Last Updated: November 23, 2018 1:26 PM
Associated Press
Maria del Carmen Mejia holds her daughter Britany Sofia while standing a line outside a migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, Thursday, Nov. 22, 2018.
TIJUANA, MEXICO —
The mayor of Tijuana has declared a humanitarian crisis in his border city and said Friday that he has asked the United Nations for aid to deal with the approximately 5,000 Central American migrants who have arrived.
Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum said that the Mexican federal government has provided little assistance and he is not going to commit the city’s public resources to dealing with the situation. He said 4,976 migrants had come to the city.
Migrants listen to Mexican authorities as they join a small group of migrants trying to cross the border at the Chaparral crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Thursday, Nov. 22, 2018.
“We don’t have sufficient and necessary infrastructure to adequately attend to these people, to give them a decent space,” he said on Grupo Formula radio.
On Thursday, his government issued a statement saying that it was requesting help from the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“I am not going to spend the money of Tijuana (citizens),” Gasteulum said in the statement.
For the most part, the migrant caravan that left Honduras in mid-October was well received by the towns it passed through along the way to the border. Even cities with few resources made sure the migrants had food and a place to rest.
But in those places, the caravan stayed at most two nights — with the exception of Mexico City. In Tijuana, many of the migrants who are fleeing violence and poverty want to request asylum in the United States and face the prospect of spending months in the border city before they have the opportunity to speak with a U.S. official.
