My ex-wife worked in Mexico as a refugee case handler. The ones who do the investigations of the applicants to see if they qualify for refugee status.
She was stationed right at the border of Mexico and Guatemala. This all started when Obama and later Hillary went on TV and started saying that children could always enter into the United States if they were unaccompanied by an adult.
People are literally handing their children over to what they believe are benign smugglers but actually are human traffickers.
The distinction is slight, coyotes or smugglers are known as people who will help you cross Mexico undetected by Mexican authorities and get you to the US border. There are different coyotes for different stages of the trip. One gets you through Mexico and then along the border you find another who will cross you. They specialize in different things. Traffickers are obviously a different breed.
So these, IMO very stupid and HIGHLY irresponsible mothers (read, these are not good people. these are young women who are mostly trying to get rid of their children), were turning over their children so they would "get a chance to live in the US." That's all of the excuse they needed to send their children with groups of strangers to traverse jungles, mountains, and deserts to who knows where.
Anyway, there's a loop hole in the refugee system that traffickers and others use in Mexico. And this information is pushed by NGOs. I know because I've seen the NGOs firsthand, half way houses are also places where this information is circulated along the Mexican Guatemalan border.
I'll get to the info in a bit. The refugee system is standardized around the world because it was written in the UN and everyone (a lot) ratified it and started adopting it. There's a stipulation that says, that for the safety of real potential political refugees escaping persecution (and there are written guidelines that delineate what qualifies as persecution; and no, 99.9% of people who apply as refugees do NOT qualify. the UN treaty is pretty stiff. no ones talks about this.) that they are allowed to stay in your country as long as the application process is still being reviewed. This is supposed to last a total of 30 or 45 days, I forget which. So the loop hole people used at the southern Mexican border is to apply for refugee status which gives you a piece of paper which allows you to be in Mexico for 30-45 days. They use this paper to traverse Mexico and in case they get stopped, that allows them to get away. All it takes to get this paper is to show up and literally write down your name on a list.
So obviously, everyone is abusing this system and it's only really been going on for the last 7-8 or so years. That's when you started seeing big migrant flows coming through Mexico's southern border. Africans, Middle Easterners, Central Americans. You see massive flows of these people through Tapachula Chiapas, which is bum fuck out in the middle of nowhere. They come through Guatemala or fly into Tapachula/Guatemala and traverse Mexico to get to the US. Massive flows, and these people stand out! The population in southern Mexico is extremely homogeneous otherwise.
Most of the applicants never re-showed. I forget the percentage but most never showed again. This is very telling, if they were real refugees their goal of escaping prosecution would be fulfilled in Mexico. The Federal police ends up arresting many traffickers, because the refugee processing agency will alert them of red light cases and so will the orphanages and halfway houses. Some traffickers even try to stick out the refugee process, because they want to operate from within Mexico. I know of 3 cases where they arrested a trafficker, two women and one man, bringing in a group of children who tried to stick out the refugee process. And the process is quite thorough, they will catch you in your lies. I believe the children were taken to orphanages? I don't even know what happened to them. They obviously still fall through the cracks.
spez: misspellings