Migrants hold hands in Tapachula, Mexico on December 6, 2021 to control other migrants who want to get on a bus. MEXICO CITY, December 7, Reuters - Mexican officials have sped up the transfer of thousands of migrants from southern Mexico to other regions as northern border states prepare to receive asylum seekers from the United States.
Dozens of buses full of migrants, mostly from Central America as well as some from Cuba and Venezuela, have the city of Tapachula in Chiapas state in recent days to go to other states, a Reuters witness and activist said on Monday.
Many of the migrants had waited months in Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, to try to regularize their migration status. Many people have left violent and impoverished home countries hoping to seek asylum in the United States.
U.S. President Joe Biden's administration said on Thursday it would re-instate the Migrant Protection Protocols MPP, a controversial Trump-era policy that requires asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico, a decision that shelters along the northern border have said could overwhelm their capacity.
The first group of migrants to be returned to Mexico this week is expected to be returned to Mexico under the revamped program.
In Tapachula, 45 buses took migrants out of the city on Saturday, according to a government source who requested anonymity.
Migrant rights activist Luis Garcia Villagran said migration officers took 32 full buses of migrants out of the city on Sunday and another 70 on Monday.
He said they are trying not saturate the northern border now that MPP is starting. They are moving them more quickly, controlling where the migrants are going. Mexico's national migration institute did not respond to a request for comment.
A Nicaraguan migrant who was not identified said he was relived to get on a bus to the city of San Miguel de Allende in the central state of Guanajuato.
He said I was here for a few months, but thank God we are going.
Large numbers of migrants, especially from Haiti, remained in Tapachula waiting for buses, with some sleeping in a camp outside a stadium that the migration officers have used as a processing center.