In Abu Qurqas district, Minya Governorate, southern Egypt, a family of a father, a mother, two sons and two daughters dreamed of migrating to the United States, fleeing deteriorating economic conditions and seeking a better future, as many people from their governorate have done over the past few years, migrating illegally to America across the Mexican border. But the family never imagined that its dreams would turn into a nightmare, and that its journey from Egypt to the United States, via Morocco, Nicaragua, then Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, would end tragically, costing the lives of the two daughters, with the father wounded by Mexican army bullets. The middle son also took shrapnel to the head, not to mention what awaits the surviving members of the family after losing all their savings.
A week ago, a group of irregular migrants from Egypt, Peru, Honduras and Pakistan were preparing to leave the town of “Tapachula”, heading to the Mexican capital on their way into US territory. Among them was the family of Saad Salah Malak Girgis, 50, who owned a herbalist’s shop in the village of Abu Qurqas El-Balad, before migration brokers convinced him that his and his family’s journey would be safe.
Things were going as planned, until the Mexican smugglers put them in two trucks with 33 irregular migrants, heading for the border between Guatemala and Mexico. While the family was riding in the first truck, Mexican soldiers opened fire on them. The father was shot in the pelvis, his elder daughter Silvia, 19, and his younger daughter Irini, 11, were killed, and the middle son, Yostos, 14, suffered serious shrapnel injuries to the head and various parts of the body, after which he was taken to the High Specialty Regional Hospital in the city of Tapachula, Mexico, according to a Mexican newspaper. Another young man from Abu Qurqas district who was with them in the truck, Badie Makram, 17, was also killed by Mexican army bullets, according to what Zawia3 learned from residents of the village of Abu Qurqas in Minya Governorate.
Mexico’s Ministry of National Defence announced last Wednesday that Mexican soldiers had killed six migrants after opening fire on a group of 33 people riding in a truck that tried to evade a military patrol, stating that ten migrants were injured in the incident, which occurred on Tuesday evening, including citizens of (Egypt, Nepal, Cuba, India and Pakistan).
The details of the incident were told to Zawia3 by Hamza, a Moroccan migrant who accompanied Saad during his treatment in hospital after he was wounded, and who volunteered to translate for him to the medical staff, the media and civil society organisations in Mexico. He tells us there were three trucks carrying migrants who had left Guatemala and were on their way from the Mexican state of Chiapas to the capital, Mexico City, and from there to the border of the US state of Tennessee. The first truck carried Moroccans who had decided to take the sea route to reach America, while the others, who rode in the other two trucks, mostly Egyptians with children, chose the land route, believing it to be less dangerous. However, the Mexican army forces thought the driver of the first truck, which carried Saad’s family and other Egyptians, had thrown something, and believing it belonged to the gangs, they opened fire on them. While the mother, Neama Nabil Farag, 40, was sitting at the front of the truck with her young child, who is no more than five years old, Saad, his middle son Yostos and his two daughters were sitting in the back. When they were fired upon, the two girls died instantly, while their father was hit by bullets and their brother took shrapnel to the head and veins. The minor Badie Makram was killed, a young Egyptian woman named Aya Abdel Wahab was shot in the leg, and a young Egyptian man named Ziad who was with them survived, according to the witness.
Hamza confirms that the mother and youngest son were not harmed and were placed in a social care centre, while Saad lies in hospital, where his condition has stabilised and he has received good medical care, as well as attention from human rights organisations and civil society organisations in Mexico. The middle son, Yostos, is in critical condition and was flown to a hospital in another city. He revealed that the family had feared being robbed, so the elder daughter, Silvia, hid USD 10,000 in her underwear, all the money they had left, and when she was killed her body was moved and the father does not know what became of their money. He confirmed the death of the young man Badie Makram, and said the victims’ bodies have not yet been buried.
The Foreign Ministry Steps In
According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigration Badr Abdelatty held a phone call with Juan de la Fuente, Mexico’s foreign minister, in which they discussed the incident. The Mexican foreign minister expressed his deep regret over the tragic incident and asked that his condolences be conveyed to the Egyptian government and the victims’ families, stressing that investigations were continuing and that the Egyptian government would be informed of their results as soon as they were completed. The Egyptian minister asked the Mexican government to swiftly complete the investigations and the procedures needed to transfer the victims’ bodies to Egypt, and to provide the necessary medical care to the injured. He also instructed Egypt’s ambassador to Mexico to travel to the city, which is about 850 kilometres from the Mexican capital, to follow up on the situation, complete the procedures for transferring the bodies and assess the needs of the injured.
Saad Salah’s family, the victims of the shooting in Mexico, are not the only ones to have taken the road of death in an attempt to migrate illegally to America; hundreds and perhaps thousands of Egyptians preceded them over the past five years, most of them from the same governorate, Minya, whose migrants pass on their experiences to others, as travel and migration blogger Tarek Abdo, known as “Consul of the Poor”, explains to Zawia3. Irregular migrants used to travel from Egypt to Panama, then Colombia, and from there travel overland to Nicaragua, since it does not require an entry visa, then cross Honduras and Guatemala without problems until they reach the Mexican border, where smugglers pick them up and take them to the US border.
He adds: “This route was cut off after Panama imposed tough conditions for obtaining its visa, so smuggling networks created a new route from Cairo airport to Mauritania, then to Morocco, then transit to Madrid airport, then transit to El Salvador, entering Guatemala overland, on a route fraught with danger that passes through Mexico and is controlled by gangs, so they are exposed to kidnapping or death.”
Facebook and WhatsApp groups about migrating to the United States and travelling to Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala are full of stories of Egyptian migrants, among them a young Egyptian man from Alexandria who was arrested in Mexico and lost contact with his family, as his sister Eman Mahmoud pleads for help.
According to the testimony to Zawia3 of Rania, who recently crossed the Mexican border and entered the United States, 12 young Egyptian men decided to embark on the adventure of travelling along the road of death and migrating from Mexico to America, but they remained stuck in Mexico City for a long time, until a smuggler of Arab origin picked them up and took them on a dangerous route at a lower cost, then left them alone in the open, pleading for help. Contact with them was then cut off some time ago, and their fate remains shrouded in mystery; Rania does not know whether they are alive or have been killed, or whether they managed to cross the border or were arrested.
From Mauritania or Jordan to Nicaragua and Mexico
In the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, there is a travel agency that serves as a cover for a network smuggling irregular migrants to the United States. It hunts for Egyptian customers on social media, convinces them the journey is easy, and provides them with invitations to travel to Nicaragua and spend a week there, for USD 500 per adult and USD 100 per child.
On arrival there, a woman working with the agency receives the migrants and hands them over to smugglers who take them by bus from Nicaragua to Mexico for USD 1,500 per person. When they reach the capital, Mexico City, they stay at a particular hotel and register their details on the US immigration website, then set off again by bus, and as they approach the border the buses stop and they continue on foot, according to what a migration broker working for the agency told Zawia3. He stressed that Egyptians have a good chance of migrating via this route, which he claims is safe as long as the migrant does not travel with Mexican drug traffickers, and said he has brought many women and children in through it.
Zawia3 spoke with an illegal migration broker of Mauritanian nationality named Sheikh Omar, who is active on social media and organises migration trips for Egyptians from Mauritania to Madrid airport and from there to Nicaragua, for USD 9,500 per person, paid on arrival there.
Another route for Egyptians’ illegal migration to the United States was created by Jordanian travel agents and migration brokers, among them Khaled, with whom Zawia3 spoke. It begins with obtaining a tourist visa for Jordan; the migrant sets off from Cairo airport to Amman airport, spends two days there, then takes transit flights to Spain, then Honduras, then Guatemala, then Nicaragua, and from there to the city of Tijuana in the far north-west of Mexico, ending at the US border, where they cooperate with Mexican smugglers and gangs who charge large sums of money to bring migrants into US territory.
For the illegal migration trip, which takes between 12 and 13 days, Khaled charges USD 6,600 per person, including flight tickets and accommodation, making a profit of USD 1,200 on each migrant.
He says that over the last two years he has sent hundreds of migrants to America, including 88 Egyptians, most of them young men, among them a family with children, explaining that there are more dangerous but cheaper routes used by Egyptian migrants, such as the Mauritania or Morocco route, heading for a land route in Mexico. Some break the instructions and leave their hiding places for the streets, so they are arrested in Mexico and deported, while some get into trouble with gangs when they travel without a travel agent.
He points out that a few days ago he witnessed a Mexican gang firing shots in the border area to threaten a group of young Egyptian migrants from Minya Governorate, to force them to pay USD 7,000 each, and they could have been killed had he and a group of travel agents and brokers not helped them pay a sum of money to the gangs, with whom they are forced to cooperate to bring migrants in.
According to a previous statement by the Minya Governorate office, the villages and districts dominated by illegal migration in the governorate were listed as follows: El-Edwa district in the far north-west of the governorate includes four villages that export illegal migration, along with six villages in Maghagha district, seven in Beni Mazar district, five in Matay district, nine in Samalut district, eight in Minya district, eight in Abu Qurqas district, nine in Mallawi district and five in Deir Mawas district.
The Steep Cost of Illegal Migration
Estimates put the total number of Egyptians in the United States at 1.8 million, including about 700,000 living in the state of California, near the border, according to television statements last year by Ambassador Soha Gendy, Minister of Emigration and Egyptian Expatriates’ Affairs.
According to the US State Department’s annual report for 2023, Egypt ranked first in the Arab world for the number of immigrant visas to America, with a total of about 5,900 visas out of nearly 562,000 worldwide in 2023.
According to a 2022 report by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, the United States ranked first by number of Egyptians who obtained approval to emigrate and acquired immigrant status in 2022, at 44.8%.
Over his years working as an immigration consultant in the United States, Mamdouh Nakhla, a member of the American Bar Association, has met many illegal Egyptian migrants and defended more than 200 of them, 90% of whom came from Minya Governorate. Most were Christians, some of whom claim to have suffered religious persecution, and all share the economic hardship and marginalisation of the Upper Egyptian villages they come from. They headed to countries that do not require entry visas for Egyptians, and from there to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and then Mexico; two or three kilometres from the US border with Texas, California or Arizona, the smugglers leave them, fearing arrest, since smuggling is a felony under US law punishable by life imprisonment, while those who are smuggled face no penalty, as the lawyer explains to Zawia3.
He points out that some migrants pay with their lives for attempting to migrate illegally to the United States, as they are shot dead by gangs or have their organs stolen and sold.
The Egyptian-born lawyer says the cost of illegal migration from Egypt to the United States may exceed EGP 1 million, as the multinational smuggling networks receive about USD 20,000 per migrant, divided into stages that end at the US border, where USD 6,000 is paid to the smugglers.
He explains that when migrants arrive, officers take them to detention centres where they spend between three days and two weeks before being brought before an immigration judge, who rules either to allow them into the country, in which case they pay USD 1,000 for a work permit, or to deport them if they have a criminal record, forged papers, have lost their identity papers or have previously attempted to enter the country. The ruling can be appealed, and if the appeal is not accepted, the migrant is returned to his country on the first plane, and the travel costs are recorded as an immigration fine that becomes a debt on him if he tries to enter America again legally.
He notes that an immigration lawyer’s fee for defending an irregular migrant is USD 5,000, and the same amount is charged again if the ruling is appealed, while he and a small number of lawyers offer their services to Egyptian migrants for a nominal fee or free of charge.
Mahdy Afify, a member of the US Democratic Party, explains to Zawia3 that there are smuggling networks active in some Egyptian villages that cooperate with gangs in South America, especially Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Illegal migrants usually have friends or relatives in the United States who receive them and help them obtain residence and work, taking advantage of the fact that US law prohibits police officers from asking people about their nationality or residence, or whether they hold a “green card”, as this is the responsibility of passport officials and officers in border areas; but if they are caught, they are liable to detention and deportation.
He stresses that there has been a large increase in illegal migration from Egypt to the United States, with most migrants coming from particular villages in Upper Egypt or the countryside through smuggling networks, but there are no statistics on the number of illegal migrants holding Egyptian nationality who reach the United States.
Bishop Youssef, Bishop of Texas, Florida and the Southern United States, warned the young people of Minya Governorate against illegal migration via Mexico during his visit to the Diocese of Minya last July. Despite this, Egyptians in some Upper Egyptian villages, especially the Minya villages mentioned above, are still taking the risk and embarking on illegal migration that may cost them their lives, as happened to Saad’s family. But what calls for study and questioning is that many of the migrants from that governorate are Christians seeking the American dream to escape Egypt.
