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"A total of 4,612 foreigners were taken into custody by the National Migration Institute (INM) during the second month of this year," the agency said in a statement. INM agents detained 3,089 Central Americans - 2,716 men and 373 women - in 298 inspections conducted on highways and 38 operations targeting railways. The INM detained 1,451 Guatemalans, 1,021 Hondurans, 485 Salvadorans, 55 Nicaraguans and 77 people from other countries in the region. A total of 231 foreigners from other countries were detained during inspections at airports and bus stations, among other sites.
Joint operations with other agencies resulted in the detentions of 1,292 other migrants, the INM said. The law allows immigration agents to conduct inspections of foreigners "with the objective of dealing with them in the manner necessary in case they cannot verify their migratory situation," the INM said. All inspections are carried out "with respect for the human rights" of the migrants, the agency said. An estimated 250,000 Central Americans cross Mexico each year on their way to the United States, but academic researchers contend that the figure has fallen markedly because of the kidnappings and attacks on migrants.
Mexico recently launched the Unified Strategy for Preventing and Combating the Kidnapping of Migrants, a program aimed at dismantling the gangs that prey on migrants and forming alliances with other countries affected by this problem. The National Human Rights Commission, or CNDH, said in a report released last month that at least 11,333 migrants, the majority of them from Central America, were kidnapped in Mexico between April and September 2010. "Government efforts to reduce the rate of kidnappings against the migrant population have not been sufficient," CNDH president Raul Plascencia said during the presentation on Feb. 22 of the "Special Report on the Kidnapping of Migrants in Mexico."
Some 44.3 percent of the victims were Hondurans, followed by Salvadorans (16.2 percent), Guatemalans (11.2 percent), Mexicans (10.6 percent), Cubans (5 percent), Nicaraguans (4.4 percent), Colombians (1.5 percent) and Ecuadorians (0.50 percent), the CNDH, Mexico's equivalent of an ombudsman's office, said. The CNDH documented 214 kidnapping cases, many of them mass abductions, and found that some migrants were employed by criminals and corrupt officials to "infiltrate" groups of migrants.
Read more: Mexico detains nearly 5,000 migrants in February - Fox News Latino