The UN team in the country, in close collaboration with the Mexican authorities, is working to ensure that they receive essential, and often life-saving, assistance.

In 2014, 2,100 people arrived in the country to request refugee status; five years later, in 2019, that had risen to more than 70,000.

The figures dropped in 2020, as travel restrictions imposed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic slowed global migration but, between January and November 2021, the country received more than 123,000 asylum requests from people coming from Caribbean, Central American, and South American countries, including Haiti, Honduras, Cuba, El Salvador, Chile, Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Colombia.

The refugees and their children are being supported by the UN refugee agency, (UNHCR), which has found them a safe place to live, and psychological aid.

They are being supported with life-saving information and other kinds of assistance at the shelters and institutions that work together with UN agencies in Mexico.

A build up on the border

As of July 2021, 70 percent of asylum requests were concentrated in the border town of Chiapas, which receives daily flights of people expelled from the United States under Title 42 legislation, a public health order issued in March 2020 by the Trump administration, which justifies the expulsions on the grounds that there is a communicable disease, namely COVID-19, in the migrant’s country of origin. (ILKHA)