JUÁREZ CHIHUAHUA, Mexico — The mayor of Juárez made an urgent plea for help from the Mexican government, asking for medical supplies and to consider banning U.S. citizens from crossing the border.
Like in El Paso, new cases of COVID-19 are surging in Chihuahua state with the epicenter in Juárez, which hit 1,100 deaths over the weekend, state public health officials said.
Juárez Mayor Armando Cabada is asking the Mexican government to consider temporarily banning U.S. citizens from nonessential travel over the border as COVID-19 flares in the region.
Travel by U.S. citizens in “indiscriminate crossings at the border in Ciudad Juárez are contributing in an active manner to the expansion of the virus,” Cabada said Friday in a letter to Roberto Velasco Alvarez, director for North America in Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Relations.
The U.S. has restricted nonessential Mexican tourists travel over the land border since March 21, but U.S. tourists still are able to go to Mexico.
Cabada also made an “urgent plea” for medical supplies for hospitals over the weekend in a separate open letter to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
