Texas border crossing where migrants made camp to reopen
Mayorkas said about 5,000 are in DHS custody and being processed to determine whether they will be expelled or allowed to press their claim for legal residency. Some returned to Mexico.
A U.S. official with direct knowledge of the situation said seven flights were scheduled to Haiti on Saturday and six on Sunday, though that was subject to change. The official was not authorized to speak publicly.
No migrants were left Saturday morning in the camp on the Mexico side of the border. Local authorities had moved the last migrants to a walled, roof-less facility in downtown Ciudad Acuña where the Mexican immigration agency put some tents.
That shelter had 240 people as of Saturday morning, according to Felipe Basulto, the secretary of the municipality. The Mexican government has been moving migrants by land and air to the south of the country and was planning to begin flying some to Haiti in the coming days.
The Mexico office of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration released a statement late Friday saying it is looking for countries where some Haitians have residency or where their children have citizenship as an alternative to allowing them to be deported to Haiti.
Luxon, a 31-year-old Haitian migrant who withheld his last name out of fear, said he was leaving with his wife and son for Mexicali, about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) west along Mexico’s border with California.
"The option was to go to a place where there aren't a lot of people and there request documents to be legal in Mexico," he said.
At the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition in Del Rio, migrants stepped off a white Border Patrol van on Friday, many smiling and looking relieved to have been released into the U.S. Some carried sleeping babies. A toddler walked behind her mother wrapped in a silver heat blanket.
A man who drove nearly 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) from Toledo, Ohio, hoping to pick up a friend and her family, scanned the line of Haitian migrants but didn't see them.