On a wooden platform on the Rio Grande, bishops from Mexico and the United States held a mass celebration this Saturday in memory of the many migrants who died trying to cross the border between the two countries fleeing poverty.
The ceremony took place between Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (United States), and was attended by activists and migrants on both sides of the border area.
The Rio Grande, with less flow at that point and called the Rio Grande in the United States, marks the border between the two countries and is a corridor through which undocumented migrants permanently cross.
“The aim is to pray for the dead migrants, but to raise our voices for whatever is happening to Venezuelans, Haitians, Africans” seeking asylum or asylum in the United States, priest Francisco Javier Calvillo told AFP. Director of the Casa del Migrante de Ciudad Juárez, which houses about 400 people.
In all, about 2,800 migrants currently live in 25 shelters in that city.
Near the mass site, on a river bank, about a thousand Venezuelans have been camping for days waiting to enter US territory.
The Bishop of El Paso, Marc Joseph Seitz, remembers Margaret Sophia, a five-year-old girl from Guatemala, who died on August 22, about three kilometers from the site where, after a stream, the river stream swelled. had come The rain took him away from his mother.
“Margaret Sophia’s dream was to come to the United States and one day work with her mother, Sylvia, to help her nine-year-old brother, Aaron, who was suffering from cerebral palsy,” recalled American Religious.
According to United States Border Patrol data, during fiscal year 2022, which ran from October 2021 to September 2022, 853 migrants were found dead along the entire 3,169-km border with Mexico.
On September 1, nine people drowned and dozens were rescued after attempting to cross the Rio Grande near the American town of Eagle Pass, Texas.
Recent mass deaths have exposed the alarming journeys that headline hundreds of thousands of people each year trying to reach the United States from Mexico.
On June 27, 53 migrants, mostly Mexicans, died of suffocation after being dropped into the trailer of a truck in San Antonio, Texas. Such accidents also include murders committed by human traffickers.
The memory of the deceased migrants is being collectively celebrated for 25 years.
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AFP
