To avoid illegal migration to the US, Mexico quadruples rejection of Brazilians

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Mexico is closing its airports and barring more Brazilians who try to enter the country. This year, 1,846 travelers of this nationality were denied entry at  Mexican airports, or 2.3% of all visitors from January to April.

This is four times the number of rejections in the same period in 2020 and 2019, in the pre-pandemic. Brazil is the third country of origin within the most inadmissible visitors, behind Ecuador and Colombia.

Authorities who dealt with the issue and gave interviews on the condition of anonymity say that there is underreporting since not all cases are reported, and that historically the proportion is the repatriation of 0.4% of all Brazilian tourists. This year, in just one day, April 8th, there were at least 78 non-admission cases, more than the occurrences in the whole month of March 2020.

An alert on the subject was given by the Federal Police of Minas Gerais, which made a note stating that it has found an “increase in the refusal of entry of Brazilians by Mexican authorities in immigration procedures at airports. According to the text, the goal of the Mexican government is to prevent the entry of people who want to cross the land border and enter the US irregularly, and those barred have a “migration alert” against them.

Itamaraty said it had noticed the upward trend and that the issue is a priority for the Brazilian embassy.

While waiting for repatriation inside the airport, travelers complain of mistreatment by police officers, poor housing conditions, and inability to communicate with relatives. According to their complaints, the Mexicans give the immigrants the same discriminatory treatment that many of their citizens receive when crossing the US border.

Folha newspaper had access to a video made by one of the Brazilians detained in May at the Mexico City airport. He did not want to be interviewed but said he managed to hide his cell phone before it was seized – devices are confiscated while waiting for the repatriation flight.

The images show a place with bunks very close to each other, full of men lying down, most of them without masks. According to the Spanish newspaper El País, the facility is known to Latin American tourists as a “cell,” “dungeon,” or “little room.”

“If someone had Covid in there, they were going to contaminate everyone,” says soccer player Matheus Barboza, 23, who was detained for 24 hours in this same place. “There were about 60 people inside the room, about 40 were Brazilians. We didn’t sleep because every hour, they opened the door to put someone else inside, it was like a prison. They didn’t let us call anyone; they took our cell phones, watches, bags, everything. It was an embarrassing situation.”

Matheus claims that he traveled to Mexico to play soccer for a local team. He says he took his employment contract and negative Covid test and that the agents asked him to open his social networks. “I showed pictures of me playing soccer; they wanted to see my conversations with my mother, my girlfriend,” he says.

He believes he was barred because he didn’t have a return ticket, but he says he didn’t have one because he would stay and work in the country. He also says that he has never been to the US.

Brazilians Janaína and Ulysses Rodrigues were also barred by the Mexican authorities, who claimed that he could not enter because he was a “migratory threat”. According to the couple, they lived in London for ten years, came to Brazil to visit family, and would stop in Cancun before returning to Europe.

“We wanted to close the trip with a golden key. We showed them the hotel reservation, which we had paid in cash, R$10,000 (US$1,850), but they wouldn’t let us explain; they didn’t even want to know,” says Janaína, 34, who estimates that she lost at least R$15,000.

She says that she was put in a different room from her husband, where there were about 30 people crammed together, ten of them from Brazil. “The place was a dump. They treated us super bad, left us hungry, barely had water to drink. If a child cried, they told him to shut up.”

One of the Brazilians, she says, had a son with autism crying a lot and started to feel sick. “Another girl had to yell at the guards to let her husband into the room.”

Ulysses, 37, believes he was barred because he was denied a visa to the US in 2015, he says. “But we were carrying 23-pound suitcases, plus carry-on luggage and a backpack. There was no way to look at us and think we were going to cross [the border],” says Janaína.

It is not only Brazilians who have become targets. Other Latin American countries have noticed the same increase in repatriations in the first months of this year. In March, the government of Colombia formally expressed to Mexico its concern for the “repeated inadmissions” and alleged human rights violations in the treatment of Colombians waiting for their flight home.

Since February, a group of embassies and consulates from Latin American countries, including Brazil, held meetings with Mexican authorities to ask for better treatment for their citizens denied entry  at the airport.

The keynote of the discussion was that although Mexico has sovereignty to decide who enters its territory, it should respect the laws and treat the barred travelers with dignity. It was also requested that Mexico notify the governments of the cases of barred citizens and allow phone calls from these people to a relative and the consulate.

In mid-March, the head of the migration department at the Mexico City airport was changed. Although the number of banned people remained high, there were fewer official complaints of mistreatment by Brazilians afterward.

Brazil banned flights to Mexico from the beginning of the pandemic until July last year. Even with the resumption of the route, the number of flights decreased considerably due to lower demand.

This year, demand has increased again. From January to April 2021, more than 79,000 Brazilians traveled to Mexico, according to the country’s embassy. The average for the whole year, pre-pandemic, was around 350 thousand. Because it does not require a visa and is one of the few countries currently open to flights departing from Brazil, Mexico has been one of the preferred locations for Brazilian tourists who need to quarantine in another country before flying to the US or other destinations in Europe and Asia.

But the resumption of flights has also brought to Mexico more migrants who want to try their luck at crossing the US border without a visa. Many are attracted by the end of the term of Republican President Donald Trump, who had a strong anti-immigration banner and was defeated by Democrat Joe Biden.

The US has agreements with Mexico to address the migration issue jointly. Since his inauguration, Biden has been negotiating for the neighboring country to tighten controls on the entry of migrants heading to the border.

In March, the Mexican government agreed to send 10,000 security agents to the border to detain migrants. In return, the US promised to send Covid vaccines to Mexicans and to invest in humanitarian and economic programs in the region to address the systemic causes that drive people to migrate.

Chosen by Biden to address the issue in his administration, the US vice president, Kamala Harris – herself a daughter of immigrants – met virtually with the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on the 7th and scheduled a trip to the neighboring country in June.

According to Mexican law, migratory irregularities are not a crime, and the repatriates are theoretically not prevented from returning to the country. But, in practice, there may be more difficulty on a future trip.

In a statement, Itamaraty said that the Brazilian consulate is in permanent contact with Mexican authorities to guarantee “fair and dignified treatment to our nationals”. On the Itamaraty website, a warning that is informally entering the US from Mexico “is a criminal practice in both countries and extremely dangerous” and that the “crossing represents a serious risk to the lives of those involved.”

In a note sent to Folha, Mexican consul Vicente Flores said Mexican authorities could deny entry to travelers when there are inconsistencies in the documentation presented or when the reasons for the trip are not adequately proven.

“Many of the travelers of Brazilian nationality arrived in Mexico in recent months intending to do the necessary quarantine before traveling to the US, some of whom tried to cross into that country through Mexico’s northern border, sometimes without having a visa from that country,” he added, adding that the flow of Brazilians has grown a lot in this first semester and that the inadmissibility cases represent a small percentage of the total.

“Despite the current health contingency due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Mexico maintains an open-door policy for travelers from all over the world, including numerous Brazilian tourists.”

Coyotes make false promises of open borders

The economic crisis stemming from the pandemic and the defeat of Republican Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election has led to an explosion of irregular immigration to the US. The number of arrests at the border with Mexico in 2021 is already the highest in 20 years.

In Governador Valadares (MG), a well-known hub of emigration of Brazilians to the US, the outbound movement is large. Nearby, in Sobrália, a tiny town of about 5,000 inhabitants with the country’s highest proportion of emigrants in relation to the population, every month “a cartload of people leave, at least 20,” says a resident.

According to the Federal Police of Minas Gerais, coyotes – criminals who charge up to US$ 20,000 to bring immigrants – have even given lectures falsely promising that the borders are open after Biden’s inauguration. Although some relaxations have been made, the restrictions on entry for those without visas remain in force.

“It is only possible to cross land border points in exceptional cases. Attempts to cross irregularly present severe risks to the safety and lives of the people involved,” says a note from the Federal Police, released in April. Another warning sign for the police was the increase in the number of passports requested in Minas Gerais – from January to April, the demand grew 77%.

For César Rossatto, professor at the University of Texas and an honorary consul of Brazil, the border is “like a thermometer that measures the temperature of the social tensions of the different countries.” “Now, many Haitians, Ecuadorians, Brazilians are arriving,” he says. “Nobody wants to abandon everything, sell their house and cars, pay high prices, and risk their lives if things aren’t bad. The pandemic left millions in misery in Latin America.”

The number of children arriving unaccompanied is also a record. In March alone, there were 19,000. They arrive traumatized from the crossing and also suffer in the shelters where they are installed. “I even cried when I heard their stories. There was a nine-year-old who arrived in the middle of the pandemic, and we managed to keep him from being deported,” says Rossatto.

For many, the American dream does not end well. Besides arrests and deportations, they are subject to kidnapping, extortion, sexual abuse, and other violence by Mexican coyotes, many linked to drug cartels.

Some die during the crossing in the desert or the Grande River. The Brazilian consulate in Mexico issued a notice in April saying that it has been sought by several relatives of Brazilians who have disappeared while trying to cross the border. Five months ago, a 36-year-old Goiano died when he hit his head on the ground after jumping over the wall between the two countries. “The 15-meter iron wall cannot stop immigration. I see things here that I have never seen in my life,” says Rossatto. “People are in total desperation. And it’s going to get worse in the coming months.”