Daily Mail, February 12, 2024
PIEDRA NEGRAS, MEXICO - At least two hundred and twenty Venezuelans, Colombians, and Ecuadorians crowd inside the cramped cement block, barbed wire-rimmed Casa Del Migrante compound.
It's a makeshift shelter run by Catholic nuns.
Kids in filthy pajamas play with trash in the dirt yard.
Families guard their belongings stuffed in black garbage bags and piled in heaps.
There's a bucket of water for washing hands and a cinder block building with two toilets – for everyone.
A busy ad hoc barber shop – consisting of a stool and a mess of extension cords — is off in a corner.
The place reeks of boredom.
There's nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
'We're protected only inside the shelter,' a Central American man tells me, explaining no one even dares to step foot outside the walls of the Catholic charity to buy snacks at the store across the road.
'Out on the street, they can capture us,' he says. 'But they cannot come in here.'
Mexican law prevents the authorities from entering a religious facility.
Inside Migrant House, these people are hidden away from roaming patrols of the Mexican army, state police, and national immigration service officers, who are finally now forcibly transporting them 1,500 miles south into southern Mexico.
Make no mistake, the fact that Mexico is doing something to address the unrelenting mass migration crisis that enabled an estimated 5 million undocumented people to enter the U.S. over just three years is a good thing.
But why are the Mexicans doing this now?
How long will this operation last?
And, most critically, why wasn't this policy instituted years ago?
I traveled to Piedra Negras, just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas to answer these questions - and what I found cuts to the heart of President Joe Biden's utterly cynical, dangerous and destructive immigrant non-policy.
First, this is happening because Biden ordered it to save himself.
There is no single issue on which the President is rated more poorly than the migrant crisis. A January NBC poll showed only 22 percent of voters think Biden would be 'better' than Trump on 'securing the border and controlling immigration.'
But Biden can't lead a crackdown himself and risk alienating the 'open borders' extremists in his party, so his deceitful solution is a shadow deportation operation run by the Mexicans - out of sight of the American media.
Second, there's good reason to believe that if Biden gets back in the White House this policy will end as quickly as it started.
Third, and most disturbingly, this could have happened years ago sparing the United States a spiraling humanitarian disaster gripping communities from El Paso to Tucson, Chicago to New York City and Boston.
President Biden didn't need a permission slip from Congress to end the migrant catastrophe that he helped create. He could have simply picked up the phone and called Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In late December, Secretary Antony Blinken and his chief lieutenants traveled to Mexico City on a diplomatic mission.
Shortly thereafter the Mexican army, national guard, and state immigration officers rushed into the northern borderlands and began rounding up tens of thousands of immigrants.
Troops, positioned at intervals along the Rio Grande, are equipped with mobile living quarters that sleep up to 20 at a time.
In Piedras Negras, known to the Mexican troops as 'Zone 47,' soldiers in early January were filling 10 buses a day. By the end of the month, they had also packed an additional 30 passenger planes full of people.
Captured migrants are fed into a conveyor belt of government transports to deliver them to Mexico's southern provinces along the border with Guatemala - especially the cities of Villahermosa and Tapachula.
Mexican media is now reporting operations in the border cities of Tijuana, Juarez, and Matamoros, where the military recently bulldozed a massive immigrant camp across from Brownsville, Texas and dug anti-pedestrian trenches, 'under U.S. pressure.'
Key to all of this is that Mexican troops and state police, for the first time since Biden was inaugurated, are stopping immigrants from hitching free rides north atop Mexico's 'La Bestia' cargo trains.
This freighthopping was willfully ignored for years by both Biden and Lopez-Obrador's administration, as I first reported a year ago for DailyMail.com.
It's hard to overstate how deceptive this all is.
This President, who once condemned Trump for rapidly expelling migrants from the southern U.S. border, has secretly recruited Mexico's President to do his dirty work.
And an administration that once pledged to address the 'root causes' of mass migration from South and Central America is now looking the other way, as millions of so-called asylum-seekers are bottled up in southern Mexico.
Finally, some of what Lopez-Obrador's men are doing would surely horrify Biden's Left-wing supporters - if only more in the American media would report it.
In Coahuila, where Piedras Negras is situated, state police often use violent tactics to drag women and children from the freight cars, said Mexican journalist Auden Cabello, who has interviewed immigrants wrenched from the trains.
'The force that they're describing is that they're being pulled off the trains after not obeying demands,' Cabello said. 'That's everybody, women and children, men… they're physically dragging them off the trains.'
The migrants themselves do not so much fear authorities roughing them up as do the one-way trip to entrapment in southern Mexico.
The men in Casa Del Migrantes told me that they'd shelled out from $1,700 to $10,000 to get to Piedras Negras.
'We don't have money now. We've already spent everything on our journey to arrive here,' one of the Central Americans said, the others nodding in agreement. 'We would have to start from zero.'
Now only the wealthiest can afford to pay cartel smugglers for private transportation to evade northern roadblocks.
On February 4th, President Biden touted a doomed Senate immigration bill that he said would, 'make our asylum process fairer and more efficient.' But he has nothing to say about Mexican authorities rounding up migrants and forcing them south without due process.
Unsurprisingly, these hidden heavy-handed Mexican tactics are making an impact.
'The hardest thing to find in Piedras Negras now…' observed local journalist Efraim Gonzalez as we cruised around town in his car… 'is a migrant.'
Gonzalez was driving me on a long empty dirt track, playing a video on his phone of the very same road clogged with thousands from all over Central and South America.
Thousands of illegal crossings were launched every day from this city inundating U.S. Border Patrol and Texas State military forces, mesmerizing the international media, and pounding Joe Biden's poll numbers. Now, Texas crossings are far less than Arizona and California for the first time in three years. 'It's like magic,' Gonzalez said as we drove to a Mexican outpost, where four soldiers stood guard at a trash-strewn river crossing.
The soldiers weren't talkative when I would pull up on them, but some reluctantly answered questions.
What are their orders?
Finding immigrants and turning them over to the immigration service for shipment to Mexico's south.
How long is this deployment?
Answer: 'No ending point'.
A source with access to senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection told me this Mexican enterprise is set to last until after the American election.
After that - it's anyone's guess.
I suspect, if Joe Biden is re-elected, the streets of Piedra Negras will again be packed with thousands.