Mexican Cops Do Trump's Dirty Work Thwarting Asylum Seekers

[DonViejo]

Mexico is not paying for ‘The Wall,’ but some officials are playing the U.S. administration’s game along the border, and the human cost is high.

Alice Driver
02.20.19 4:35 AM ET

PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico—Children were hanging onto the fence, peering out of a “shelter” in this town just across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas. There had been some 1,800 migrants, including pregnant women and babies, detained in this vacant factory in Piedras Negras that is surrounded by the Mexican army and police.

The numbers were declining amid relocations and forced repatriations, but none were allowed to leave for the U.S. border–especially not to request asylum, which is their right under U.S. and international law. Journalists, almost without exception, were not allowed to enter the factory, see conditions, and interview migrants. So we talked through the fence.

And then, on Tuesday, they were gone, shipped off to places harder for the press to find. Mexican officials, it turns out, are playing Donald Trump's tune, but while it's very noisy on the U.S. side of the border, here it's in the key of silence, and the regional authorities want to keep it that way.

On Feb. 15 when I arrived in Eagle Pass on the U.S. side of the river, Customs and Border Protection, the National Guard, a SWAT Group, Border Patrol and the Texas state police shut down the international bridge to Piedras Negras for 20 minutes in an emergency practice drill that the local newspaper here described as “showing migrants force via a drill.”

As I drove across the bridge on Feb. 16, the air hummed with the sound of helicopters, and Border Patrol cars lined the golf course on the Eagle Pass side of the border.

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