60 Mexican Migrants Ask For Asylum At San Diego Border In Third Deportation Protest In Last Week

A third group of protestors marched from the Mexican city of Tijuana to the Otay Mesa port of entry near San Diego on Sunday, where they were detained by immigration authorities after trying to cross into the United States. They petitioned for asylum following their detention. According to the Associated Press, the sixty Mexican migrants who made up their ranks were seeking changes to deportation and other immigration policies, and were headed by Jacqueline and Marisol Aparicio, 11- and 12-year-old sisters.

Televisa reported that the Aparicio sisters said they wanted to be able to reunite with their parents, who have been living in North Carolina for 10 years and have not seen their children since. The girls have lived in Mexico City in the care of their aunt. “We’ve never seen our parents,” Jacqueline told the network, adding, “My sister and I want to be reunited with them. That’s why we’re here.” Another one of the protestors, 22-year-old Felipe Molina, told the AP that he wanted to reunite with his family in Durham, North Carolina, where he lived from age 8 to 18. “I went to high school there, my parents and sisters still live there," he said. "I came back to Mexico ... because I wanted to study sound engineering. I couldn't study in the U.S. because it was too expensive for foreigners."

March 10 and March 13 saw the first and second installments of the protests, with two groups of 35 Dreamers -- or one-time undocumented immigrants brought illegally to the US as children -- asking for asylum at the Otay Mesa border crossing. Reuters reported that all of the second march’s participants, who were organized by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, were either deported or left the country before President Obama created a program which gave many Dreamers relief from deportation and work authorization in summer of 2012.