MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) ‐ The bus carrying dozens of Central Americans from the Texas border arrived in this northern Mexican city late at night and pulled up next to the station. Men and women disembarked with children in their arms or staggering sleepily by their sides, looked around fearfully and wondered what to do.They had thought they were being taken to a shelter where they could live, look for work and go to school. Instead they found themselves in a bustling metropolis of over 4 million, dropped off on a street across from sleazy nightclubs and cabarets with signs advertising for "dancers."
The Associated Press witnessed multiple such busloads in recent days carrying at least 450 Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans from Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, to Monterrey, where they are left to fend for themselves with no support on housing, work or schooling for children, who appear to make up about half the group.
Mexico has received some 20,000 asylum seekers returned to await U.S. immigration court dates under the program colloquially known as "remain in Mexico." But there had been no sign of such large-scale moving of people away from the border before now, after the program expanded to Nuevo Laredo in violence- and cartel-plagued Tamaulipas, a state where the U.S. State Department warns against all travel due to kidnappings and other crime.