Last Updated on August 19, 2019
A new report reveals Mexican authorities have apprehended 65 migrants who flew from South Asia first to Turkey, then to Central America before traveling on foot until they found themselves lost in Mexico, all while attempting to enter the United States illegally.
Revealing just how porous and insecure the United States-Mexico border remains, 65 immigrants from South Asia believed they could travel around the world and walk through Central America to illegally enter the United States.
According to DW, the migrants are from “Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka”, and were severely dehydrated when they were apprehended by Mexican police in the state of Veracruz.
Mexico’s Public Safety Department said on Thursday that the migrants endured a long and difficult journey in an attempt to reach the US border.
“It is very rare to find migrants of this type of nationalities, they are regularly Central American and even Cuban,” said an INM source.
After Mexican authorities provided the migrants with medical assistance, food and water, they recounted their journey.
The website also notes that the migrants first flew to Turkey in April of this year before catching another flight to Colombia.
“They then moved through Ecuador, Panama and Guatemala before reaching Mexico,” according to DW.
Mexico is under increasing pressure from the Trump administration to turn migrants using the Central American country as a highway to the United States around and send them back to their home country.
As a result of this mounting pressure, DW reports that Mexican authorities will first establish the identity and nationalities of the 65 migrants and then give them assistance returning to their countries of origin.
Earlier this year, Fox News reported that ISIS planned to use the southern border to move terrorists into the country:
Seized ISIS fighter Abu Henricki, a Canadian citizen with dual citizenship with Trinidad, last month said that he was sought out by the violent insurgency’s leadership to attack the U.S. from a route starting in Central America, according to a study by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and published in Homeland Security Today.
“ISIS has organized plots in Europe with returnees so it seems entirely plausible that they wanted to send guys out to attack. The issue that makes a North American attack harder is the travel is more difficult from Syria,” Anne Speckhard, who co-conducted the study as the director of ICSVE and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University, told Fox News. “So the idea that they would instead use people who were not known to their own governments as having joined ISIS might make it possible for them to board airplanes.”
Since Mexico agreed to aid the United States in ending the illegal immigration crisis in June, the Mexican government claims it has located nearly 20,000 would-be illegal immigrants and is processing them to be returned to their countries of origin.
Prior to this agreement, it is unknown exactly how many migrants used the porous southern border to illegally enter the United States, or from which country they came.
