.” Like thousands of other Honduran citizens, Kevin initially arrived in one of the caravans that made international headlines in 2018 and 2019.
Since then, caravans have continued to leave Honduras, but very few migrants have managed to reach even Mexico, stopped in their tracks by a suite of U.S. policies that have effectively pushed the U.S. border all the way to the frontier between Honduras and Guatemala. Meanwhile, a sharp increase in the militarization on Mexico’s southern border, a joint project of the U.S. and Mexican governments, mean even those who managed to reach Mexico before borders snapped shut are still in constant danger of being detained and deported—even those who, like Kevin, have a legal right to remain in the country.
Many reasons to migrate
Kevin’s life hasn’t been easy. His mother abandoned the family when he was young, and Kevin grew up with his father and grandmother. He left school at a young age to start working, at first in a mechanics’ workshop, and then making iron balconies and window. But the money was never quite enough.
One day, Kevin witnessed a robbery committed by a local gang, and instead of turning a blind eye, reported it. The gang responsible for the robbery started threatening him; meanwhile, other gangs were trying to recruit him. Eventually, threats of violence, combined with the constant struggle to make ends meet, became too much. In 2018, at 14 years old, he joined the migrant caravan and left Honduras in search of safety and a job that would help him support his family.
“More than anything, he came here so he could support his grandmother,” Doña Francisca says. “His grandmother is everything to him.”
Like Kevin, many migrants from Central America and elsewhere leave home for a combination of many reasons, including fleeing violence, looking for better economic opportunities, rejoining family, or being displaced by the effects of climate change. These factors intersect and influence each other, making it difficult to say someone has migrated for any one reason.
The militarization of Mexico’s southern border
In the chaos of the caravan’s arrival in Mexico in 2018, a fellow migrant in was killed after falling from the vehicle Kevin was traveling in. Because he had witnessed this death, Kevin was granted a humanitarian visa, and released into the care of his aunt, Doña Francisca, who lives near the Mexico-Guatemala border. After a couple years, he received word that his father was very ill, and returned to Honduras to be with him. When he died, Kevin was the last family member who could support his grandmother, and so he left Honduras once again for Mexico. This time, there was no humanitarian visa—Kevin was now living in Mexico undocumented.
Doña Francisca is also undocumented, despite her regular attempts to regularize her migration status. Her husband is Mexican, so she’s entitled to Mexican residency, but the process is confusing and bureaucratic, and it’s hard to find the information she needs to get everything in order. Despite this, neither Kevin nor Doña Francisca were worried when they boarded a bus in late 2020 to visit family members in Mexico City—after all, they had been safe for so long.
But they hardly had a chance to settle in for the day-long journey before they hit a migration checkpoint. Somehow, Kevin and Doña Francisca were identified as Honduran nationals and taken off the bus. They were held in detention for three days. When Doña Francisca’s husband arrived at the station, he paid to have Doña Francisca released. However, because Kevin and Doña Francisca don’t share either of their last names, they were unable to prove their family relationship, and so Kevin remained in custody.
Chiapas has changed significantly since large migrant caravans from Central America first started arriving in Mexico in 2018. At first, Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador granted humanitarian visas, like the one Kevin received the first time he entered Mexico, to all migrants. However, after receiving 13,000 applications in three weeks, the program was declared “too successful” and cancelled. Then, in June of 2019, then-U.S. president Donald Trump threatened Mexico with potentially crushing tariffs if Mexico didn’t do something to stop Central American migrants from arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“From then on, we’ve observed the militarization of our context,” said Sandybell Reyes, coordinator of MCC partner Voces Mesoamericanas’ migrant advocacy program. “Every twenty kilometres, at every entrance or exit to every community, there are checkpoints.”
These checkpoints are frequently staffed not by civilian migration agents, but by members of the Mexican National Guard, identifiable by their military-style uniforms and black armbands. The National Guard is under military command and is largely comprised of former police officers and members of the armed forces, with a mandate to prevent crime and preserve public safety—not to detain migrants.
A dysfunctional system
Under Mexican law, detained migrants under the age of 18 are supposed to be taken to special shelters for minors. At the time Kevin was detained, there were no beds available at any of the shelters, so he was first detained at La Mosca, an infamous detention centre housed in a former factory on the outskirts of Chiapas’s capital city, Tuxtla Gutierrez.
It was during his stay at La Mosca that Kevin met Sandybell Reyes as part of a routine monitoring trip carried out by Voces’ migrant advocacy team. Reyes and other Voces staff regularly visit detention centres like La Mosca as part of an MCC-funded project in Chiapas. During these meetings, they evaluate migrants’ needs and determine who might have a right to seek asylum in Mexico, or a right to stay in the country because of family connections. In Kevin’s case, he had both.
But before Reyes and Doña Francisca had made much headway on Kevin’s case, he was transferred—not to a shelter for minors, or even another detention centre, but to a rehabilitation facility: a place where severe punishments and hard labour are used to “cure” people of their addictions. It was the only place that had space for him.
When Doña Francisca visited him, he told her he was being mistreated. He had marks on his back and shoulders to prove it. The woman in charge of the shelter told Doña Francisca that Kevin had been misbehaving, starting fights with the other occupants, and it had been necessary to “correct” him using physical punishment. Doña Francisca was immediately suspicious. Polite, tidy Kevin, starting fights?
As soon as she left the shelter, Doña Francisca went straight to Voces Mesoamericanas and she and Reyes got to work, filing complaints to the National Human Rights Commission and to the National Migration Institute, as well as to the state institute responsible for the rights of children and adolescents. As a result, it was recommended that Kevin be transferred to a shelter for minors in another city, closer to where Doña Francisca lives.
But when the day of the transfer arrived, Kevin disappeared. He wasn’t answering his phone, and the woman in charge of the shelter wasn’t either. Reyes started calling all of her contacts, but it was no use. No one knew where he had been taken.
On a bright, cloudless day in late November 2020, I got into a car with Reyes and other staff members from Voces Mesoamericanas. We were visiting migrant shelters in Chiapas, both so the migrant advocacy team could follow up on cases, and so I could see what Voces’ work looked like first-hand. Over coffee and sweet rolls, we heard about the challenges facing migrants arriving in southern Mexico. Sometimes those challenges were criminal actors—narcos and human traffickers—but migrants were also increasingly at risk as a result of increased militarization of migrant routes.
The results of this militarization vary, from deportation back to risky situations in migrants’ home countries to detention in over-crowded shelters, like La Mosca, that lack basic supplies to attend to migrants’ needs, or worse: Amnesty International has documented incidents of torture and sexual assault committed by the National Guard against migrants in Chiapas and Sonora.
Somewhere on the highway between Las Margaritas and Comitan, close to the border with Guatemala, Reyes received a phone call from UNHCR. They had found Kevin.
What happened is still unclear. Kevin had been sent, not to the shelter for minors, but back to La Mosca. Whoever had made this decision hadn’t informed anyone—not UNHCR, not Voces Mesomericanas, not Doña Francisca. Her eyes filled with angry tears as she described the way she and her family had been treated by Mexico’s detention system.
“They just sent him like a little animal into the wolf’s lair,” she said. “They’re not treating him the way a human being should be treated.”
Militarization of Mexico’s southern border continues in 2021
Since November 2020, Reyes and Doña Francisca have been able to get Kevin transferred to the shelter for minors, but they have not been able to have him released to Doña Francisca’s care—they’re still struggling to prove the family connection. If that doesn’t work out, an asylum claim may be their only option.
Meanwhile, the devastation caused by Hurricanes Eta and Iota has continued to push more and more people out of Honduras. In January, Guatemalan police and soldiers stopped the first migrant caravan of 2021 before it even reached the Mexican border, and in Mexico, more migrants are being kept in detention. More members of the National Guard are also being sent to Chiapas after the border with Guatemala was closed in March of 2021, allegedly to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Recently, the United States announced it had reached agreements with the governments of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to tighten their borders. Both U.S. and Mexican officials say this is a way of protecting children by making sure they don’t fall victim to human trafficking or aren’t used as “human passports.” But as we’ve seen with Kevin’s case, militarizing borders won’t keep children from leaving their homes, and it’s no guarantee that they’ll be safe from harm once they do.
* Last names not used to protect their identities
Annalee Giesbrecht is the Context Analyst and Advocacy and Communications Support coordinator for MCC Latin America and the Caribbean.