Migrants testing positive for coronavirus find shelter in Mexico
By Guadalupe Penuelas
Mexico City, Sep 8 (EFE).- Despite being faced with scant resources, the Esperanza Para Todos (Hope for All) shelter in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez is providing support to Covid-19-positive migrants who have been expelled from the United States.
“We are infected. We tested positive for Covid-19 in Ciudad Juarez. It is not easy, but we trust in God that we will get through this,” Santos Garcia, a Honduran who arrived in Mexico along with 11 other migrants a week ago after they were deported from the US, tells Efe.
Another migrant, Yanira Cruz from El Salvador, says that her journey once she was expelled from the US was made far tougher after she was infected with Covid-19.
“I am asymptomatic, but what worries me most about the virus is that children too can be infected,” Cruz stresses.
Mexico has recorded more than 3.44 million coronavirus cases since the onset of the pandemic, with 264,000 related deaths, the fourth-highest number in the world.
The region is currently facing an unprecedented wave of migration. Last July, the US has detained 212,672 illegal migrants on its southern border, the highest number in 20 years.
While waiting to cross into the US, migrants are crowded into caravans in southern Mexico or held on the northern border, exposing them to contagion.
Some 95 coronavirus-induced deaths among migrants were registered in Mexico between the beginning of May 2020 until September 5, 2021, according to figures released by the country’s ministry of health.
In the midst of these challenges, Esperanza Para Todos started sheltering migrants four months ago in Ciudad Juarez, a heavily industrialized city in the northern state of Chihuahua just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
