DAKAR, Senegal – Gueva Ba tried to reach Europe by boat 11 times from Morocco, failing every time. Then, in 2023, the former welder heard of a new route to the United States by flying to Nicaragua and making the rest of the illegal journey overland to Mexico’s northern border.
“In Senegal, it’s all over the streets — everyone’s talking about Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Nicaragua,” said Ba, who paid about 6 million CFA francs ($10,000) to arrive in Nicaragua in July with stops in Morocco, Spain and Salvador . “It’s not something hidden.”
Ba, 40, was deported from the United States with 131 compatriots in September after two months in detention, but thousands of other Senegalese have won a place in America. Many times to knowledgeable travel agents who know the way – presented on social media by those who have successfully settled in the United States.
They are part of an increase in migration to the United States that is extraordinary for its size and scope, with more people from distant countries accounting for border crossings. And as with this route used by the Senegalese, more are understanding plans, making payments, and looking for help via social networks, and applications such as WhatsApp and TikTok.
Arrests for illegal crossings on the US border with Mexico reached record highs in December. January saw a drop for the month, but arrests exceeded 6.4 million since January 2021. And Mexicans account for only about 1 in 4 arrests, with others coming from more than 100 countries.
US authorities arrested Senegalese migrants 20,231 times for crossing the border illegally from July to December. That’s a 10-fold increase from 2,049 arrests during the same period in 2022, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Many crosses in the remote deserts of western Arizona, such as Ba, and California.
Word of the Nicaragua route began to spread at the beginning of last year in Dakar and took off in May, said Abdoulaye Doucouré, who owns a travel agency that has sold about 1,200 tickets from Dakar to Nicaragua. in the last three months of 2023, for the equivalent of several thousand. dollars each.
“People didn’t know about this route, but with social networks and the first migrants who took this route, information circulated quickly among migrants,” he said.
Some are motivated by Senegal’s political turmoil – authorities delayed February’s presidential election by 10 months – but the sudden attraction appeared to be based largely on social media posts and the spreading the road here.
Spikes attributed to social media have occurred in other West African nations, where people have historically turned to Europe first to escape. Mauritanians arrived at the US border with Mexico in similar numbers, and migrants from Ghana and Gambia also arrived.
Many are eventually released to the United States to pursue asylum in immigration courts that are backlogged for years with more than 3 million cases.
Passports from many African countries carry little weight in the Western Hemisphere, making the overland journey to the United States difficult to even begin. Senegalese can fly visa-free to only two countries in the Americas: Nicaragua and Bolivia, according to the Henley Passport Index. Nicaragua is much closer to Bolivia and avoids the notoriously dangerous Darien Gap in Panama.
As US sanctions against Nicaragua’s repressive government increased, the government of President Daniel Ortega used migration to push back.
The Nicaraguan government has gone so far as to hire a company based in Dubai to train the Nicaraguan civil aviation to manage nationally. immigration procedures for charter flight passengers. More than 500 charter flights landed from June to November, mostly from Haiti and Cuba, according to Manuel Orozco, director of the migration, remittances and development program at the Inter-American Dialogue.
But migrants from further afield, like Ba, also made their way to Nicaragua on a series of connecting commercial flights from Africa. In African capitals, migrants usually buy multileg tickets from travel agents connecting through Istanbul or Madrid, followed by stops in Bogota, Colombia, or San Salvador, El Salvador, before arriving in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, they meet smugglers who offer to take them to the Honduran border, or organize the trip to the United States.
The US State Department has asked Nicaragua to “play a responsible role” in the management of hemispheric migration, but this has not been seen. Nicaragua’s first lady and vice president Rosario Murillo did not respond to a request for comment on the increase in extra-continental migration through her country.
In October, El Salvador began charging $1,130 for citizens of 57 mostly African countries and India transiting the country’s airport. Authorities said most of the defendants were en route to Nicaragua aboard Avianca, a Colombian commercial airline.
The El Salvador tariff has caused the increase in airfares from Dakar towards the end of 2023, said Serigne Faye, an agent at the Touba Express travel agency in the Senegalese capital. Some passengers instead fly to Bogotá. The stops in Turkey are the most expensive.
While most asylum claims fail, the immigration court backlog means that people can stay in the United States for years, with eligibility for work permits. The asylum-granting rate for Senegalese was 26% in the US government’s fiscal year ended Sept. 30, compared with 14% for all nationalities, according to Justice Department figures .
Ousmane Anne, 34, left Senegal on September 25 with a plane ticket to Nicaragua, purchased from a travel agency. Their journey took a month – longer and more expensive than expected. Mexico was treacherous, he said, describing his travel group as often harassed, threatened and robbed by gangs.
Despite the enthusiasm back home, he said, it will be difficult to recommend the trip to anyone who does not understand the risks. But it did in New York, which has the largest Senegalese population of any US metropolitan area, according to census data.
“I knew it wouldn’t be very easy to come here to the States, but the hope I had was higher than all the obstacles and problems,” said Anne. “I knew the opportunities would be bigger here.”
He recently attended a forum in Harlem, hosted by the Senegalese Association of America. He learned the basics of US law, heard some dos and don’ts from police officers about e-bikes and mopeds that are popular with migrants, and got tips for navigating the immigration system. Hi.
Although it came with more questions than answers, Anne said, she remains hopeful.
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This story corrects the spelling of Colombia.
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Associated Press writers Philip Marcelo in New York, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, and Christopher Sherman and Maria Verza in Mexico City contributed.
