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President Trump said yesterday: “We’re building a wall in Colorado.”
MEXICO CITY — President Trump likes to boast that he has built a wall between this country and the United States (he has not yet).
But the dramatic changes to immigration laws implemented by his administration are having a similar effect in this country. And Mexico is indeed paying for the huge burden of housing, caring for, processing asylum seekers and, at times, deporting tens of thousands of migrants now detained in this country before they ever reach U.S. soil.
During a Monday event meant to celebrate how migrants have enriched Mexico’s culture, Francisco Garduño, head of the Mexican government’s National Migration Institute, took the microphone and demonstrated a new reality on the ground here: Some government officials have become attack dogs for Trump’s immigration policies.
According to Mexican newspaper Milenio, Garduño said Mexico’s deportation of more than 300 migrants from India last week was meant to serve as a warning to all other undocumented migrants considering entering Mexico.
“This is a warning to all transcontinental migrants,” Garduño said. “No matter if they’re from Mars, we’re going to send you all the way back to India, to Cameroon, to Africa.”
The turnabout comes months after Mexican officials agreed to crack down on the flow of migrants and asylum seekers headed to the U.S. border in the wake of the Trump administration threat to impose tariffs on all Mexican imports. Mexican authorities deployed thousands of National Guard troops to its border with Guatemala and struck a deal with the Trump administration to force asylum seekers to seek refuge in the first country they enter after leaving their homelands.
The new policies are part of Trump’s crackdown on illegal border crossings known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which have forced thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to stay on the Mexican side of the border while they await U.S. asylum hearings. With MPP also came a series of agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras allowing the United States to divert asylum seekers from the southern border to these Northern Triangle countries. These third-country deals are being challenged in court but are being enforced while the legal fight plays out.
Veronica Mendoza, an asylum seeker from Guatemala shows the Mexican residency cards of her family in Valle de las Palmas near Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico.
In Mexico, the deal with the Trump administration is taking a toll on local governments and non-governmental groups scrambling to feed, house and process migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. And while it’s unclear the exact number of migrants and asylum seekers for which Mexico is picking up the tab, the Guardian reported earlier this month the United States has sent more than 51,000 asylum seekers to wait for asylum hearings in Mexico’s border towns. Newspaper Contra Réplica reported Mexico deported an average of 727 migrants daily in the first six months of 2019, which totaled about 130,995 migrants.
So far this year, Mexico has received over 54,000 asylum requests, up from 29,631 in 2018. In 2013, the country only received 1,296 of these requests, according to COMAR, the Mexican government’s commission for refugees. By the end of the year, Mexico could become one of the top 10 countries for receiving asylum requests.
“There’s never been this number of asylum requests,” said Adrián Meléndez Lozano, founder and director of Proyecto Habesha, a nonprofit organization created to provide access to higher education to Syrian refugees here. “This is something that the country is not prepared for, that the civil society is not prepared for … Mexican institutions are not prepared for the size of this phenomenon.”
Incidents sparked by the massive influx have engendered international coverage. There was that viral video of a Mexican commander preparing his troops for the day by telling them: “We are in our country. We are in Mexico. We are enforcing our laws. Nobody is going to come here to trample our laws, nobody is going to come here to trample our country, our land.”
Then came reports of Mexico’s National Guard blocking migrants from reaching the northern border, including a caravan of approximately 2,000 people from Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. The group was broken up and sent to a migrant camp in the Mexican southern border city of Tapachula. And this week, a Tijuana newspaper reported the director of a migrant shelter there accused the National Migration Institute and the National Guard of racially profiling Haitian and African migrants and asylum seekers, going as far as detaining some who had the right documentation.
Migrants from different countries wait to access a migratory station and manage the documents that allow them to transit through Mexico, in Tapachula, Mexico.
And the new stance could be fundamentally changing the fabric of Mexico. In a recent visit to Tapachula, Meléndez Lozano was amazed by what he saw: streets and neighborhoods largely populated by migrants and refugees from Guatemala and Honduras and from as far as India, Pakistan and parts of Africa. “Tapachula, which before this exodus or massive arrival was an unknown city, now is the most cosmopolitan city in Mexico,” Meléndez Lozano said.
But the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to deal with the challenges they pose. “I’ve worked in the past in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Lebanon,” he said. “What I saw in those countries is similar to what I see here in Mexico.”
The U.N. refugee agency has increased its presence in Mexico to adapt to the influx of asylum seekers. Meanwhile, UNICEF opened offices in Tijuana and Tapachula to help manage the surge in migrant children, of which an approximate 5,000 are asylum seekers, according to Dora Giusti, who leads the child protection department at UNICEF Mexico. Giusti said UNICEF has been helping Mexico’s refugee agency ease the asylum process for children.
“It is known that COMAR doesn’t have the staff to respond to this challenge,” Giusti said. “It was this way since even before this flow of asylum seekers began.”
COMAR has also upped its presence in border towns and major cities across the country. But that’s still not enough, according to its director, Andrés Ramírez.
Currently, Ramírez’s office is working to hire and train more staffers with the legal power to process and approve asylum requests. “… We need to have more help from the Mexican government,” he said. “We’ve had minimal support this year, support that’s yet to be materialized because the administrative processes take time.”
Ramírez doesn’t know the precise causes for Mexico’s explosive growth in asylum applications. But the government’s deal with the Trump administration seems like a likely culprit.
“We know very well that the United States’s asylum approval rates, particularly for Central Americans, are very low. Mexico, on the other hand, has higher approval rates,” Ramírez said. “You don’t need to be Einstein to conclude that, if Mexico, with its higher rates, rejected some of these asylum seekers, the chances of them being given asylum in the U.S. are very low.”
Asylum seeker children play at the Juventud 2000 migrant shelter in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico.
Treaties that might send U.S. asylum seekers to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, meanwhile, have raised red flags in all three Central American countries. On Wednesday, CNN reported that an agreement to keep migrants in Guatemala is close to being implemented.
VICE reported earlier this year that Guatemala has just four asylum officers and hasn’t resolved a case in nearly two years.
In El Salvador, Meghan López, head of the International Rescue Committee’s mission there, said there are nine people working in the office that processes asylum claims. She said 25 people have received asylum in the country, with 49 cases approved over the past five years.
“We don’t see any resources being put towards that right now. All three of the Northern Triangle governments are in fiscal crisis. They have many, many fires that they are trying to put out,” she said. “They are really trying to do as much as they can for the populations currently in their countries, and that does not afford for preparation of receiving asylum seekers.”
Acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan attends a news conference after a meeting of security ministers of the Northern Triangle of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador.
MORE ON THE IMMIGRATION WARS:
– The White House is considering Chad Wolf to replace ex-Department Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan, per CNN: “Wolf, a senior department official, previously served as chief of staff to former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He was nominated by [Trump] in February to serve as undersecretary for the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at DHS, a role he currently fills in an acting capacity. He is still awaiting Senate confirmation for the position. Earlier this week, CNN reported the White House’s personnel director told Trump that neither immigration hardliner Ken Cuccinelli nor Customs and Border Protection chief Mark Morgan are eligible to succeed [McAleenan] as acting Homeland Security secretary, according to a senior administration official.”
– During a speech at a shale conference in Pennsylvania, Trump said the U.S. is “building a wall in Colorado,” according to the Denver Post: “‘Do you know why we’re going to win New Mexico? Because they want safety on their border, and they didn’t have it. And we’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico and we’re building a wall in Colorado,’ the president said, drawing cheers. .. ‘We’re building a beautiful wall, a big one that really works, that you can’t get over, you can’t get under,’ Trump added, as the crowd rose to its feet in support. ‘And we’re building a wall in Texas. And we’re not building a wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the walls we just mentioned.’ … Colorado does not border Mexico, as Texas and New Mexico do, and it’s unclear where the president’s confusion came from. The government is building fencing near the Colorado River, which may have led to the misstatement.”
– A Honduran woman accused a U.S. immigration agent of sexually assaulting her over a period of seven years under the threat of deportation, according to a federal lawsuit. From the Guardian: “The woman, identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe, sued the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the former ICE agent Wilfredo Rodriguez on Saturday, seeking $10m in damages. … An ICE spokesman told the Associated Press he couldn’t comment on litigation but confirmed Rodriguez no longer works for the agency. Homeland security didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.”
– ICE rescinded a nearly half-million dollar fine against Edith Espinal, an undocumented immigrant who’s been living inside a Columbus, Ohio, church in order to avoid deportation. From CNN: “ICE also withdrew fines for six other women who were living inside churches across the country to avoid deportation, according to the National Sanctuary Collective. The fines drew national attention earlier this year and spawned legislation to grant Espinal deportation relief.”
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