Several MEPs sent a letter to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in which they show their concern about the treatment of migrants and refugees in Mexico. The letter was delivered to the Mexican embassy to the European Union and in it, 12 representatives of various formations of the European Left, the Green Group and the Socialist Group express their concern about the policies adopted by the López Obrador government towards people crossing the country in the direction of the United States.
“We see with concern the turn that your government has taken, which began with an immigration policy of open doors and guarantees for regularization for people who entered, mainly, through the southern Mexican border,” the letter states. “We know that this shift came from the economic pressure exerted by the U.S. government in June 2019. We are concerned to know that a strategy of immigration control and containment is being consolidated through militarization and coordinated actions, such as the systematic deportations agreed under the expulsions by Title 42 from the United States to Mexico and from Mexico to Guatemala,” he adds.
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Animal Político consulted about the letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but at press time it had not received a response.
Among the practices denounced, express expulsion flights from the United States to southern Mexico and then be delivered to Guatemala without any legal support. “The impacts on the human rights of migrants are severe. According to different sectors of civil society, these practices put the integrity of people at risk, violate and violate international human rights law and international refugee law,” they warn.
“Under no circumstances can an operation involving the use of force by federal agents be called humanitarian rescue, nor can detention in immigration detention be called accommodation. It is urgent that protection be guaranteed instead of militarization of borders reached by people who are expelled from a system that is already unsustainable and leaves out the most vulnerable forcing them to flee and cross international borders,” says the letter, which regrets the “excessive use of force” by the National Guard and the National Institute of Migration.
“Unfortunately, we see that the containment and military control at the borders of third countries through agreements that are actually based on economic pressures, is a policy that has been consolidated throughout the world, including and mainly, in the European Union and the United States,” say the MEPs, who regret that “these agreements not only breach international human rights obligations but also violate and dispossess people of any possibility of accessing a dignified and safe life.”
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“Do not follow the example of the EU’s migration policy that violates human rights, Mexico can show the world that another migration policy that defends the right to have rights is possible,” they say, to ask the president to “resume that solidarity in the tradition of asylum that characterized them.”
The letter was sent within the framework of the agreement on trade and political relations between the EU and Mexico, which include clauses of respect for human rights, according to Spanish MEP Miguel Urbán, of the Podemos party. “We are alarmed by the deportation and detention policy in Mexico, a policy that, in collusion with the U.S. government, is turning Mexico into a kind of buffer state at the service of U.S. border control interests,” Urban said.
“We have asked López Obrador to cease the persecution and repression exercised against the migrant caravans. That it does not follow the example of the EU’s migration policy that violates Human Rights and that it resumes that solidarity in the asylum tradition that characterized them,” he said.
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