() — Marilyn Lomas had finally made it. In front of the Ecuadorian migrant, her husband and her two children, was Suchiate. The waters of the mighty river, which can become dangerous at times for migrants, mark the most southwestern part of the 956-kilometer border between Mexico and Guatemala.
“The situation [en Ecuador] She’s so bad. There are a lot of delinquency. It’s very bad,” she said as she and her family recently crossed the river on a flimsy raft along with about a dozen migrants who usually pay local guides a dollar to help them cross, hopefully without getting wet. .
Apart from Suchiate, nothing prevented the family from crossing from the Guatemalan department of San Marcos to the Mexican state of Chiapas. Historically, migrants from the south have faced few or no restrictions in Guatemala or Mexico. But that changed drastically in 2019.
In May of that year, then-US President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on all Mexican products entering the United States if Mexico did not limit the number of Central American migrants circulating through the country.
After intense negotiations between both countries, Trump announced on June 7 that an agreement had been reached whereby Mexico was going to “take strong measures to stem the migratory tide through Mexico, and towards our southern border,” the then-president tweeted.
Two weeks later, Mexico’s Secretary of Defense announced that nearly 15,000 troops had been deployed to the US-Mexico border, in addition to the 2,000 National Guard members already deployed to Mexico’s southern border with Belize. and Guatemala, which added to the 4,500 soldiers already distributed throughout the area.
But enforcement of the law has been chaotic, sporadic and, in the words of a former high-ranking Mexican official, “inefficient.”
Tonatiuh Guillén was commissioner of the National Institute of Migration of Mexico until 2019. After only seven months in office, he resigned due to his strong disagreement with the decision of his boss, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to “militarize the borders of Mexico”.
“Mexico became a territory of control, [un lugar de] a severe immigration policy, detentions, deterrence and expulsions. And it should also be noted (…) that despite these severe measures, we have to admit that they have been very inefficient. If we compare the number of migrants that entered Mexico in 2018 or the following year, when these measures were implemented, those numbers have tripled or quadrupled,” Guillén told .
When asked if Mexico is doing the dirty work for the United States in terms of immigration policy, Guillén said that “Mexico’s immigration policy is aligned with the general objectives and strategies of the United States government under the Trump administration, and now, by extension, under the Biden administration.”
Today, US immigration policy remains dependent in many ways on Mexico’s cooperation, as another immigration deal illustrates: Earlier this month, the White House announced that Mexico had agreed to take back migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela effective May 12, one day after Title 42 ended. The agreement marks the first time the United States will deport non-Mexicans back across the border.
“It’s Not About” Doing America’s Dirty Work
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, delivers a speech in the Zócalo square in Mexico City on March 18, 2023. (Credit: RODRIGO ARANGUA/AFP via Getty Images)
President Obrador denies that Mexico is doing the dirty work for the United States in terms of migration.
“It’s not doing the United States government’s dirty work,” he said in his March 2 morning address, arguing that a crackdown on illegal migration was necessary to protect victims of traffickers.
“It is to protect migrants. Just look at what has happened, so many tragedies with migrants in trailers,” said the president. Fifty-one migrants were found dead in suffocating conditions inside a semi-trailer in San Antonio (Texas) last June. Two months later, another 47 migrants were found alive crammed into a truck in Matehuala (San Luis Potosí state), in Mexico.
López Obrador says that part of the solution is to “cooperate with the United States government so that there is no chaos and much less violence on the border,” and that they are helping in the southeast so that migrants are protected. He said they have received information that there are “many human smugglers offering to take migrants to the border for $8,000 or $10,000.”
But Guillén, his former immigration commissioner, points out that tragedies have also occurred in the course of immigration enforcement, saying he is horrified by the fire that killed 40 mostly Central American migrants at an Institute facility. Migration Office of Mexico in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.
He considers this tragedy to be one of the most deplorable examples of his country’s inability to humanely address its migration challenge.
Paramedics carry an injured migrant after a fire at a center in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, on March 28, 2023. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
Clashes between members of the National Guard and migrants became frequent on the Mexico-Guatemala border during the summer of 2019. In the following years there have also been clashes that have hinted that the Mexican authorities do not have the numbers or the strategy to adequately deal with the problem.
According to statistics released Monday by the Mexican government, between September 2021 and June last year, some 23,458 members of the Mexican armed forces were deployed to the country’s borders to enforce Mexico’s immigration policy. The military detained 345,854 migrants during that period.
However, it appears that Mexico is trying to find a balance between strict law enforcement and a welcoming approach. The office of the National Institute of Migration in the state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, told that between the beginning of November and May 6 they processed more than 81,000 migrants from more than 100 countries, mainly Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti.
That’s what Marilyn Lomas and her family, the Ecuadorian migrants, hoped to do: obtain permission to travel through Mexico without hindrance and then cross the border into the United States.
“With the favor of God, everything is possible,” he said.
