Mexican immigration agents have halted 9,622 unaccompanied minors so far this year, a figure equivalent to all of 2013, with the full year anticipated to be 16,000, Deputy Government Secretary for Population, Migration and Religious Affairs, Mercedes del Carmen Guillen Vicente, said.
Vicente said throughout a gathering Tuesday, facilitated by the Mexican Senate, that recent immigration reform in the United States has caused a rise in the number of unaccompanied minors heading north because they are misinformed of the U.S. government’s “temporary normalization” of immigration status.
Human traffickers exploited the circumstances, telling people that by paying a high price, normally thousands of dollars, they could guarantee that their kids had a superior life in the United States, Guillen Vicente told officials, activists and educators attended the meeting.
Reform is “undeniably important” in the United States and action is required to discover an answer for the child migration issue, the elected authority said.
The issue has reached a crucial level in 2014 and has turned into a humanitarian crisis, Sen. Mariana Gomez del Campo, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee’s board on Latin America and the Caribbean, said.
The amount of Central American youngsters heading to the United States started climbing in 2011 and has surged in 2014, with more than 70,000 minors yearly “being exposed and vulnerable,” Gomez del Campo, a part of the moderate National Action Party, or PAN, said.
A week ago, the administrations of the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador began a facilitated effort to stop the crisis created by huge entries of unaccompanied Central American minors at the southern U.S. border.
Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina facilitated a gathering last Friday to produce a joint strategy that was attended by Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, U.S. VP Joe Biden and agents of Honduras and Mexico.
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Perez Molina asked partents not to permit their kids to run the dangers of venturing out to the United States unaccompanied.
The Honduran government had effectively said it would hold a worldwide gathering in July to manage the crisis created by transient youths traveling alone to the United States.
The young transients are subject to deportation, however each case is reviewed separately, the U.S. government said.
