Mexico pledged to shore up security near its border with the United States after a peaceful march devolved into chaos when US agents fired tear gas into Mexico to stop some migrants who
Christopher Sherman
November 26 2018 8:14 AM
Mexico pledged to shore up security near its border with the United States after a peaceful march devolved into chaos when US agents fired tear gas into Mexico to stop some migrants who tried to breach the border.
Mexico’s Interior Ministry said it would immediately deport those who tried to “violently” enter the US from Tijuana.
Meanwhile, Tijuana’s municipal government said that more than three dozen migrants were arrested for disturbing the peace and other charges stemming from the march and what followed.
The vast majority of the more than 5,000 Central American migrants who camped out for more than a week at a sports complex in Tijuana returned to their makeshift shelter to line up for food and recuperate from an unsettling afternoon.
Lurbin Sarmiento, 26, of Copan, Honduras, walked back to the sports complex with her four-year-old daughter, shaken from what had unfolded a short time earlier at the border when US agents fired tear gas.
“We ran, but the smoke always reached us and my daughter was choking,” she said.
The gas reached hundreds of migrants protesting near the border after some of them attempted to get through the fencing and wire separating the two countries.
American authorities shut down the nation’s busiest border crossing at San Ysidro for several hours at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.
The situation devolved after the group began a peaceful march to appeal for the US to speed up processing of asylum claims for Central American migrants marooned in Tijuana.
Mexican police had kept them from walking over a bridge leading to the Mexican port of entry, but the migrants pushed past officers to walk across the Tijuana River below the bridge.
