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 News from Around the Americas | May 2006 
"I'm Mexican, Really," say Central America Migrants
 Tim Gaynor - Reuters
| | U.S. President George W. Bush (2nd L), and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (3rd L), receive a tour from Chief of Yuma Sector Ron Colburn (L) and Chief of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Border Patrol David Aguilar (R) as they tour the International Border with Mexico from the Yuma Sector Border on the United States side in San Luis, Arizona. (Larry Downing/Reuters) |
Non-Mexican Hispanics entering the United States illegally are studying up on Mexican history and geography, even learning to whistle the national anthem, to beat U.S. plans to fly them home.
As part of a proposal to overhaul immigration laws and tighten border security, President Bush pledged last week to increase deportations of illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico caught crossing the U.S. border.
Mexicans, who make up most of the almost 1.2 million immigrants detained crossing the border illegally in 2005, are given a criminal background check and then sent over the frontier, usually within a day. Many often try crossing again immediately.
But so-called Other Than Mexican, or OTM, illegal immigrants mostly from Central America, are increasingly being flown back hundreds of miles to their home countries, which can effectively end their dream of entering the United States to earn a better life.
So, many pretend to be Mexicans.
"We heard we could be sent back to our own countries, so many of us are trying to pass ourselves off as Mexicans," Honduran Jorge Alberto Carvajal, 38, said as he stood with a group of Central American migrants outside a shelter in this sweltering city south of Laredo, Texas.
"A lot are learning the Mexican national anthem and the names of the states, and even the names of the state's governors," said Carvajal, a former street trader from the city of San Pedro Sula.
Central American migrants say their journey north through Mexico to the border, often riding train box cars, is so tough they are willing to lie to U.S. agents about their nationality to avoid being flown back.
"I suffered a lot on the train journey. I was thirsty and hungry, and had to sleep in stables with animals," said Guatemalan father of five Jose Posadas, 34, as he prepared to cross the Rio Grande to McAllen, Texas, 140 miles east of Nuevo Laredo.
FALSE IDENTITY
Previously, illegal Central Americans apprehended on the U.S. side of the border were routinely served with a notice to appear before an immigration judge at a later date, after which most just melted into the United States and disappeared.
The majority of the 155,000 OTMs nabbed last year were freed onto the streets of U.S. cities. Bush called that so-called catch-and-release policy unacceptable.
A new strategy to detain the non-Mexican immigrants and fly them home was imposed on the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border last September, although it has been applied only patchily.
The program started in several areas of the border, notably the Del Rio and McAllen sectors in Texas, which had become swamped by OTMs. It covers citizens of Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said some 70,000 non-Mexican immigrants have been caught crossing from Mexico since October 1, down 11 percent from the same period a year ago.
At present, a decision on whether to send OTMs home in many cases depends on whether there is detention space to hold them pending repatriation flights.
Border Patrol spokeswoman Maria Valencia said it was common for agents to encounter OTMs attempting to pass themselves off as fellow Spanish-speaking Mexicans, and said some agents might be successfully tricked.
"Definitely ... Some might fool us to believe they are Mexicans, especially when we are overwhelmed and we are trying to process a large, large group," she said by telephone from Washington.
Agents were skilled at picking out impostors from their Mexican neighbors, Valencia said, but migrants like Posadas said they are now going to great lengths to try and beat border police and avoid deportation.
"I told (the Border Patrol) I was from the Zaragoza district of Reynosa ... I studied the streets of the area, and even had the names of my Mexican parents worked out," said the restaurant worker from Escuintla, Guatemala.
"They caught me ... and now I'll try again." |
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