The migrant activist who is leading thousands of asylum-seekers to the United States was convicted of kidnapping nearly three decades ago and sentenced to 40 years in a Mexican prison where he claims he was tortured, according to a report.
Luis Garcia Villagran, a self-described Evangelical Christian, is at the head of the procession of nearly 10,000 migrants who set off Christmas Eve from the southern Mexican town of Tapachula heading north to the United States, which is already reeling from an immigrant crisis at the border.
Villagran, who runs the Center for Human Dignity, was arrested in the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1997 on kidnapping and conspiracy charges, which he has denied, the New York Post reported.
A judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison.
While imprisoned, Villagran said he was held in solitary confinement and tortured in an attempt to make him confess, resulting in him suffering a detached retina.
The injury, he said, went untreated and he lost sight in one eye.
Villagran said he was “stigmatized as dangerous, and they took me to maximum security prisons until the [Inter-American Commission on Human Rights] demanded my freedom.”
He was released in 2010.
That experience led to the creation of the Center for Human Dignity, which he operates with his wife, Martha Martinex de la Fuente, the New York Post reported.
Villagran, who says he has led more than 40,000 migrants to the US since September 2021, is guiding a group of 8,000 asylum seekers mainly from South and Central America through Mexico. He predicted that the caravan could swell to 15,000 along the journey.
“We are the poorest of the poorest of those at the peak of need, those of us who do not have money to pay for visas or people smugglers,” he said, according to the New York Post.
More than two million people have been apprehended at the US border in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, the Department of Homeland Security says.
About 10,000 migrants have been arrested every day at the border this month, forcing US Customs and Border Protection to suspend cross-border rail traffic in the Texas border cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso, the Associated Press reported.
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