Mexico, Dec 2 (EFE).- The new government of Mexico, led by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, on Sunday seeks to take control of the emergency situation of the migrant caravan that arrived in the border city of Tijuana three weeks ago, with more than 6,000 Central Americans hoping to cross the border to the United States.
The crisis of the migrants arriving occured in the midst of a change of president in Mexico and now is a problem that must be solved by the administration of Lopez Obrador.
The national coordinator of Civil Protection, David Leon, said Sunday that the Secretariat of Welfare and the National Institute of Migration (INM), headed by Tonatiuh Guillen, will be in charge of dealing with the emergency.
The first is to deliver and control the resources and the latter is to take charge of the new roofed shelter occupied by the Central American migrants in Tijuana, after the closure of the first one due to sanitary issues.
Although local authorities claim that most of the 6,000 migrants accepted their change to move to a new shelter, there are at least 3,000 migrants of which they don’t know their whereabouts. They believe that those migrants might have been relocated to migrant homes run by priests and religious organizations.
Some Central Americans just settled in the streets and decided not to go to the new shelter because they say it was farther, about five kilometers, from the “El Chaparral” border crossing where they hope to start their asylum process in the United States.
According to data from Mexican authorities, some 9,000 Central Americans arrived in the country as of Oct. 19 in different groups, of which more than 7,000 arrived in Mexicali and Tijuana, in the state of Baja California, to request asylum in the United States and 2,000 are located in other parts of the country.