MCALLEN, Texas – On the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen, news about the “zero tolerance” policy is just beginning to spread.
“We are starting to learn about this,” Edith Garrido, who works at a Catholic immigrant center, said in Spanish. “This is inhumane.”
Most people on the streets in Reynosa said they hadn’t heard about the policy. Those who did expressed disappointment and even horror.
“I heard they are taking the kids away and forcing them into freezers,” one man said in Spanish. Many immigrants are not used to the cold air conditioning in the processing center, a border patrol agent told KPRC.
At the immigration center in El Salvador, where hundreds are deported from the U.S. every week, leaders told KPRC they don’t have an official response. KPRC visited the center in April.
News of the new American policy has only just started to reach Central America after days of nonstop media coverage from U.S. and international news sources. The first deportation planes since the news are just arriving in those countries.
“I’ve never heard of that until today,” a long-time news producer in El Salvador told KPRC by phone.
Several Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Chief of Staff John Kelly, have said that part of the purpose of the “zero tolerance” policy is to deter families from immigrating at all.
NBC News talked to two families in Oaxaca, Mexico, about the policy. One father, traveling from Honduras, said “it’s not worth it” and decided to stay in Mexico permanently instead of continuing on to the United States. The mother of the second family said she would keep going, naively insisting that Border Patrol would not take her children.
When President Donald Trump took office, his presence and rhetoric alone were a deterrent for illegal immigration, it seems. But after six months or so, illegal immigration picked back up to the highest levels in several years.