SALTILLO, Mexico – Gunmen came for Alex Morales in 2017, giving him a stark choice: deal drugs or die. He tried running that night from his home in Guatemala and was shot in the stomach and left leg.
After he recovered, Morales, 27, abandoned his bakery business and fled. He filed for asylum in the United States but was rejected. He returned home to find his three brothers dealing drugs. “They’re scared they’ll be killed,” he said.
“When I turned them down, they killed my mother, killed my father,” Morales recalled last weekend from a migrant shelter in Saltillo, 190 miles southwest of Loredo, Texas, on the U.S. border.
So he headed north again this year.
Migrants like Morales are increasingly abandoning Central America, leaving behind poverty and violence in attempts to reach the United States despite stricter enforcement along the border. Many also file asylum claims to stay in Mexico.
The Saltillo shelter and another one 65 miles east in Monterrey are the last stops for these people before reaching the U.S. border. The final push is so dangerous that migrants on buses or walking along railway lines risk being kidnapped by drug cartels who demand ransoms from their families.
Even with President Donald Trump telling migrants to stay put, and immigration officials separating families at the border, Central Americans continue streaming through Mexico — treks Trump compared to “walking through Central Park,” but rife with the prospect of kidnapping, extortion and rape.
Mexico also detains and deports tens of thousands of Central Americans each year, despite Trump's comments that Mexico is doing little to stop them. Last year, the Mexican government deported 77,371 people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, according to the Interior Ministry.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained 40,344 people on the southwest border in May, a 58 percent increase since October, the start of the fiscal year. The detentions included 9,485 families, nearly double the figure from October — with Guatemalans making up the largest number of detainees.
“The numbers have continued (rising) regardless of the policies in the United States,” said Rick Jones, with Catholic Relief Services in El Salvador. “They’re leaving based on the conditions here in the northern triangle of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, (which) continue to be among the five most violent countries in the world.”
Jones said the motives for leaving fall into three broad categories: violence, lack of opportunities and family reunification.
Many Central American migrants at the shelters in Saltillo and Monterrey spoke about extortion threats and forced gang recruitment, as well as being unable to make a living at home. Those from Honduras also mentioned political problems after last fall's disputed election and a government crackdown on opponents.
Rodolfo Argueta left Honduras this year after he and his wife lost their teaching jobs in what he called a “purge” for supporting the opposition. “They’re hiring people from their own party,” he said.
Some migrants spoke of seeking asylum, even though some said they were not directly impacted by violence in their home countries.
Edwin Alvarado, 16, from Honduras, whose family are poor coffee-pickers, planned to tell immigration officials that he's a minor, hoping that will allow him to stay in the United States.
“I understand that they’re giving asylum to people from Guerrero” state in Mexico, said Ramiro Gallardo, 34, a farmhand who was kidnapped several years ago in the country's heroin-producing heartland.
Many seemed unfazed by Trump’s tough talk and policies. Instead, they described theier difficult trips through Mexico that involved stealing rides atop trains — and being forced off by police or railway security and being robbed of their few possessions.
“The only thing (Trump’s) doing is raising the cost of crossing the border,” said Esdras Corios, 33, a Guatemalan trying to return to Georgia, where he worked as a dishwasher for four years and has a daughter. He was deported last year for driving without a license.
Migrants at the Saltillo and Monterrey shelters often wait for relatives already in the United States to send money, or they work odd jobs in Mexico to pay smugglers, also called coyotes, to take them on the last leg to the Texas border through the violent state of Tamaulipas.
Few women and families arrive at these two shelters, according to the staff, because women either hire smugglers for the trip or receive humanitarian visas in Mexico that allow them to travel on buses to the U.S. border. Both shelters said smugglers’ fees have skyrocketed in recent years up to $10,000.
For many of these young men, increased border enforcement is just another risk to face, said Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. “A bigger deterrent is that the more secure the border becomes, the higher the prices become for coyotes.”