Idania*, a 36-year-old Central American woman, is traveling with her 8-year-old son and is one of the families forcibly evicted from Plaza Giordano Bruno in the Juárez neighborhood of Mexico City, on June 6*. Upon arrival at the southern border, she had intended to request international protection to travel safely north. Within just fifteen days, however, she and her son were kidnapped by two different cartels. Both she and her son were victims of extreme human rights violations and suffered severe psychosocial impacts that have not yet been addressed. After losing all the financial resources she had, Idania sought to continue her journey via clandestine routes. Finally, upon reaching Mexico City and finding that public shelters were overcapacity, Idania had to build a house with sticks and garbage bags and began working as a laborer at a nearby construction site until the day of the eviction.
Like Idania, in recent years, people in situations of forced mobility, arriving in Mexico have faced abandonment and neglect by the Mexican State to meet their protection needs. The most recent example is the closure of COMAR in Mexico City on May 29 – with no clarity from the authorities on when it will resume operations – and the forced eviction, a week later, of the people staying in Plaza Giordano Bruno by agents of the National Migration Institute (INM), in coordination with components of the National Guard, The Secretariat of Inclusion and Social Wellbeing in Mexico (SIBISO) staff, and the Mexico City Citizen Security Secretariat.
In this first section, we will recount the dismantling of the COMAR and the bureaucratization of the asylum application process in Mexico. Since September 2017, COMAR has suspended the deadlines established by law to resolve asylum requests, which means that a process that should last three months has, in some cases, extended to more than a year. In contrast, if more than 30 days have passed since a person entered the country, they will not be able to apply for asylum unless they can adequately justify the delay.
Additionally, the process for recognizing refugee status in Mexico City has become more complex. During the second half of 2023, applications to start the process were only received at the “shelter” in Tláhuac, where people were asked to fill out a pre-registration form online and then wait in long lines to be assigned an appointment at the COMAR offices in the Juárez neighborhood, to formally begin the application process.
Regardless on November 8, 2023, the Tláhuac shelter was suddenly closed after a protest by the local community, leaving migrants in need of protection in limbo, and the reception of applications was suspended until February 2024, when a reception office was established in the Naucalpan State of Mexico. Furthermore, since the last quarter of 2023, it was documented that the National Migration Institute delayed or definitively denied access to regularization documents to which asylum seekers are entitled.
These measures demonstrate the Mexican State’s lack of interest in providing care to people who have been forced to leave their countries, and the supposed solutions adopted do not consider the needs of the people and exclude them from the city’s periphery. This, combined with the bureaucratization of the asylum application process, characterized by delays in resolutions, lack of information and arbitrariness in the modification of procedures, constitutes a serious obstacle for those seeking protection. These problems not only demotivate applicants but also lead them to abandon the process, face deportation or settle and move irregularly in Mexico.
The refugee system in Mexico and the Mexican State’s duty to guarantee international protection are broken. The new federal administration faces the challenge of fulfilling its obligations to international human rights.
*A pseudonym has been used to protect the identity of the woman who shared her testimony. This testimony was captured in collaboration with Grupo de Monitoreo Frontera Centro.
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This blog was written by CWS network partner, REDODEM (The Documenting Network of Organizations Defending Migrants) and was originally published by Animal Político.