The Americans were not happy.
They said the migrant situation at the border is out of control, and Mexico is not doing enough to stop it, according to officials from both countries.
In fact, the crisis was worse than Mexican officials were led to believe by their own immigration chief, Francisco Garduño Yáñez.
The revelation in October 2023 sent Mexico’s then-defense minister into a frenzy at an emergency meeting, officials familiar with the meeting said.
“You tricked me,” the defense minister, Luis Cresencio Sandoval González, shouted at Mr. Garduño, according to two people familiar with the incident.
The Minister of Defense regularly briefed the then President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But Mr. Sandoval learned days earlier from the Americans that the migrant crisis was more dire than he thought.
“You hid information from me, forcing me to lie to the president,” the defense minister lashed out.
It was a tense chapter in US-Mexico relations, according to five Mexican and US officials involved in bilateral migration talks, and Mr Garduño, 76, landed in the middle of it. In addition to being accused of mismanaging and minimizing the migrant crisis, he is separately facing criminal charges related to fire in the migrant detention center which killed 40 people in 2023.
Now, as Mexico finds itself on the brink of what is expected to be a contentious border debate with the incoming Trump administration, the same Mexican official accused of mismanaging the migrant crisis, Mr. Garduño, will be a key player in these negotiations. The US president-elect has promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants as soon as he takes office.
Ministry of Defense, Mr. Garduño and the agency he ran, the National Migration Institute, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Controlling the US-Mexico border is a massive undertaking involving thousands of government agents from both countries. This issue is often used as a political cudgel. Republicans in the US House of Representatives accused the Biden administration of failing to control the border and voted to impeach his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
In Mexico, Mr. Garduño was the one in the crosshairs.
A former director of Mexico’s prison system, he has been criticized for relying on troops to manage migrant flows. Mr. Garduño’s agency has also been accused of actually waving migrants to the northern border for bribes. In interviews, the migrants said they had to pay Mexican immigration agents to travel across the country to reach the United States.
The British embassy also commissioned a confidential report on Mexico’s migration system in 2022, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. It found systemic corruption in the government’s treatment of migrants, including extortion, sexual abuse and collusion with criminal organizations to kidnap migrants for ransom.
In 2022 interviewMr. Garduño defended his performance, saying he fired nearly half of the agency’s employees for extorting migrants. His agency has issued documents to nearly two million migrants from 2018 to 2022, he said, helping to regulate their presence in the country.
It is a “humanitarian policy of integration and fraternity,” he said.
But interviews with officials from both countries revealed dissatisfaction among US officials with Mexico’s handling of migration.
In 2023, President Biden’s popularity was declining ahead of the 2024 election. Migration was the main concern of American voters. So the president sent Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Mr. Mayorkas to an emergency meeting in Mexico City that October.
They told Mr. López Obrador that U.S. border agents encountered nearly 220,000 migrants at the U.S. southern border that September — one of the largest flows ever recorded, officials familiar with the meeting said.
Border Patrol agents were devastated. Freight trains from Mexico to the United States were not insured. Corrupt conductors, the Americans said, stopped or slowed trains to allow migrants to board.
They asked Mexican officials to move more aggressively to break up large groups of migrants heading toward the U.S. border and to end visa-free travel for countries whose nationals used Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally, officials said.
The reality revealed by the American delegation was grimmer than that presented by Mr. Garduño’s agency, which reported daily to the Mexican administration on the number of migrants intercepted in southern Mexico.
Three migration officials who were familiar with the figures said the figures rarely correlate with data presented by US Customs and Border Protection and the government of Panama, which many migrants pass through to reach Mexico.
The Mexican military reported that it and the migration agency met five million migrants from 2018 to 2024, but Mexico’s Interior Ministry reported about half that number in that period. The numbers for 2023 also varied widely; The Migration Agency reported almost 1.5 million encounters that year, while the Ministry of the Interior reported about 500,000.
“The Mexican government is obfuscating the picture by issuing two very different numbers, without even explaining the discrepancy,” said Adam Isacson, director of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank. “It is confusing, undermines the government’s credibility and makes it difficult to predict new trends.”
After the US delegation returned to Washington, Mr. López Obrador called an emergency meeting of Mexico’s top security and migration officials on October 13, 2023. It was held in Tapachula, a city on the border with Guatemala and a funnel for migrants entering Mexico.
The city’s refugee agency was on the brink of collapse, with around 7,000 migrants a day flooding its offices to register as asylum seekers – a fast track to a migrant permit.
The permits were a kind of golden ticket: they allowed asylum seekers to study, work and access basic services. Although asylum seekers are supposed to stay in the state where they applied, many use Mexican permits to reach the U.S. border without being detained, officials say.
In the emergency meeting, then-Interior Minister Luisa María Alcalde Luján focused on the permits, officials said.
She questioned Mr. Garduño about whether his agency was handing out permits but allowing asylum seekers to head north toward the U.S. border, according to four officials with knowledge of the meeting, two of whom were present.
Yes, replied Mr. Garduño.
While Mrs. Alcalde scolded him, Mr. Garduño looked to his lap and fell silent, officials familiar with the meeting said.
Then she announced in the room that Mr. Garduño was being deprived of the ability to issue new immigration permits without the approval of other government branches.
Ms. Alcalde did not respond to requests for comment.
As soon as the migrant permits ended, thousands of asylum seekers in Mexico were thrown into legal limbo.
The move made them “easy prey for criminal groups,” said Dana Graber Ladek, Mexico’s head of mission for the International Organization for Migration. This left “migrants without the possibility of legal work in the country”, she added.
Mexico eventually began issuing migration permits again, but today they are a fraction of what they once were: only about 3,500 permits were issued last year, compared to nearly 130,000 in 2023.
After the meeting, Mr. Garduño quickly demonstrated that his agency was capable of controlling the flow of migrants, officials said.
His agents made it difficult for migrants to reach the US border and increased security on the trains that many traveled north. The number of migrants we encountered at the US-Mexico border decreased from September to November by almost 13 percent, according to November 2023 US Customs and Border Protection statistics.
But just as the numbers fell, the leak prompted senior officials to call another emergency meeting on migration in Mexico.
Mexico’s finance minister temporarily stopped funding parts of the government in November 2023, including Mr. Garduño’s agency, due to budget constraints. But instead of lobbying the Treasury to release the funds, as other officials have done, Mr. Garduño proactively shut down his agency.
On December 1, he sent a letter ordering your agency pause deportation flights carrying undocumented migrants, pull staff from checkpoints and shut down a busing program that has eased pressure on the northern border.
The memo was quickly leaked and made public.
Migrants flocked to the US border, many undisturbed by Mexican immigration agents. That December, US Customs and Border Protection recorded the largest number of encounters with migrants at the border in history: nearly 250,000 migrants.
Overstretched US Border Patrol agents close land border crossings in Lukeville, Arizona, and San Diego. The US Border Protection Agency has suspended several rail crossings in Texas.
The Mexican government, trying to contain the fallout, has publicly pledged more funding to its migration agency. Mr. Blinken flew back to Mexico City, December 27 — with an even larger delegation.
The following month, January 2024, after Mexico and the United States cooperated in implementing stricter measures, the flow of migrants at the US border was cut in half.
The pressure from Washington continued to work; illegal border crossings have decreased. Last June Mr. Biden issued an executive order effectively barring undocumented migrants from obtaining asylum at the border.
Mexico deployed National Guard troops to immigration checkpoints and bussed migrants further south, sapping their efforts to head north. Authorities have also broken up caravans of migrants so they no longer reach the US border.
In October, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president of Mexico. She appointed a new head of immigration, but said that Mr. Garduño continue to advise the government to establish “deep transformation” his immigration agency and help weather the storm after Mr. Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Mr. Garduño still faces criminal charges over the fire at the migration center. Several Mexican and US officials said they thought he would resign after the tragedy. But he has been a confidant of Mr. López Obrador for decades.
Mr. Garduño has not been arrested, but every two weeks, he must check with the prosecuting judge.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Paulina Villegas contributed reporting.
