TIJUANA – Municipal authorities in Tijuana are seeking an alliance to guarantee the safety of migrants arriving in the border city by air. At Tijuana International Airport, the migratory flow has increased and is constant, and it is there that migrants have already been victims of crime.
Enrique Lucero, director of Migrant Services, told Telemundo 20 that the international airport is a worrying point for people arriving at the airport, as they could be victims of extortion or abuse. “We have had two cases that have started at the airport,” he confirmed.
In one of them, the migrants boarded a taxi at Tijuana’s international airport where the driver promised to take them across to the United States and all he did was drop them off at the Chaparral border crossing, charging them hundreds of dollars for a distance of about 11 kilometres.
“For that action he took $700 dollars from them and the second case was the most recent one of a family from Ecuador, where he took a taxi outside the airport, and was the victim of an assault and two people were injured, Lucero added.
Approximately 30 to 40 percent of the migrant community from Russia, Colombia, Brazil, Africa and Mexico arrive in the city by air, so through this alliance they seek to provide information to those arriving for the first time at this border and thus provide guidance on the CBP One application, the guide for migrants and refugees or even the tabulators of the prices of taxi routes to avoid further abuses. Something that migrants like María Guadalupe would have liked to have when they arrived in this city and thus avoid being one more victim.
A few weeks ago, she and her four children arrived in Tijuana and upon their arrival a taxi driver at the terminal charged them more than 1,700 pesos for a ride of just a few minutes.
“And he took us out to the street and brought us here where we told him, to the Chaparral line, and when we told him how much it was, he said …. 1,788 pesos. Well, since he was the first Tijuana airport taxi driver I ever caught here in Tijuana, I got really scared and I started to think that if they were going to charge us like that, we wouldn’t even have enough to eat or where we were going to spend the night”, said María.
