EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The president of Mexico says 81 of her countrymen are being held in the “Alligator Alcatraz” Florida facility, and she wants them returned home as soon as possible.
A Mexican consul in late July and early August talked to the detainees inside the state-run migrant holding facility to offer legal assistance and hear their complaints. The consul found no instances of human rights abuses against Mexican citizens but gleaned a widespread desire for them to be released from detention.
“Diplomatically, we are working so they stay there the least number of days. Some don’t want deportation so they will go to trial. But those who want to return (to Mexico), we will provide legal and other support,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Monday.
An average of 30 Mexicans are arriving at the facility every week. Some 700 migrants were being held there as of early last week, according to American news reports.
The government of Mexico as well as numerous immigration advocacy groups in the United States have expressed concern – and some outright disgust – about the detention of migrants at the 5,000-capacity facility in the Florida everglades. The American Civil Liberties Union, environmental groups and civil rights groups are suing the state over the facility over issues ranging from violations of due process to environmental damage.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently updated its intergovernmental agreement with Florida to close legal loops in the facility’s operations.
“Obviously, we are not in agreement with these detention sites, which are run by the states, Florida owns that,” Sheinbaum said at her daily news conference broadcast on social media. “(Consul) Rutilio Escandon is regularly going to see what Mexicans who are kept there need.”
Sheinbaum has dealt with a series of diplomatic fires at home since President Donald Trump took office in the U.S.
It started with the designation of Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which allows the U.S. to pursue them in foreign countries. Sheinbaum has said she will not allow U.S. troops in Mexico without her government’s authorization.
What followed were a series of tariffs and threats of tariffs not just for the U.S. to procure better trade conditions but to force Mexico to stem the mass movement of migrants from third countries through its territory, to stop fentanyl trafficking to America and to hand over cartel leaders.
The U.S. has removed more than 70,000 Mexican nationals back to their country during that seven-month period.
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