A Mexican judge has freed two migrant rights activists who organized caravans , said a member of their legal team and a rights group on Wednesday, a week after their arrest which their supporters claim was meant to appease the Trump administration .
After 13 hours of oral arguments for Cristóbal Sánchez on Tuesday and an eight-hour overnight hearing for Irineo Mujica , a judge in the state of Chiapas ruled that the two defenders of migrants should not be held in pre-trial custody , said lawyer Santiago Nuñez , who attended the hearings.
Sánchez
, 41, and Mujica , 49 were arrested within an hour of each other on June 5 and jailed as part of a Mexican crackdown that week, which coincided with talks in Washington to avert tariffs threatened by Donald Trump .
The high profile activists were held in a prison in the border city of Tapachula ahead of a hearing on human trafficking charges.
The judge ruled they could face the charges in liberty. They both face possible 24-year sentences.
In Sánchez’s hearing, the defense team presented witnesses, a photo, video, and documents to show he was at a party in Mexico City on March 29 at 10 p.m., Nuñez said.
That evidence contradicted four Honduran migrants who had said they handed USD $8,000 to Sánchez at that time in the Guatemalan border city of Tecun Uman .
The legal team also presented evidence that Mujica was in the town of Chahuites, Oaxaca , on February 27 at about 9 a.m., about 185 km from Mapastepec, Chiapas , where two other Honduran migrants had accused him of taking MXN $7000 pesos to transport them to Tijuana at that time, Nuñez explained.
None of the six migrants who had accused Sánchez and Mujica appeared at the hearings, Nuñez said.
Irineo Mujica
and Cristóbal Sánchez accused the federal government of proposing a “war policy” as an answer to the interests of the U.S.
During a press conference, Mujica said that “the criminalization campaign ” against migrants and human rights activists is worrying.
Cristóbal Sánchez
added that they are the first political prisoners of the new government.
Mujica, working with migrant aid organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras , has for years guided annual caravans of Central American migrants , negotiating their passage, temporary shelter , food handouts, and occasional transport through Mexico and sometimes to the U.S. border.
The migrants , who travel in large groups to avoid exploitation by cartels and corrupt government officials , drew international attention in 2018 when Trump said they should be stopped before reaching the U.S.-border.
After Mexico averted a tariff war with the U.S. , it has announced it will deploy 6,000 additional security elements to its southern border to halt illegal immigration.
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