The border city of Nuevo Laredo is to begin receiving migrants returned from the United States to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims wind their way through U.S. courts, Mexican officials said Monday.
Mexico and Washington agreed to expand the program known as Migrant Protection Protocols during earlier talks that headed off threatened U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods.
The expansion is expected to take place at three points along the border, and Nuevo Laredo Mayor Enrique Rivas confirmed that his city across from Laredo Texas, is one of them and could receive up 200 asylum seekers daily beginning Friday.
Previous rollouts of the program at two points along the California-Mexico border and at Ciudad Juarez-El Paso on the Texas border began in much smaller numbers than that and gradually increased. Nuevo Laredo officials said Mexico's government has not yet said how many their city will be receiving.
"It is a humanitarian issue that we are attending to within the measure of our capacities," Rivas said. "The federal government must take responsibility for being the ones who took this decision (to expand the program). We will continue knocking on doors to find resources. The municipal government is overwhelmed."
Observers have expressed concern about the possible implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocols in Tamaulipas state, which is home to Nuevo Laredo and where drug cartels control swaths of territory and have been known to prey on vulnerable migrants.
The State Department bars U.S. government employees from most travel in Tamaulipas and warns American citizens against all travel to the state due to kidnapping and other crimes. It is one of just five of Mexico's 31 states currently under a level-four travel warning, the State Department's most severe.
"Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault, is common," the department's travel warning reads. "Gang activity, including gun battles and blockades, is widespread. Armed criminal groups target public and private passenger buses as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers hostage and demanding ransom payments. Federal and state security forces have limited capability to respond to violence in many parts of the state."
Rivas and Deputy Mayor Raúl Cárdenas Thomae said Nuevo Laredo's shelters are already overflowing with some 3,000 migrants. The city is studying the possibility of opening another one to accommodate the returnees, they said.
Thomae said Nuevo Laredo would be receiving those returned across a stretch of border from Roma, Texas, to Ciudad Acuna, in the state of Coahuila. That is about 260 miles (420 kilometers).