During the 12 months of last year, Mexico received 118,478 petitions from migrants who requested recognition of refugee status, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) reported on Tuesday.
Unlike previous years when applicants from Haiti were the most numerous, in 2022 petitioners from Honduras were the first with 31,086 applications.
In second place are those from Cuba with 18,087 requests and in third place are those from Haiti with 17,068.
The institution, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior (Ministry of the Interior) of the Mexican Government, indicated that this figure is the second highest after the 131,448 cases registered in 2021.
“This is the second largest number of applicants registered in Mexico, only below the record number of 2021. Second consecutive year with more than 100,000 applicants,” the head of Comar, Andrés Ramírez Silva, said in a message on social networks.
In fourth place were migrants from Venezuela with 14,823 and in fifth place those from Nicaragua with 8,971 requests.
They were followed by El Salvador (7,803), Guatemala (5,271), Brazil (2,592), Colombia (2,482) and the Dominican Republic (1,421), among the top 10.
La Comar also reported that of the entire country, the migration office that received the most requests was Chiapas, a state bordering Guatemala, with 76,239 and the next in number of requests was Mexico City, with 17,364.
The data was published in the midst of a record migratory flow to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office detained an unprecedented number of more than 2.76 million undocumented immigrants in fiscal year 2022.
Migration has increased in Mexico since October 2018, when caravans with thousands of migrants, mostly Central Americans, began to enter with the aim of crossing the country to reach the United States, and the arrival of migrants has continued in recent years despite the pandemic and the restrictions imposed by countries in the region.