CIUDAD JUÁREZ, México—It was after midnight when migrants sleeping in a shelter on the outskirts of the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez heard a loud noise at the front door. No one had time to say anything before at least seven armed men burst in and started asking everyone to step outside and form a line.
Security footage from the cameras outside the Tierra de Oro shelter show a truck ramming the gate open before several men jump out and enter the building. Video from the inside shows a man kicking open the door to the room in which the migrants were sleeping, and then forcing them outside. Most of the group of about 15 migrants were adults, but at least four children can be seen hugging their mothers.
The men identified themselves as police officers, saying they were there to rescue the migrants. “But they were not police. They tried to kidnap us all,” one of the migrants at the shelter, who asked not to be named, told VICE World News in a phone interview. “They pointed their guns at us and tried to get us into three different vehicles.”
After several minutes trying to scare the migrants, the armed group realized that they were in a shelter not a stash house and left, the director of the shelter Rosalio Sosa told VICE News. Chihuahua's state attorney general's office also said that the gang confused the shelter for a kidnapping stash house run by a rival cartel.
But the incident highlights the grave dangers faced by migrants from Latin America and other parts of the world who are waiting in border cities under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that uses a health justification to immediately return asylum seekers to Mexico after reaching U.S. soil. The rule is set to be repealed on Dec. 21, although 15 U.S states are seeking to force its continued implementation.
Ciudad Juárez’s local government says they have rescued at least 99 migrants kidnapped by cartels during the first six months of this year alone.
“This is the third time something like this has happened at one of our shelters,” Sosa said. “Organized crime has been trying to kidnap migrants from wherever they can to ask their families for ransom.”
The incident occurred during the last days of November, but was only recently reported in the Mexican press after the migrants were moved to a different location.
“Migrants in Ciudad Juárez are in a very vulnerable position and no one is really helping to protect them,” Sosa said.
Last week a migrant shelter in Tijuana was forced to close its doors and relocate over a dozen migrants after cartel members threatened to kidnap everyone if they didn’t pay a $200 fee to stay “on their turf”, local news outlets reported.
Last year VICE World News obtained exclusive footage from a couple of Cuban migrants kidnapped at the Mexican border city of Matamoros by a criminal organization. The footage showed the two Cubans pleading for their lives, and was filmed by their captors and used to ask for ransom from their families back home.