TIJUANA, Mexico — Henry Atum learned the meaning of “mañana” from the Mexican officials who every day for two months denied him the paperwork he needed to travel to the U.S. border, telling him to try again tomorrow.
He’d fled a brutal war in Cameroon in May, flying first to Ecuador and then walking north through the jungles of Panama’s Darien Gap. He passed the corpses of fellow migrants who’d risked the same deadly journey. He’d been robbed and cheated along the six-week trek.
But his journey reached a new low in Mexico.
“What I experienced here in Mexico is even worse than the jungle. We were taken hostage in Mexico,” said Atum, speaking from a run-down hotel in Tijuana, where he arrived in October in what he described as a lucky break.
While President Trump’s immigration policies have largely targeted Central Americans, African asylum-seekers have also suffered — often out of view — from the crackdown at the U.S. border. For the thousands of African asylum-seekers like Atum, their hopes are crushed long before they’re even in view of the U.S. border.
“What I experienced here in Mexico is even worse than the jungle. We were taken hostage in Mexico”
Under the Trump administration, African migrants fleeing government persecution would have a much stronger claim to asylum than, say, Central Americans fleeing gang violence. But first they need to make it through Mexico to the U.S. border. Currently, more than 2,000 African asylum-seekers are stranded in southern Mexico trying to get permits that would allow them to travel north to the U.S. border.
A dwindling number who’ve made it north face new roadblocks, including adding their names to a months-long waitlist to apply for asylum in the U.S. In Tijuana, migrants report being extorted for amounts of $300-$1,500 in order to get a higher number on the waitlist.
Unfamiliar with Spanish, thousands of miles from home, and easily identifiable because of their skin color, Africans are especially vulnerable to being detained, assaulted, and blackmailed by hard-line or corrupt Mexican officials.
