One day last week in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a fearsome gun battle broke out on the main boulevard to the airport, as drivers careened off the thoroughfare in terror while rival narcos blasted away at each other.
The Cartel of the Northeast operates with impunity here, cruising around town in armored, olive-drab pickups with Tropas del Infierno, Spanish for "Soldiers from Hell," emblazoned on the doors.
And a pastor named Aaron Mendez remains missing after being kidnapped from the Love Migrant House, a shelter he operated. One news report says extortionists grabbed Mendez when he refused to turn over Cuban migrants they wanted to shake down.
This is where the U.S. is sending migrants who have asked for asylum after crossing the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas.
More than 30,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexican border cities to await their day in U.S. immigration court under the "remain in Mexico" program. They are sent back from U.S. ports of entry and given a date — generally two to four months in the future — to return and make their case for asylum before an immigration judge on a video link. About 4,500 of them have been sent to Nuevo Laredo, where mayhem is rampant and extorting migrants has become the cartel's latest income stream.
The program is officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. In Spanish, the acronym is PPM.
"For me, it's P-M-M, or Plan of Lies to Migrants," says Father Julio Lopez, director of the Nazareth Migrant House. "Because there is no protection."
Lopez is anxious these days. He won't talk about organized crime in his city — it's too risky. But he has plenty to say about MPP. He's seen firsthand the asylum-seekers who cower in fear in the city's six shelters, including his own, leaving only briefly to buy food.
Mexico's National Immigration Institute has been providing migrants with free bus trips to Monterrey, two-and-a-half hours away, and Tapachula, 36 hours away, to get them out of crime-ridden Nuevo Laredo.
But even that may not be safe. According to a witness account, several pickups full of mafiosos recently screeched to a stop in front of a government-contracted bus that had just left the central bus station. They ordered a dozen migrants off the bus, ordered them into their vehicles, and drove off, leaving the rest of the passengers shocked and frantic.
Cesar Antunes was on an earlier bus that departed, just before the bus that was ambushed. Antunes said he learned what happened to the second bus when both buses arrived in Monterrey and he spoke with one of the remaining passengers who witnessed the abductions. Antunes related the terrifying tale to NPR on his mobile phone from a city in Northern Mexico.
"Nuevo Laredo is more dangerous than San Pedro Sula, Honduras," Antunes says, "which is where I fled from."
