Asylum-seeking migrants who were recently welcomed into southern Maine are complaining about being sent to free housing in wooded districts of central Maine, according to the Associated Press.

“Some families expressed fear about being relocated from the busy city to towns where the vast woods that are part of Maine’s identity could trigger bad memories from their journeys,” said the report, which included comments from the migrants who trekked through Central American jungles to reach the U.S. border hoping to win the hugely valuable prize of U.S. residency and citizenship for themselves and their families.

The AP quoted migrants who are being moved further north from Portland’s busy downtown with its many employers.

The migrants are protesting their move out of downtown with a clever argument that exploits the progressives’ conceit that asylum programs are noble projects to rescue helpless and innocent unfortunates:

“By the grace of God, my family made it here. But the kids still have that stuff in their brains,” Lidia Maria Afonso, of Luanda, Angola, said Thursday through an interpreter as she and her three children awaited a ride to their new home 25 miles (40 kilometers) north, in Brunswick.

… They recalled seeing fellow asylum seekers fall to their deaths, get swept away by rivers, starve to death and get bitten by venomous snakes in Panama’s infamous Darien Gap, a jungle that’s known for dangerous wildlife and bandits.

The claimed traumas were suffered during the migrants’ voluntary and expensive journey from Africa to the United States:

“We are really thankful and appreciative. Really, God bless you. But we also want you to understand what it was like in the forest. There were people who went with us who died. We don’t want to go again to a spot like that. It’s just too difficult,” Thierry Malasa, who fled Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, said through an interpreter as his family prepared to move to a wooded home in Scarborough.

“Maine probably isn’t the place a dedicated herpetologist would like to spend much time,” reports a webpage about snakes in Maine. “There are only nine species and two sub-species of snakes in the Pine Tree State, none of them venomous and only one considered endangered. The Maine Herpetological Society lists three other species as having “special concern” status, with dwindling numbers in the state.”

The migrants are asylum seekers and will be required to plead their case before an immigration judge. If they have to wait more than six months for a court hearing, they can get work permits and jobs.

The U.S. jobs are vital for migrants, partly because they are needed to pay the loans owed to the smuggler who brought them from Africa and through Central America. The loans are frequently tied to real estate, such as farms, which can be legally seized by smugglers’ bankers if the loans are not quickly repaid.

Few non-working migrants have the money needed to buy and operate cars, so many seek housing and jobs in urban areas. Brunswick is roughly 130 miles from Boston and is also 30 miles far from the many potential jobs in downtown Portland.

U.S. officials are working with governments in Central America to shut down the growing flow of migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told Breitbart News.

“We are seeing [migration] flows from throughout the Eastern Hemisphere from Africa, from the Middle East, from South Asia, that are arriving in South America and making a long land trek to the U.S. border, paying, in some cases, $30,000 to $50,000 per person to a variety of alien-smuggling organizations,” he said August 2.