MOSCOW (Sputnik) — At least 19 migrants from Brazil attempting to illegally reach the United States disappeared near Bahamas in the Caribbean Sea, the official news portal of the Brazilian government said in a statement on Monday.
"We suspect that Brazilian citizens were on board of a ship that drowned on its way from Bahamas to the US, that the migrants were trying to illegally reach," the statement said.
The relatives of these migrants had not received any news from them since early September, the government added. However, the Foreign Ministry of the country does not exclude the possibility that the migrants are in prison.
According to the US Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the number of Brazilian immigrants in the United States in 2014 reached 336,000, which is 1 percent of all migrants living in the country. Some 20 to 35 percent of them live in the United States without the appropriate documents.
