'There is no plan': migrant groups at US-Mexico border await mass deportations [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Mon 20 Jan 2025 06.30 EST
It is cold and quiet in Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Ciudad Juárez, on the US-Mexico border. A group of men play dominoes, another shoots hoops alone, and a young couple watch their kids play with superhero toys. “Some people get here and don’t want to go back outside,” said Ivonne López, a social worker. “They’re afraid.” With Donald Trump’s return to power, the rules of US immigration are set for drastic change.
While border cities like Juárez prepare for possible mass deportations, criminal groups are lying in wait to kidnap and extort migrants – and also offer them a way back across the border. Besides deportations, Trump wants to cancel CBP One, the app that migrants in Mexico use to arrange US asylum appointments, and to bring back the so-called Remain in Mexico policy, under which asylum seekers were forced to wait in dangerous border cities while their applications were processed.
The incoming administration also reportedly wants to revive Title 42, the pandemic-era public health policy that expelled people almost 3m times without letting them request asylum. Experts say that each of these moves would increase the number of migrants in Mexico’s border cities. Taken together, their effect could be overwhelming.
Yet on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Juárez is oddly calm. “We do not currently have a strategy for the massive deportation of migrants from the United States because there is no information,” said Enrique Serrano, general coordinator of COESPO, the state-level agency for migration, which he added was mostly the remit of the federal government.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/mexico-migration-trump
= new reply since forum marked as read