Kidnappings are a terrifying part of life for migrants returned to crime-ridden Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. 'There is no protection,' one Catholic priest said.
The kidnappers came to the shelter near the U.S.-Mexico border looking for Cuban migrants, favored targets because relatives in the United States are known to pay exorbitant ransoms to free abducted loved ones.
The case has dramatized the systematic fashion of abductions and shakedowns faced by migrants and others at an especially sensitive time — when U.S. authorities have been expelling tens of thousands of Central Americans, Cubans and others back to Mexico’s crime-ridden border cities under the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, known informally as “Remain in Mexico.”
“There is no protection,” said Father Julio Lopez, a Catholic priest who runs the Casa de Migrante Nazareth shelter in Nuevo Laredo. Beti Suyapa Ortega, 36, and son Robinson Javier Melara, 17, wait at a Mexican immigration agency waiting room in Nuevo Laredo.Beti Suyapa Ortega, 36, said she was unaware of the extent of the danger when she boarded a Mexican public bus last month
“If he didn’t pay, they said they would turn us over to ‘other people,’” Ortega said, trembling as she recalled the ominous phrasing. “My brother said it would take him time to raise the money, that he had just arrived, but please not to do anything to us.” Ortega and her son were detained in U.S. custody in Texas for two nights, she said, before being released with a court date of Dec. 10 in San Antonio.
Like Ortega, Rodriguez said she had given up and would forgo her Jan. 10 U.S. court date and return home to Honduras, following the tracks of so many migrants, broke and petrified of Mexican organized crime.
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