TIJUANA, MEXICO - Many of the nearly 3,000 Central American migrants who have reached the Mexican border with California via caravan said Saturday that they didn’t feel welcome in Tijuana, where hundreds more migrants were headed after more than a month on the road.
The vast majority were camped at an outdoor sports complex, sleeping on a dirt baseball field and under bleachers with a view of the steel walls topped by barbed wire at the newly reinforced U.S.-Mexico border. The city opened the complex after other shelters were filled. Church groups provided portable showers, bathrooms and sinks. The federal government estimated the migrant crowd in Tijuana could swell to 10,000.
Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum has called the migrants' arrival an “avalanche'' that the city is ill-prepared to handle, calculating that they will be in Tijuana for at least six months as they wait to file asylum claims. U.S. border inspectors are processing only about 100 asylum claims a day at Tijuana's main crossing to San Diego. Asylum-seekers register their names in a tattered notebook managed by migrants themselves that had more than 3,000 names even before the caravan arrived.
While many in Tijuana are sympathetic to the migrants' plight and are trying to assist, some locals have shouted insults, hurled rocks and even thrown punches at the migrants.
It's a stark contrast to the many Mexican communities that welcomed the caravan with signs, music and donations of clothing after it entered Mexico nearly a month ago. Countless residents of rural areas pressed fruit and bags of water into the migrants' hands as they passed through southern Mexico, wishing them safe journeys.
Alden Rivera, the Honduran ambassador in Mexico, visited the outdoor sports complex Saturday. Rivera expects the migrants will need to be sheltered for eight months or more, and said he was working with Mexico to get more funds to feed and care for them. He expects the migrant numbers in Tijuana to reach 3,400 over the weekend, with another 1,200 migrants having made it to Mexicali, another border city a few hours east of Tijuana. An additional 1,500 migrants plan to reach the U.S. border region next week.
Rivera said 1,800 Hondurans have returned to their country since the caravan first set out on Oct. 13, and that he hoped more would make that decision.
“We want them to return to Honduras,'' Rivera said, adding that each migrant must weigh whether to go home, appeal for asylum in Mexico or wait in line to apply for asylum in the U.S.
The Mexican Interior Ministry said Friday that 2,697 Central American migrants had requested asylum in Mexico under a program that the country launched on Oct. 26 to more quickly get them credentials needed to live, work and study in southern Mexico.
Ivis Munoz, 26, has considered returning to Honduras. The coffee farmer called his father in Atima, Honduras, on Saturday to consult on his next move a few days after being attacked on a beach by locals in Tijuana. His father told him to stick it out.
Munoz has a bullet in his leg. A gang member shot him a year ago in Honduras and threatened to kill him if he saw him again. Munoz said he found out later his girlfriend had been cheating on him with the gang member.
He's afraid to go home but feels unwelcome in Tijuana.
Munoz was asleep on a beach in Tijuana with about two dozen other migrants when rocks came raining down on them around 2 a.m. Wednesday. He heard a man shout in the darkness: “We don't want you here! Go back to your country!''
Munoz and the others got up and ran for cover, heading toward residential streets nearby. As the sun rose, they hitched a ride on a passing truck to Tijuana's downtown. Now he is staying at the sports complex.
“I don't know what to do,'' said Munoz. He fears the U.S. won't grant him asylum, and that he'll get deported if he tries to cross into the country without authorization.
Carlos Padilla, 57, a migrant from Progreso, Honduras, said a Tijuana resident shouted “migrants are pigs'' as he passed on the street recently. He did not respond.
“We didn't come here to cause problems, we came here with love and with the intention to ask for asylum,'' Padilla said. “But they treat us like animals here.''
Padilla said he would most likely return to Honduras if the U.S. rejected his asylum request.
The migrants' expected long stay in Tijuana has raised concerns about the ability of the border city of more than 1.6 million to handle the influx.