SAN ANTONIO — The Mexican government has spent an average of $5 million on each migrant caravan that traveled through the country to the United States over the past five months, according to the top U.S. homeland security official in Mexico.
“The estimate is that in each one of these groups — the October, November, January, February — the different levels of government in Mexico have spent about $5 million on each one,” said the Department of Homeland Security’s attache in Mexico, Edgar Ramirez.
“These are obviously amounts that are not huge, especially when you compare them to the expense that the U.S. puts toward immigration matters,” Ramirez, a panelist at the Border Security Expo, said Tuesday afternoon.
However, he said, the issue is the money is going toward this continued flow of people, not toward a long-term solution.
[Related: Some 700 Cuban migrants join Central American caravan traveling on foot to US-Mexico border]
The largest of the caravans (more than 7,000 people from primarily Central American countries) arrived in Tijuana last November after a more than 2,500-mile trek from Mexico’s Chiapas state north along the country’s Pacific coast to the California border. The Mexican government provided $3.5 million to shelter, feed, and protect the noncitizens on their journey to Tijuana.
The government also opened a shelter in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, in February to house approximately 1,800 migrants who had intended to apply for asylum just over the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas.
That shelter was open for two weeks. It was heavily guarded by federal police in order to prevent people from leaving the facility and trying to illegally cross into the U.S. That facility alone cost $1 million.
Ramirez said the Trump administration’s State and Homeland Security Departments are focused on developing a long-term solution that addresses the root causes to more people fleeing northern nations of Central America.
“It’s going to take a long time,” he said.
