A hard journey for those in the Migrant Caravan

The month-long journey for the Migrant Caravan has been hard. The migrants’ expected long stay in Tijuana has raised concerns about the ability of the border city of more than 1.6 million people to handle the influx.

While many in Tijuana are sympathetic to the migrants’ plight and trying to assist, some locals have shouted insults, hurled rocks and even thrown punches at them. The cold reception contrasts sharply with the warmth that accompanied the migrants in southern Mexico, where residents of small towns greeted them with hot food, campsites and even live music.

Alden Rivera, the Honduran ambassador in Mexico, told the AP on Saturday that 1,800 Hondurans had returned to their country since the caravan first set out on 13 October and that he hoped more would make that decision. “We want them to return to Honduras,” said Rivera.

Honduras has a murder rate of 43 per 100,000 residents, similar to US cities like New Orleans and Detroit.

In addition to violence, migrants in the caravan have mentioned poor economic prospects as a motivator for their departures. Per capita income hovers around $120 a month in Honduras, where the World Bank says two out of three people live in poverty.

[The Guardian]

Migrants arriving in Tijuana brace for long stay

More buses of exhausted people in a caravan of Central American asylum seekers reached the U.S. border as the city of Tijuana converted a municipal gymnasium into a temporary shelter and the migrants came to grips with the reality that they will be on the Mexican side of the frontier for an extended stay.

Tijuana’s robust network of shelters was already stretched to the limit, having squeezed in double their capacity or more as families slept on the floor on mats. A gated outdoor courtyard can accommodate hundreds more. There are real questions about how the city of more than 1.6 million will manage to handle the migrant caravans working their way through Mexico, which may total 10,000 people in all.

With U.S. border inspectors at the main crossing into San Diego processing only about 100 asylum claims a day, it could take weeks if not months to process the thousands in the caravan that departed from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, more than a month ago.

To claim asylum in San Diego, migrants enter their names in a tattered notebook held together by duct tape and managed by the migrants in a plaza outside the entry to the main border crossing. Migrants who registered six weeks ago are just now getting their names called. The waiting list has grown to more than 3,000 names and stands to become much longer with the caravans.

Francisco Rueda, the top deputy to Baja California state governor, said that if all migrants from the caravan currently in Tijuana were to register to seek asylum in the U.S., they would likely have to wait four months in Mexico at current processing rates. For that reason, the state has asked Mexican federal authorities to encourage others in caravans to go to other border cities.

There are 7,000 jobs available in the state for those who can obtain legal status in Mexico, Rueda added. He touted Tijuana’s integration of Haitian migrants over the last two years and the state’s relatively low unemployment rate.

[AP]

650 illegal immigrants detained crossing Arizona border over two days

U.S. Border Patrol agents in Arizona have been busy, detaining more than 650 illegal immigrants in just two days this week. They say apprehensions in the Yuma Sector are up more than 150 percent compared to the last fiscal year at this time.

Agents in the Yuma Sector said they detained 654 people – most reportedly being family units or unaccompanied minors from Guatemala – on Monday and Tuesday. Officials said the groups of illegal immigrants are not believed to be associated with the large caravan of mostly Central American migrants that have prompted the military deployment.

“Yuma is seeing a huge spike and it’s a concern because they don’t have the facilities to process the cases,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, adding a majority of the people detained are released to local charities or even at bus stations because federal facilities are overwhelmed.

[Fox News]

First wave of the Migrant Caravan reaches US border in Tijuana

Hundreds of migrants in the caravan traveling from Central America have begun arriving in the northern Mexico border city of Tijuana, setting up a potential confrontation with the American authorities that has been brewing for weeks.

About 800 migrants associated with the caravan have made it to Tijuana so far, according to local officials and advocates, with another 1,500 – 2,000 migrants expected to arrive by the end of Thursday, with many hundreds more showing up throughout the rest of the week. That influx could possibly overwhelm the city’s resources, they said.

Tijuana, long a migratory gateway to the United States, supports a constellation of migrant shelters. Prior to these first arrivals, migrants’ advocates said the shelters were already half full. César Anibal Palencia Chávez, Tijuana’s director of migrant services, said there were already some 2,800 migrants not related to the caravan waiting their turn to apply for asylum at the United States border, plus another 130 Mexican deportees, staying in Tijuana shelters.

After coming under fire from critics who accuse him of stoking fears about the migrant caravan as a threat to get Republicans to the polls for the midterm elections, President Trump has not tweeted about the caravan since the elections on November 6.

Olvin Joel Lobo Reyes, 21, who said he left Honduras because of poverty, hoped that the American authorities would relent and let them in. If that didn’t happen, he had a Plan B: to stay in Mexico and look for work. And even a Plan C: to sneak across the American border with the aid of a smuggler.

“Thanks to God, we made it,” he said. “All will be defined here.”

[New York Times]

Human Rights Watch denounces Angola’s expulsion of 400,000 Congolese

Global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on Angola to halt mass deportations after more than 400 000 migrants mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo fled or were expelled from Angola in just weeks.

Without producing any evidence, the government of President Joao Lourenco claimed that migrants organized and controlled diamond smuggling.

The migrants have accused Angolan security forces of physical and sexual abuse that feed a climate of fear and intimidation. HRW pointed to UN reports that Angolan security forces and allied youth militias from the ethnic Tshokwe group, shot dead at least six Congolese last month during an operation in Lunda North province bordering DRC. (Angola and DRC share a 2,500km land border, the longest in Africa.)

The government has vehemently denied that its security forces committed abuses.

[AFP]

UNICEF convenes key players in sanitation markets in West Africa

Open defecation is a life-threatening practice, as contact with human waste can lead to diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, polio and diarrhea. Every day, 700 children under five die from diarrhea-related diseases.

One of the key approaches in the UNICEF global strategy for water, sanitation and hygiene is to build sustainable markets for goods and services where supply meets demand. In an effort to support the abandonment of open defecation, and 60 million to gain access to at least basic sanitation services by 2021, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is convening industry, financial institutions, governments and development partners in Abuja, Nigeria to discuss shaping healthy sanitation markets in the West and Central Africa Region.

In Nigeria alone, 46.5 million people practice open defecation, making it the second highest ranked country in the world. Following the rise in demand for toilets, “new accelerators are needed to support local markets to deliver sustainable sanitation solutions at scale,” said Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa.

UNICEF, with a long history of influencing markets and driving product innovation that has increased children’s access to essential commodities, will host a series of regional sanitation industry consultations, the event in Abuja convening product manufacturers, service providers, government officials, financial institutions and development partners to share information, discuss market challenges, communicate perspectives and identify strategic steps to strengthen local markets in West and Central Africa and specifically in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana.

Similar consultations in other regions such as Eastern & Southern Africa, Southern Asia and Eastern Asia and the Pacific are also in the pipeline.

[UNICEF]

‘Water from air’ quenches thirst in arid region

In many arid regions of Africa, water can be hard to find, particularly in the dry season.

But a center run by the Samburu Girls Foundation in northern Kenya – which rescues girls facing early marriage and female genital mutilation – has a new high-tech source of it. Since June, the center has used panels that catch water vapor in the air and condense it to supply their drinking water.

Officials at the school say the girls no longer have to travel for water.  “The girls can now have more time to study since there is enough fresh water to go round and there is no need to walk long distances to search for water,” said Lotan Salapei, the foundation’s head of partnerships. Girls formerly trekked up to five kilometers a day in search of clean water during particularly dry periods, sometimes bringing them into contact with members of their former community, Salapei said.

The center, given 40 of the water vapor-condensing panels by the company that builds them, U.S.-based technology company Zero Mass Water, now creates about 400 litres of clean water each day, enough to provide all the drinking water the center needs. The panels provided cost about $1,500 each, foundation officials said.

George Sirro a solar engineer with a Nairobi-based solar equipment company said such devices can be a huge help not only to people but in slowing deforestation that is driving climate change and worsening drought in Kenya. Often people with inadequate water cut trees to boil the water they do find to make it safe, he said, driving deforestation.

[Reuters]