Use of ‘rescues’ by Mexican migration officials criticized

MEXICO CITY — The headline on a statement from Mexico’s National Immigration Institute read: “INM rescues 800 Central American migrants who entered (Mexico) today irregularly.”

For many people who watched the moments when hundreds of Mexican national guardsmen with helmets and riot shields confronted hundreds of migrants who had been resting in the shade after walking all morning, “rescues” didn’t seem to be the right word.

Defenders of migrants’ rights say rescues typically don’t involve spraying those being rescued with pepper spray. Those requiring rescue usually don’t run away from their rescuers.

But such euphemisms have become the language of immigration policy and not just in Mexico. The same terminology has been employed in Europe for immigrants crossing the Mediterranean, though sometimes those migrants are in unseaworthy vessels in need of assistance.

The same statement Thursday from Mexico’s immigration agency said the migrants were taken to “migration shelters,” which is a step beyond the agency’s previous language calling its detention centers “immigration stations.”

Mexico’s immigration agency has used the term “rescue” for years. Sometimes it has seemed a plausible fit, like when immigration agents find 100 migrants stuffed into the back of a trailer in sweltering heat and the driver has run off. There no doubt are times when migrants require rescuing.

The U.S. Border Patrol uses the term as well — also at times in dubious situations — though most often in scenarios including migrants lost in the desert without water, a migrant drowning in the Rio Grande or migrants found in the back of a semi-trailer.