The African migrants join the long lines forming outside the Tapachula offices of the refugee agencies of Mexico and the United Nations and the local headquarters of the National Institute of Immigration – joining an international throng that includes people mostly from Central America, and people from Asia, and the Caribbean.
Just about all of the migrants are seeking to go to one destination, the United States. And all of them, regardless of their home country, are now caught up in an expanding Mexican immigration crackdown prompted by pressure from the U.S. to stem the flow of Central American migrants.
From Texas to Maine, officials are doing their best to absorb the sharp increase in migrants from Africa. They fly across the ocean from the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola. There are also Cameroonians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Mauritanians, Sudanese and Congolese.
Where #Refugees are coming from. (2018) #immigrants pic.twitter.com/kSo43xVCJl
— MeMA-Music (@MEMA_Music) June 13, 2019
Cameroonians generally fly to Ecuador because no visa is required and take about four months to walk to Tijuana. Walking through the dense jungles of Panama, they are often robbed and held in government-run camps.
They come from Cameroon’s English-speaking south with horrifying stories of rape, murder, and torture since late 2016 by soldiers of the country’s French-speaking majority, which holds power, according to the Associated Press.
Apprehensions have doubled
In one recent week, Border Patrol agents near the Del Rio sector stopped over 500 African migrants, in several different groups after they all had waded across the Rio Grande River with their children.
This is more than the total of 211 African migrants who were detained by the Border Patrol along the entire 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) U.S.-Mexico border in the 2018 fiscal year.
Fox News is reporting that “Mexico, on the overland route to America, is on pace to tripling the number of African immigrants it is processing this year, up from 2,100 in 2017.”
U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to Del Rio Sector apprehended a large group of 116 individuals—from Angola, Cameroon and Congo—after they illegally crossed the Rio Grande River into the U.S. on Thursday: pic.twitter.com/HWGyVtzEC6
— CBP (@CBP) May 31, 2019
Besides being dropped off in San Antonio by border patrol, a number of African migrants were bussed to Portland, Maine. Apparently, word had already spread that Portland would welcome them because Somali refugees were resettled in Portland in the 1990s. Portland is now preparing for a greater influx.
Already, about 170 asylum seekers have arrived in recent days. Hundreds more are expected in an influx that City Manager Jon Jennings called unprecedented. With one shelter already full, a basketball venue called the Portland Exposition Building was converted into an emergency shelter.
Portland officials tweeted Thursday that rumors some of the migrants are carrying the Ebola virus “are patently false,” and said that as asylum seekers, they are in the United States legally.
Keep this in mind reading this because there is already a pile of fake news stories all over the web, saying these migrants are carrying the Ebola virus.
Even though the majority of migrants trying to get to the U.S. are primarily Central American, they, along with all the different nationalities coming through Mexico to reach our border are fleeing oppression and civil disruption. Others are fleeing countries already impacted by the climate crisis.