Migrants mired in transit as Mexico becomes US’s immigration enforcer

Between border visits and rallies, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are duelling to control the narrative on immigration, placing the issue – and Mexico’s role in it – at the heart of the coming election. In tasking Mexico with reducing arrivals at the border, the US has given its neighbour leverage over US political discussion. On the ground, this has meant many migrants find themselves stuck in Mexico, running a gauntlet of extortion and violence as they try to make it to the northern border. “It used to be that the Darién Gap was the most horrific part of their journey, but now people are saying that Mexico is the worst,” said Ari Sawyer, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Mexico is the new jungle.” There are two components to Mexico’s central role in US immigration. Many Mexicans are themselves going to the US, and Mexico remain the top nationality among immigrants. Then there is Mexico’s status as the United States’ immigration enforcer, a role that has evolved over the course of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency, starting in 2018, as the number of migrants trying to reach the US through Mexico has risen tremendously. Compared to before the pandemic, detentions of migrants in an irregular situation have risen fourfold, reaching almost 800,000 in 2023. But it is far from clear what Mexican officials are doing with the people they detain. According to Tonatiuh Guillén, former commissioner of Mexico’s National Institute of Migration, detained people should be taken to a migration office to be reviewed. Meanwhile, consulates should be contacted, and the decision made on whether to repatriate them. But if the official detention numbers are accurate, he says, then it would be far beyond the capacity of Mexico’s institutions to process them. In any case, deportations have not risen in step with detentions – on the contrary, they collapsed last year, to a little over 50,000. In the first year of López Obrador’s administration, deportations as a percentage of detentions stood at 88%. In 2023, they stood at 6.8%. What is happening instead, according to human rights organisations, is that migrants are being put on buses and sent back south, sometimes all the way to the border with Guatemala. “If you’re detained in Mexico City, you go to Acayucan. If you’re detained in Acayucan, it’s Villahermosa. And if you’re detained in Villahermosa, it’s Palenque,” said Rafael Velásquez, Mexico director of the International Rescue Committee. “In other words, you go one step back.” At the same time, obstacles have been raised to make it harder for migrants to move north. These include checkpoints on roads and greater efforts to stop migrants hitching a ride on cargo trains. “Without a doubt there is a series of tactics to reduce people’s ability to move through the country,” said Velásquez. “But they are not formal, and when you ask for information, it’s murky.” Combined with the sustained entries on the southern border and the fall in deportations, the implication is that there are ever more migrants mired in transit through Mexico. “It’s like they’re stuck on this treadmill,” said Sawyer. As there is not a parallel strategy of social inclusion, these migrants are highly vulnerable. They are often unable to work formally, continually extorted by officials, and sometimes kidnapped and disappeared by criminal groups. Meanwhile the limited infrastructure that exists to support migrants has been overwhelmed. “If it weren’t for civil society organisations that attend to the humanitarian aspects we’d be in an even worse situation,” said Guillén. Since illegal border crossings hit a new record in December 2023, hurting Biden’s polling and triggering high-level meetings between US and Mexican officials, they have fallen by almost half – a remarkable drop, even accounting for seasonal trends. US officials credited Mexico with reducing arrivals at the border through greater enforcement. “The US needs Mexico for immigration deterrence and enforcement,” said Sawyer. “And López Obrador has been very willing to trade the rights of migrants and asylum seekers for political capital in Washington.” Within Mexico, such a bargain comes with relatively low political cost. “In contrast to the US, where migration is a huge issue, in Mexico it simply isn’t,” said Guillén. “Things as terrible as that detention centre fire in Ciudad Juárez happen –with the deaths, practically the murders, of those migrants – and there is no great political cost.