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Growing numbers of migrants who had been seeking to reach the US are instead making plans to stay in Mexico for long periods after US President Donald Trump launched a crackdown at the border.
In the border city of Ciudad Juárez, the Jesuit Refugee Service, a non-profit offering legal and humanitarian assistance, has seen three times the number of people wanting its help to request asylum in Mexico this month as in all of 2024, said local branch director Alejandra Corona.
Mexican media showed long lines outside the offices of Mexico’s asylum agency Comar in recent days, with more people trying to lodge applications to avoid detention by immigration authorities and secure a work permit.
“Asylum applications to Comar have increased in Tapachula and Mexico City in the last few days,” said Giovanni Lepri, Mexico representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
In his first week in office, Trump, who campaigned heavily on curbing migration, declared a national emergency at the southern border, sent 1,500 military personnel to help with enforcement, and cancelled his predecessor Joe Biden’s legal pathways for entry.
The US has also launched highly publicised deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and begun regularly using military planes for deportation flights.
One factor sending migrants away from the border for the time being is Trump’s scrapping of an app, CBP One, that had assigned 1,450 appointments a day to request asylum at regular ports of entry.
At the El Buen Pastor shelter in Juárez, occupancy grew from just 14 people to 60 after the cancellation of CBP One, said its director Pastor Juan Fierro.
Among those who lost their appointments was Luis, 30, a Venezuelan who spent his savings on the journey from his home country, which has been hit by an economic collapse under Nicolás Maduro’s repressive regime.
Luis finally reached the US-Mexico border with his sister, girlfriend and other family members and secured an appointment to cross into the US and apply for asylum, but one day before his slot, Trump cancelled it.
“There was nothing we could do, and we’re stuck on this side, defeated,” he said in Juárez.
Many migrants are opting to stay in Mexico to try to get a job or request asylum. Mexico’s capital is seen as a safer option than border areas, with more work opportunities and public transport.
“We want to go to Mexico City to at least work, clear our minds as time passes,” Luis said.
For the past year, cities along the US-Mexico border had been much quieter than previously, with shelters below capacity and irregular crossings down. That resulted from a crackdown by Mexican authorities, tighter US restrictions, and more legal pathways to cross through the app.
But for many migrants, returning home — whether to Venezuela, other countries in the region or parts of Mexico plagued by violence linked to drug cartels — is not an option. Many said they still hoped to reach the US eventually.
“Going to the US is illogical, we can’t get there . . . but it’s also dangerous here in Juárez,” said Roxana, a 52-year-old from southern Mexico who said she had not yet decided where to go.
Gloria, a 54-year-old Guatemalan woman in Ciudad Juárez, said she believed Trump had not thought through the economic impact of his policies on industries such as agriculture, which rely on undocumented workers.
“Guatemala’s men are men of corn, working men, the sun nor the rain stops them,” she said. “Are the Americans going to dare to go out to the fields to work? . . . The president should have thought of that.”
Mexico’s government has been creating shelters fit for 2,500 people each to take back deportees from the US. Several organisations said the system was unusually efficient so far, but that there was no clear additional plan for the estimated 380,000 Mexicans displaced internally by violence or the hundreds of thousands of foreigners now stuck.
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