In the first five months of the year, almost 1.4 million undocumented foreigners were detected traveling in Mexico without entry authorization, the National Immigration Institute (INM) said Sunday. The INM said in a statement that “through various immigration verification actions” between January and May, it located and “rescued” just over 1.
39 million “foreign persons traveling through the country in an irregular condition.” The figure is almost double the number of encounters authorities had with undocumented foreigners in Mexico in all of last year, according to data from the International Organization for Migration. In turn, the 2023 statistics showed a 77% increase in such encounters compared to 2022.
Most migrants who enter Mexico in an irregular fashion do so at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala before attempting to make the long, arduous and dangerous journey through the country to the northern border to enter the United States, either legally or illegally. According to the INM, citizens from 177 countries — or around 90% of the world’s nations — were detected traveling irregularly through Mexico in the first five months of 2024. It said that those people came from “the five continents” of the world,” but the majority left other countries in the Americas.
The data shows that more than 377,000 of the 1.39 million irregular migrants detected between January and May, or 27%, came to Mexico from Venezuela, a country where citizens “suffer.
