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In Mexican border city, hundreds of migrants deported from US struggle to survive

By Associated Press
Updated: Friday, August 5, 12:31 AM

TIJUANA, Mexico — After 15 years of installing marble in homes in Escondido, California, Porfirio Perez was caught without a driver’s license during a February traffic stop and deported.

Now the 42-year-old just tries to survive in this sprawling industrial border city, 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from his birthplace of Puebla in central Mexico.

He is among hundreds of deportees who are stuck in Tijuana, which sits across from San Diego, California, because they don’t have the Mexican documents required and need permanent addresses to get them. He and about 350 others live in and around the Rio Tijuana canal that separates the two cities.

“I’m looking for work here but I can’t get any because I don’t have papers or a voter ID,” Perez said. “It’s a real awful change, you know. There, when I was hungry I’d go to a restaurant. Here, you eat if you can get it. You walk back and forth, looking out for the police.”

During the day the deportees look for work, wash cars at intersections or flee Mexican police who will jail them for not having papers, just like in the U.S. At night they take refuge in drainage tunnels feeding the canal, beneath bridges or in shacks made of wood, cloth and plastic a few feet from the rusty barrier that separates the country of their birth from the country where they worked years for a better life.

The Padre Chava soup kitchen in Tijuana has offered 900 free breakfasts a day for the last 12 years, along with haircuts and medical services. About 80 percent of the people it serves have been repatriated from the United States.

“Society has to turn to the reality that deportees and migrants are a part of our city,” said the Rev. Ernesto Hernandez Ruiz, kitchen director. “We can’t consider them a plague ... they’re human beings in a difficult situation who need a hand.”

An average of 254 migrants were deported to Tijuana every day from the United States in the first half of this year, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute. That’s down from 2010, when an average of 366 people were deported every day over the same period.

During the 2 1/2 years of President Barack Obama’s administration, the U.S. has deported a million people, almost of all them Mexican, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Deportations are going to increase because the economic situation in the United States has not stabilized yet,” says Jorge Bustamante, the U.N. special investigator on migrants’ human rights.

Most repatriated Mexicans find a way to return to their homes. But others like Perez are forced to stay, disoriented, without money or contacts. Many left Mexico as children or adolescents and don’t have social security numbers or a voter registration card, the document Mexicans use as their general identification, much like driver’s licenses in the U.S.

Getting copies of their birth certificates is complicated and expensive. Some are drug addicts who rob their fellow camp members.

Arturo Macias, 41, says he has lived in the river bed with about 50 people the last 2 1/2 years. The camp has the stench of decaying food that no one seems to notice and is littered with used syringes.


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Just would seem to me that the folks in TJ have a big poblem on their hands, and I wonder what, if anything, the suits in the DF are willing to do about it.

The head zoot suit in Mexico City is now a lame duck and his party in shambles at the moment, with Baja leading the charge to tri-color from what had been considered the birthplace of the PAN party political movement.

This is a big problem and my crystal ball predicts not a whole lot will get accomplished until after the 2012 elections unfortunately...

PAN; a disappointment.

Who coulda predicted that?

Even better laugh: given most Mexican's somewhat-cynical/realistic attitude, was it really a surprise?

Originally Posted by Marty Cortez

PAN; a disappointment.

Who coulda predicted that?

Even better laugh: given most Mexican's somewhat-cynical/realistic attitude, was it really a surprise?

Well..... since PAN kinda represents the mirror image of the US Republican party, one merely could equate that with the decades upon decades of what has been fundamentally a Socialist regime run by oligarchs.

I look at it as akin to the seemingly worn-out idea that business should be left alone and not regulated because they will create jobs and that will resolve all problems.

IMO, Mexico has gotten caught between a millenial change. Good news is that given the relaxation of regulation, a middle class was able to develop. Yet, in a global economy, Mexico faces the challenge that their standard of living will cause jobs to be shifted to other countries with lower wages and less benefits.