SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil will begin restricting the entry of some foreigners from Asia who use the country as a base for migration to the United States or Canada, the press office of the Ministry of Justice said Wednesday.
The measures, which begin Monday, affect immigrants from Asian countries who need a visa to stay in Brazil. They do not apply to people from Asian countries who are currently exempt from visas to Brazil. U.S. citizens and many European citizens also do not need a visa to enter Brazil.
Federal police investigations have shown that these migrants often buy tickets with connecting flights at Sao Paulo's international airport on their way to other destinations, but often stay in Brazil as a starting point for their journey north, according to official documents provided to The Associated Press.
According to one of the documents, more than 70 percent of evacuation requests at the airport came from nationals of India, Nepal and Vietnam, while nationals of African countries such as Somalia, Cameroon, Ghana and Ethiopia were among the remaining 30 percent of those seeking evacuation.
The ministry said that from next week, travellers without visas will be forced to either continue their journey by air or return to their home countries.
The report, signed by federal police investigator Marinho da Silva Rezende Junior, told the justice ministry that the influx of migrants has caused “great disruption” at the airport in the São Paulo metropolitan city of Guarulhos since the beginning of last year.
“Evidence indicates that most of these migrants are using the known and extremely dangerous route from São Paulo to the western state of Acre, then through Peru into Central America and finally reaching the United States via the southern border,” one of the documents said.
A July investigation by The Associated Press found migrants, including from Vietnam and India, had passed through the Amazon after U.S. border policies created a wait-and-see attitude among them, with many returning to Acre state, on the border with Peru.
Brazil's Justice Ministry said the new guidelines do not apply to the roughly 500 migrants currently camped out at Sao Paulo's international airport.
Lemro Diniz, coordinator for the border patrol agency Geoffron in Acre state, told The Associated Press that the government's move came after local authorities spoke to U.S. diplomats about the situation of many Asian migrants and illegal immigrants in the area.
“The number of migrants coming here and the number of countries they are coming from is on the rise,” Diniz told The Associated Press by phone. “A lot of people are coming here from Bangladesh and Indonesia too. They come without papers or with fake papers from other countries.”
“That is a concern for us. They may be running away from the police,” he added. “There is also a network of 'traffickers' who are taking unaccompanied children and trafficking them in drugs.”
In a statement early on the same day, Brazil's Federal Prosecutor's Office said that Sao Paulo international airport had again seen “large numbers of foreigners arriving on LATAM flights and not departing promptly due to an overload in Brazil's immigration system.”
Prosecutors added that they would pressure airlines to provide basic needs while refugees wait for asylum – an application for refugee status for any reason.
LATAM did not immediately respond to The Associated Press' request for comment.
“It is important that decisions on these evacuation requests are made quickly so that the increasing arrival of foreigners does not affect the operation of the airport itself,” federal prosecutor Guilherme Rocha-Gepfert said after a meeting at Sao Paulo's international airport on Wednesday.
One of the documents showed that Brazil's Federal Police had received 9,082 evacuation requests by July 15 this year, more than double the number for the whole of 2023 and the highest in more than a decade.
But federal police said only a few hundred of them had tried to obtain documents to remain in Brazil.
According to the document, the federal police are convinced that “Brazil has a large number of people involved in smuggling and human trafficking, clear cases of asylum fraud, and integrated routes for illegal migration.”
Brazil has historically welcomed refugees, particularly Afghan refugees in recent years, regardless of the ideological leanings of Latin American leaders.
But reports that some migrants are seeking refugee status as a way to use Brazil as a transit point at a time when the system is overwhelmed by large numbers of people seeking humanitarian visas from Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine have sparked frustration with the government.
According to government statistics, Brazil issued 11,248 humanitarian visas to Afghans alone between September 2021 and April 2024.
Early in his administration, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva decided in January 2023 to rejoin Brazil in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, an intergovernmental agreement.
His administration has maintained humanitarian visas, but guidelines for granting them have become more restrictive under his administration.
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Associated Press writer Gabriela Sa Pessoa in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
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