A legal fight is playing out around a Mexican migrant activist accused of human trafficking

MEXICO CITY — A legal battle is playing out in Mexico over a well-known immigration activist and lawyer who was arrested earlier this month for alleged human trafficking and then ordered released by a judge in a case that underscored the conflicted stands on protecting migrants among Mexican officials.

On Tuesday, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office announced it will appeal the decision from the previous day to release Luis García Villagrán, who has helped organize migrant caravans that travel north from southern Mexico.

When García Villagrán was released from detention on Monday, Judge Jonathan Izquierdo in Tapachula, a city in the state of Chiapas on Mexico’s border with Guatemala, said authorities did not have enough evidence to prosecute him for human trafficking.

“I had never seen anything like it,” Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero said during the president’s news briefing Tuesday. The judge ignored a multitude of presented evidence and claiming that because ”he was dedicated to protecting migrant groups, he was releasing” the suspect.

Gertz Manero added that his office would appeal but did not elaborate.

After his release, García Villagrán told reporters the “judge ordered my release because he said that we do not belong to organized crime” but rather to the activist group Centro de Dignificación Humana AC, dedicated to protecting the rights of migrants and recognized by the Ministry of the Interior.

The activist-lawyer, who often accompanies migrant caravans, claimed that his arrest amounted to persecution by Mexican federal authorities for his activism.

Such caravans have been criticized by authorities, and are regularly blocked by law enforcement, but have been used as a mechanism for migrants to travel safely through an area that has largely been considered the most dangerous stretch of the journey to the United States.

President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have both emphasized the need to protect migrants, but under pressure from the United States have deployed immigration agents and the National Guard to try to keep migrants from reaching the U.S. border. There have long been accusations that smugglers take advantage of the caravans to move people north.

When he was arrested last week, García Villagrán was helping organize a new caravan of up to 300 people that was to leave Tapachula. The march began its walk toward central Mexico and has so far advanced only a few miles (kilometers).

Authorities say García Villagrán had been wanted for years and that his arrest followed a series of investigations that identified a network of human traffickers using various migrant support organizations as a “front” for “human trafficking and drug distribution” in Mexico.

García Villagrán was identified as the “person in charge of obtaining false documentation” for the passage of migrants through Mexico, in addition to operating as “one of the main promoters of migrant caravans” and having an outstanding arrest warrant.

His arrest even drew comments from Sheinbaum who said during her daily news briefing on Wednesday that he was “not an activist” but was tied to trafficking people - and “that is the crime.”

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