Migrants sent back to Mexico stuck and scared

On Friday dozens of asylum seekers pushed back into Mexico by the United States tried to get their bearings, still unsure of how they would travel some 350 miles to their court dates, subsist for months in this unfamiliar border city or return to their distant homelands.

On Thursday, the U.S. government expanded its so-called “Remain in Mexico” program to the border between this city and its sister Nogales, Arizona.

A group of about 30 mostly Central American migrants were returned that day and another approximately 45 were sent Friday.

The migrants said no one had figured out how to round up money to leave Nogales yet.

The U.S. had sent some 56,000 asylum seekers back to await their cases in Mexico through November, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Making asylum seekers wait in Mexican border cities, many of which suffer from rampant crime, aims to discourage migrants.

Previously many of them were released with monitoring bracelets to await their cases inside the U.S.

Nogales is the seventh border crossing to participate in the program and perhaps the most onerous yet for asylum seekers.

Central Americans who returned Thursday had court dates scheduled for late March in El Paso, Texas, hundreds of miles east.

Other border points have courts just across the frontier or at least a significantly shorter distance away.

Lorenzo González, a Guatemalan farmworker travelling with his wife and three children between the ages of 1 and 12, said he didn't see how they could wait three months.

He was ready to throw in the towel, but also didn't know how they'd be able to return to Guatemala.

The family spent Thursday night at a shelter nearly 2 miles (3 kilometres) from the border.

In the morning, migrants there paid a nominal fee for a lift to the soup kitchen, which sits a short walk from the border crossing.

In the afternoon, Mexico's immigration agency shuttles them back to the shelter from the border.

But workers at the independently run shelter said they can stay for only three nights.

Lorenzo explained he didn't have the money to go back to Guatemala and neither the 1,200 pesos ($63) for a bus ticket to Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, where his court date was scheduled for March 25.

"We are desperate," he said.

Even with money, the journey to Ciudad Juarez is far from secure because it entails crossing from territory controlled by the Sinaloa cartel to that of the rival Juarez cartel.

Three women and six children, all dual nationals, were killed by Juarez cartel gunmen in November where those territories meet.

“We're very concerned by this situation,” said the Rev. Sean Carroll, executive director of the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, which provides the free meals to migrants.

He said the returnees are at risk of assault, abuse, kidnapping and rape.

Reverend Sean Carroll believed that the situation is against the "human dignity" as "people have the right to access the process to apply for asylum, and this program is precisely to prevent them from having access, it is not fair."