Juarez City.- Ciudad Juárez is facing a humanitarian crisis with hundreds of migrants on the streets, without space in shelters to receive them, without the authorities agreeing to give them work permits and with a “hunt” against them by the municipal police Condemned Cristina Coronado, Apostolic Coordinator of Human Mobility for the Diocese of Juárez.
“It is a humanitarian crisis, because there are families with children looking for shelter, but they have all collapsed and the city police are chasing migrants in the streets; Tremendous, tremendous whole week they have complained, they take their documents, they take money, they take cell phone, their belongings, whole week they are very scared.
The municipal president, Cruz Pérez Cuéllar, warned yesterday that due to citizen complaints, the municipality would remove groups of migrants who are placed on public streets, especially on cruise ships to clean windows, ask for money or sell sweets. for.
“There are already many complaints from citizens, especially in the center, and we have an obligation to intervene, but as we did in Rio Grande, we do not want to do it in an untimely manner, but prefer to do it well planned Let’s organize,” he explained.
Cristina Coronado, coordinator of ministry for migrants at the San Colombano Missionary Society in Ciudad Juárez, said these have been very difficult days for migrants because “many people are on the streets, because there is no space in the shelters, and the government federal I do not plan to serve them.
And it is that given the saturation of the shelters, hundreds of migrants of various nationalities, mainly Venezuelans, have to sell sweets, clean windows or beg money on the streets to pay for rent rooms or nights be able to do. hotels, but the agents of the Municipal Public Security Secretariat (SSPM) have been ordered by Pérez Cuéllar not to let them sell in the center or at traffic lights.
“We are inviting the state, the federation to take joint action soon,” the municipal president said yesterday.
‘They can’t sit’
Activist described Perez Cuellar’s actions as “unfortunate” after ordering preventive police officers not to allow sit-ins outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe to enter the religious dining room, as happened yesterday When a small group lined up to enter they were told not to sit, but to stand and wait.
“They can’t sit on the floor with all due respect,” a police officer told those waiting, clinging to the gate of the cathedral office. “We’re queuing up for lunch”, “It’s just that we just arrived and we didn’t know you couldn’t sit while in line”, the migrants replied. “We tell them, this is a warning, there will not be another warning,” replied the municipality.
Later, when the line grew, other police officers approached the migrants again and told them that they could not be in the Plaza de Armas or sit in the flower beds.
“The federal-government is not playing its proper role, and the fact of having migrants as a problem, the way the municipal president is doing it, makes the community respond the way it wants: to drive them out.” Get them out, get them out. And we are a city of migrants, many of us can’t reach like them, but many of us also reach under tremendous circumstances,” Coronado pointed out.
No space in night shelters
Johan has been in Ciudad Juárez for more than three weeks looking to cross the border, but when he went to Grupo Beta, the State Population Council and the Leona Vicario Integration Center for Migrants (CIM) in search of shelter, the response was the same: in shelters There’s no room, so you have to sell “chupetitas” (popsicles) to pay for a room in a hotel; However, municipalities do not allow them to sell them.
“There are police officers who behave well and bless me, but others also steal the money we bring, they ask us for money,” said the Venezuelan.
Coronado said he believes the mayor is misinformed and ill-advised on the issue of immigration, as the city has no plan and “the shelters don’t have capacity to admit everyone, so this situation is I should have at least one small contingency program so these people aren’t on the street. They don’t want to sell popsicles in the cold, they need to sleep at least one night in a hotel to do this, so they Sell popsicles, wash cars, clean windows to pay for the night, that’s their dynamic.”
He said that what he is saying is the opposite of what is happening and what he is doing, “There is no desire, because we have seen police taking away young people on motorcycles who clean windows on cruise ships.” are”, but the National Institute of Migration (INM) does not give them work permits, which does not allow them to integrate into the city.
The municipality has to claim to the federal government, why did you accept so many migrants here and you have no plan? Because Leona Vicario – the only federal shelter – does not have capacity, and does not accept migrants without children, she said tartly.
“Sometimes I’m out there on the road, when we’re not meeting our colleagues at the hotel, we go out to work with a pack of pacifiers (popsicles) and together we greet each other at dinner and at the hotel. bless. We went to Cospo but they told me it is ‘full’, priority is families with children in the room sometimes they charge us 300 pesos, 200 pesos a day, it depends,” said Douglas Key, a Venezuelan who was an electrical engineering student and worked with his mother at a store in Caracas, Venezuela.
Another Venezuelan reported that when she asked for asylum, she was sent to CIM Leona Vicario, for whom she walked beside train tracks until she reached the federal shelter, where she told her that he had to request a job at INM and that he had to go back to the building next to the Lerdo bridge, where they told him that there were no more places in the shelters.
Because of this, he has to sell sweets for a hotel room in the city, which the city police have now gathered to stop.
Darwin is a 31-year-old Venezuelan migrant who has been in Juárez for two weeks with his wife and son, and the three of them sell popsicles in the city center. Yesterday they were at 16 de Septiembre and Francisco Villa.
They explain that they are waiting for the application process to be able to enter the United States, and since they cannot find a job, they sell candy to raise money to stay in a hotel, or if not, So they sleep on the street. ,
“It has become very congested and we are waiting for an appointment, there are days when we have to sleep on the street, if we finish we go to a hotel or if it is not too cold on the wall is,” he said.
He indicated that all the shelters are full and that is why he has to raise money for a hotel or simply sleep on the street, covering himself with cardboard.
Regarding the intervention that the mayor announced to remove them from public roads, he said that this is a drastic measure, because many of them do not harm anyone, they only want to survive to reach the United States, However, he added that he also understands that people feel upset.
“We chose not to be trapped, although people see more people asking for money and it attracts them in a certain way,” he said.
