The Obama Administration is promoting another Spanish-language public service announcement seeking to dissuade would-be migrants from journeying northward.
The message is part a continuation of its effort to deter Central American migrants from illegally coming the United States by warning of the dangers of the journey rather than immediate deportation.
The new PSA features a 19-year-old Central American man’s testimonial about the perils of the journey he made with his father and smugglers to get to America illegally, saying that after several hours of walking his father got terribly sick.
“My dad couldn’t walk anymore… his tongue… the ants were already getting to him everywhere,” the Central American man says in Spanish in the video.
The Central American, his face blurred out in the video, continued, explaining that the smuggler wanted him to leave his father behind “they would find him… but I told him no, he is my dad… but my dad couldn’t even open his mouth… he was stiff all over… his body couldn’t function anymore… they left us in the brush… and I carried him out to the open until I was able to find a road.”
According to Customs and Border Patrol, the man and his father were eventually rescued by CBP Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector Special Operations Group.
The video and others like it have been distributed to “key Spanish language news media in the United States” as well as to the U.S. embassies in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala fro distribution in Central America.
“Human smugglers are cold-blooded individuals who have no regard for human life. Getting sick during the journey has been a death sentence for thousands of migrants who put their trust in merciless criminals. If a migrant gets ill or injured, she/he will likely be abandoned and left to die; we see this almost every day,” Jaime Ruiz, CBP Testimonials national spokesperson, said in a statement.
In recent years the southern border has experienced a surge in illegal immigration, largely from Central America. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and so-called “family units” have been apprehended illegally entering the U.S. most of whom remain in the U.S. ostensibly awaiting immigration proceedings.
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