Migrants in Waiting in Mexico 

By Alexandra Délano Alonso

Originally published February 1, 2024 in Current History

Abstract: Under the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico has abandoned plans for a more humane migration policy. Faced with increasing flows of asylum seekers from elsewhere in the hemisphere, the Mexican government has adopted a strategy of control and enforcement that mirrors the US approach.

Citation:

Alexandra Délano Alonso; Migrants in Waiting in Mexico. Current History 1 February 2024; 123 (850): 74–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2024.123.850.74

In 2023, hundreds of migrants were apprehended during violent raids conducted by Mexico’s National Institute of Migration and local police in areas of cities around the country where families and individuals, mainly from Central America, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela, had installed tents for temporary shelter. From Tapachula on the southern border with Guatemala to Mexico City, and Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez at the US–Mexico border, the majority of migrants living in shelters, tents, small hotels or abandoned buildings are stuck in limbo for months and even years while waiting to process their applications for asylum in Mexico or the United States. Both systems are under-resourced and have backlogs of hundreds of thousands of cases, while the two governments collaborate on measures to limit access to asylum from within US territory.

According to Mexico’s National Commission for Refugees (COMAR), the number of asylum seekers in Mexico has increased from 1,296 in 2013 to 118,756 in 2022. In the United States, applications for asylum more than doubled from 106,311 in 2018 to 238,841 in 2022. Nine of the top 10 countries of origin for asylum seekers in the United States are located south of its border.

Those who are forced to wait in Mexico often do so in precarious conditions. Without public infrastructure or resources to guarantee their access to shelter, food, and health services during their stay, and with local organizations and shelters too overwhelmed to offer them support, they live in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Many also face the threat posed by criminal organizations in some areas, as well as the violence and corruption of Mexico’s police and military apparatus, as seen in the recent raids as well as in many other encounters between Mexican authorities and migrants in transit. Given these realities, a more accurate term for people crossing through Mexico is migrants in waiting—or trapped.

Almost six years ago, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador celebrated his victory in the July 2018 presidential election with a speech in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza, he reaffirmed that making migration a voluntary decision rather than a forced condition would be one of the main commitments of his administration. Soon after that, the newly appointed interior minister and the director of the National Institute of Migration also pledged that Mexico would continue to be a country of refuge and open doors. This discourse was challenged a few months later by the first so-called caravans of migrants walking through Mexico in large groups to protect themselves from the threats from organized crime and state actors. The Mexican government’s narrative, which had contrasted starkly with the Trump administration’s hostile response, soon changed as the number of migrants in Mexico heading for the northern border increased and the pressure from the US government became stronger.

Since then, the promise of a shift toward a more humane approach to migration, in alignment with López Obrador (AMLO) and his MORENA party’s leftist policies of promoting local development and employment creation while cracking down on violence and corruption, has not been fulfilled. In fact, AMLO’s government has taken a drastic turn toward a predominant strategy of control and enforcement, replicating the very US policies that Mexico has long criticized—both in their operational logic and in their consequences for human lives.

Hardening Policies

In the past decade, criminal and state violence, climate change, internal displacement, poverty, and political conflict have pushed more individuals and groups to leave their countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America. The flows of people coming through Mexico and seeking to enter the United States have changed not only in terms of origin countries, but also in their composition. Larger numbers of women, children, and families are showing up at official ports of entry and making petitions for asylum rather than crossing the border as undocumented migrants. Options to enter the country by other means—visas, temporary worker programs, or family reunification—are extremely limited or have long waiting periods that people living in precarious conditions cannot afford.

From the southern border of Mexico all the way north to New York City, local populations have seen their cities changing and struggling to provide resources to support hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers who need health assistance, food, housing, work opportunities, and schooling as they wait for their cases to be processed in Mexico or the United States. For many of them, this can take months or years, given backlogs in the processing of applications and in immigration courts. The number of pending US asylum cases surpassed 1 million in 2023. In Mexico, the number of unresolved cases was over 400,000. Although funding for border enforcement in Mexico has consistently increased, resources for the COMAR have not. Similarly, the US has focused on expanding the Border Patrol and building a longer wall, despite calls for hiring more asylum officials and immigration judges.

Mexico has taken a drastic turn toward a strategy of control and enforcement.

Since the implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocols (also known as Remain in Mexico) in 2019—a bilateral agreement that was one of the main concessions made by AMLO in the face of US President Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Mexican imports—the focus has remained on keeping migrants and asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the border (or further south). That measure was followed by Trump’s public health order invoking Title 42 of the US Code to deny entry during the COVID-19 pandemic (it remained in effect until May 2023), and then by the Biden administration’s creation of a Customs and Border Protection agency app, CBP One, requiring requests for asylum appointments to be made in Mexico, where people have to wait until their scheduled date to present their claim at a port of entry.

These were among a series of US measures to prevent and deter migration, from the crude separation of families during the Trump administration to the expansion of the border wall and the infrastructure of deportation and detention. But the most notable change during AMLO’s tenure has been how these strategies of migration control have trickled down from the United States and expanded in Mexico, building on foundations established by his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The latter’s Plan Frontera Sur, supported by the Obama administration, ramped up migration control measures on Mexico’s southern border.

The consequences of these policies have long been known. They do not deter migrants from fleeing countries where their lives are in danger. Instead, they sharply increase the risks to migrants, the growth of criminal organizations, and the number of people who disappear and die during their journeys. This is particularly concerning in a context where Mexico is now de facto acting as a “safe third country” while facing high levels of violence, corruption, impunity, and lack of accountability for state authorities, particularly in areas with limited infrastructure where migrants settle temporarily.

Hundreds of migrants have died every year since the expansion of border enforcement operations and the con
struction of the first segments of the US border wall in the mid-1990s. Millions of families have been separated by policies of detention and deportation—policies in which Mexico now actively participates, having deported over 600,000 people in the past five years. An unknown number of migrants die and disappear in Mexico in various ways: suffocated inside trucks and trailers that transport them north; at the hands of drug cartels that kidnap them; crossing jungles, rivers, and deserts to avoid military checkpoints or areas controlled by organized crime; and even while being detained by the government.

In March 2023, 40 men died inside a detention center in Ciudad Juárez when guards refused to open the cells after the detainees set a mattress on fire to protest against the conditions inside. The migrants were blamed for bringing this disaster on themselves, in line with the prevailing rhetoric that supports policies of enforcement. Deaths are justified as unintended consequences, collateral damage, or even proof of successful deterrence strategies, with no accountability from the governments that have designed and implemented such policies.

Different Logics

While both the US and Mexican governments continue to expand such operations, the cost of providing food, housing, health care, and employment resources to support populations in waiting or those who have been granted asylum status has been mostly borne by shelters and casas del migrante. These are run by a growing network of religious groups, volunteers, and community organizations, as well as nonprofits, local governments, and international organizations. As the waiting periods for resolving cases grow longer and more uncertain, with no longer-term prospect of an alternative—except for governments’ proposals for top-down development programs to address root causes of migration in the region—anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourse matching the violence of enforcement measures has also increased.

Calls to “Make Tijuana Great Again,” echoing Trump’s campaign slogan, arose in response to the first caravans. More recently, local officials such as the mayor of Ciudad Juárez have declared—in almost the same words as the mayor of New York City—that migration brings costs too high for residents to bear. Narratives of migration as a burden, a flood, or a crisis are used to justify raids, keep people in makeshift refugee camps, detain them, deport them, or move them internally to other locations without their consent.

Declarations of good intentions and plans for holistic solutions for migration abound, and not just nationally or bilaterally. Recent years have seen an expansion of a regional approach to human mobility in the Americas. The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, signed in June 2022 by 21 countries in the region, begins with the same position López Obrador’s government originally espoused: “Migration should be a voluntary informed choice and not a necessity.”

The signatory governments committed to protecting the rights and freedoms of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and returnees, noting the multiple international documents that already reaffirm them. They recognized the imperative to attend to migration’s root causes with measures including plans for sustainable development. Promising a humane approach, they acknowledged the need for safe and regularized pathways for migration, and the shared responsibility to offer public and private services to support migrants and the communities where they settle.

Migration will be a key issue in both the US and Mexican elections in 2024, though not necessarily along the lines of such diplomatic statements of intent. Migration is not a priority for Mexican voters at the national level, but it has become one in the cities and states that have experienced its growth at first hand. According to recent surveys, although Mexicans recognize that migration can offer economic benefits, they support existing border control and enforcement policies. Opinions about certain groups of migrants have become more unfavorable in the past few years.

In his campaign to return to the presidency, Trump has vowed to expand the immigration crackdown he implemented, including increased detentions and deportations, restrictions on entering the country, and refusal of asylum claims. US state and local officials from Texas to Long Island are also politicizing their responses to the migrant influx. One stark example of this was the July 2023 installation of a 1,000-foot-long string of buoys and serrated saw blades in the Río Grande. Ordered by Republican Governor Greg Abbott—who has also been sending tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers in buses from Texas to New York, Chicago, and other sanctuary cities—this action was met by protests from the Mexican government, a lawsuit by the Biden administration, and a federal court ruling that the barrier must be removed.

Meanwhile, activists and community organizers insist that the perceived scarcity of resources to support the influx of migrants is a result of structural conditions surrounding access to housing or public services that were already under-resourced. In other words, the arrival of recent migrants and the conditions in which they must wait have laid bare the dysfunction and inequities that have long been present, affecting those newly arrived and long-term residents alike.

Activists working outside the predominant logic of the US and Mexican governments show us what could change if the attention and resources devoted to border walls, technologies, detention centers, and policing shifted toward processing asylum claims in a timely and fair manner and creating other avenues for regularized migration. What if resources went to community groups working to support migrants with assistance, information, and care to ensure they can live with dignity—whether in Mexico or in the United States, temporarily or with the intent to stay? What if they went to education, health infrastructure, and labor and housing equity programs that could improve living conditions for all? This is what truly would ensure the freedom to choose to migrate, to return, or to stay.

There is a clear consensus in government and diplomatic discourse on the need for change in migration policies and laws as well as for programs that address the underlying causes of forced migration. Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor who is leading the polls as MORENA’s presidential candidate, has pledged to ensure that people do not have to migrate to the United States to have a life with dignity, and to push for protecting the rights of migrants through a reform of the US immigration system.

Yet after many failed attempts at immigration reform, and given the predominant logic of security and enforcement that now extends all the way down to Mexico’s southern border, it is hard to imagine that change will come from new elected officials, at least in the short term. The visible concentration of migrants in some areas has fed the use of alarmist rhetoric and measures by officials and anti-immigrant groups, making broader change still more difficult. Even New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has repeatedly warned that the city could be destroyed by the migration crisis.

Other, less visible local responses, such as Ciudad Juárez’s Iniciativa Juárez, have brought together community-based groups, nonprofit and international organizations, and local governments to offer alternatives, both in discourse and in practice, that address migrants’ immediate needs as well as the long-term causes of violence and forced displacement that drive them to leave their homes: access to public services, housing, and employment. Such alternatives have proved hard to sustain in a charged political environment fueled by the logic of security. But they point to different logics that demonstrate how narratives can shift and resources can be redirected toward the well-being of all, migrants and residents alike.

© 2024 by The Regents of the University of California