Mexican police look for migrants who were taken off bus

Mexican police are looking for many migrants who were kidnapped at gunpoint from a bus that was taking them to the border between the US and Mexico.

On Saturday, some people with guns got on the bus and took 31 passengers. Most of the passengers are believed to be from South America.

Some Mexican passengers and the driver noticed something wrong and called for help.

Immigrants are sometimes attacked by gangs, who keep them until their families pay money.

The people who were taken on Saturday were on a bus run by the company Senda. They were going from Monterrey to Matamoros, which is close to the US border.

The Mexican travelers said that the bus was stopped by five cars with men carrying weapons.

The people who moved to Mexico, most likely from Venezuela, had to leave the bus while the Mexican passengers got to stay.

The news in the area said that the Venezuelans were going to the border for a planned asylum meeting with US officials when they were taken by force.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the police are searching very hard.

Security forces stopped a strange vehicle on Monday on the highway and found five Venezuelan migrants, including two children, inside.

Officials said that the five Venezuelans were taken from another Senda bus in a separate incident. This shows how often migrants are kidnapped in this border area.

We don’t know which gang has the 31 missing people. But people who help migrants had said that there have been more kidnappings for ransom lately.

Father Francisco Gallardo, a Catholic priest who helps people who have come from other countries, said that many people are being taken away from their families very often.

Father Francisco said that when the migrants came to his shelter, they told him that gangs were taking whole families and threatening to hurt or kill them unless they paid a lot of money as ransom.

Tamaulipas is known for being dangerous for migrants, and Matamoros is in this state.

In 2010, a very bad thing happened. 72 South and Central American people were kidnapped and killed by a gang called Los Zetas because they didn’t want to work for the gang.

Due to the dangerous risks for migrants in Mexico, some decide to stay safe by joining large groups called migrant caravans, which travel to the border, mostly on foot.

About 7,000 people started a journey from the southern city of Tapachula on Christmas Eve.

A woman with her son talks to a government official before getting on a bus. They were part of a group of people traveling to the United States and had just finished their journey in Mapastepec, Chiapas, Mexico. This happened on January 2, 2024.

On Tuesday, Mexican officials said that the group of migrants had split up after traveling more than 100km (62 miles). Most of them accepted an offer to get on buses to a migrant processing center in the southern city of Mapastepec, operated by Mexico.

The US has asked Mexico to stop letting so many people cross through its land to get to the US.

President López Obrador said he made “important deals” in a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Mexico City last week, but he didn’t say what they were.