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Reuters
WASHINGTON
Washington is seeking closer coordination with several Latin American countries to tackle a jump in migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East who it believes are trying to reach the United States from the south on an arduous route by plane, boat and through jungle on foot.
US agents deployed to an immigration facility on Mexico's southern border have vetted the more than 640 migrants from countries outside the Americas who have been detained at the centre since October 2015, according to US Department of Homeland Security documents reviewed by Reuters.
The migrants often fly to Brazil, obtain fake passports there, and are smuggled to Panama before heading through Central America to Mexico's porous southern border, according to transcripts of 14 interviews conducted at the centre and other internal briefing documents seen by Reuters.
The US agents' findings come as Mexican immigration data show 6,342 Asian, African and Middle Eastern migrants were apprehended trying to enter Mexico in the first six months of this year. That was up from 4,261 in all of 2015, and 1,831 in 2014.
US border apprehensions point to the same trend. Between October 2015 and May 2016, US agents apprehended 5,350 African and Asian migrants at the US Southwest border. That's up from 6,126 in all of fiscal year 2015 and 4,172 in all of fiscal year 2014.
US concerns about potential security risks from migrants using the unusual and circuitous southern route have been growing in recent years, following a string of Islamic State-inspired attacks in the West and the surge in Syrian refugees fleeing that country's civil war.
Five Syrian nationals detained in Honduras last November were part of a wider group of seven Syrians who acquired forged passports in Brazil and then went by land to Argentina on their way north, a US government source familiar with that case said. There was no evidence to suggest the men were militants.
"The reality is that the vast majority of the people that Mexico encounters that are extra-continental will eventually end up on our border," a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official said.
At the detention camp in Tapachula, near Mexico's border with Guatemala, US Customs and Border Patrol agents have been training their Mexican counterparts on interview techniques, and using US criminal databases to investigate detainees, according to internal documents seen by Reuters.
Two to three US agents have been stationed there since at least October, according to the documents and US officials. Mexican officials have previously acknowledged the presence of US agents at Mexico's southern border, but few details of the cooperation have been reported.
