In 2019 there were 8,715 members of the Armed Forces in migration tasks on Mexico's northern and southern borders. By April of this year the figure reached more than 28,500.
In other words, immigration policy in this country can be summed up as a military wall.
According to the report "Under the Boot", Mexico has opted for a migration policy that lacks a human rights approach.
The systematic use of the National Guard - increasingly militarized - as an apparatus for immigration control, containment and deterrence has only increased the number of arbitrary detentions, discrimination, violence against women, excessive use of force and omissions that have led to loss of life, most of which have gone unpunished.
As if that were not enough, in this six-year term -as has happened in all the previous ones since Vicente Fox- we have not been able to build our own immigration policy, but have allowed the United States' demands to determine it.
According to the experts, the participation of military elements in immigration surveillance and review functions at airports and other migration control zones represents a threat to the rights of migrant women, girls and adolescents.
Above all, because it forces them to travel clandestine routes to avoid military checkpoints and, as a result, they become an easy target for organized crime organizations.
The report, prepared by the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law, states that this militarized strategy does not work, as the only thing it achieves is to push migration processes back into the shadows and encourage human trafficking.
And we well know what these terrible practices include.
We have just seen it in the heartbreaking case of the more than 50 migrants who died inside the trailer of a truck in San Antonio, Texas.
But that was not nearly the only case.
A few months before the macabre discovery, the Border Patrol had stopped another trailer carrying 145 people in the worst conditions, crammed into a trailer bed, with no water and no ventilation.
That truck traveled on the same state highway that the other truck was found on, the same highway that crosses Texas from south to north, and went through all the previous security controls.
What's worse is that some of the risks migrants face begin long before they get there.
Recently the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, in Amparo en Revisión 275/2019, ruled that immigration searches in places other than the zones of entry and exit of the country are unconstitutional, however, a report by Pie de Página details that this is not only not complied with, but that hundreds of arbitrary detentions are carried out without the presence of personnel from the National Immigration Institute (INM), despite the fact that the Immigration Law states that the National Guard can only act in aid of the immigration authority, not in substitution of it.
In addition, most of these arrests are almost always based on physical characteristics, making indigenous and Afro-descendant people the main victims of these human rights violations.
The fact is that handing over the control of tasks that include the inspection of people and their luggage to elements that do not even have police training or basic notions of gender violence is, by all accounts, a very bad idea.
Migration is not a crime, but a right, and it is based on this premise that it should be decided how a country's migration policy is constructed and how people who enter our territory are treated? and definitely not with a military boot on the foot.
Carolina Hernández Solis. For more than 20 years I have worked as a journalist in Mexico.
I started as a sports reporter at Grupo Reforma.
Later, I covered local, political and community news in Sinaloa and Tamaulipas, entities with high drug trafficking activity.
I saw colleagues die just for practicing their profession.
I later worked as Editor in Chief at Reporte Indigo and as Editorial Manager at Código Magenta, in Nuevo León.
Just two years ago I left the traditional work structure to undertake as an independent journalist, thus, I produced the video column Yo qué voy a saber with which I always sought to open the dialogue on issues that we generally do not like to talk about and land them without much ado.
I currently have a podcast called Sin Esdrújulas and I participate with a video column in Latinus and another in Ruido en la Red.
I teach journalism classes at the University of the Gulf of California.
I actively participate in social networks because I am convinced that it is necessary to put important issues on the table, without filters, accessible to all, without subtleties, and from a simple perspective that manages to move consciences.
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