A Mexican mayor has declared his city a “sanctuary” for the many illegal immigrants from Central American who pass through each day.
Jose Luis Gutierrez, mayor of Ecatepec — a suburb of Mexico City with as many as 3 million people — has not only ordered his police officers and city officials not to arrest or harass the migrants, he’s also told them not to cooperate with Mexican immigration agents.
“Let them go and guard the borders,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “For Ecatepec, migration is not a criminal act. It’s a universal right to seek work and the right to travel freely from one place to another.”
Each year thousands of migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries south of the border arrive in Ecatepec to catch a train that will take them across Mexico to the U.S. border.
They often receive help — food, a bath, old clothes — from local residents. Sympathy for migrants is high in Ecatepec because many residents are themselves migrants from other parts of Mexico.
And each year many young people from Ecatepec head northward for California, Texas and other U.S. states, the Times reported.
“For us, the bravest people of Ecatepec are the ones who take the risk of going to the north, with all the abuse and the hatred that goes on there,” Mayor Gutierrez said. “Those people are heroes for us.”
A number of U.S. cities are also sanctuaries for illegal aliens, including New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Minneapolis, Miami, Denver, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
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