By Laura Gottesdiener and Lizbeth Diaz
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexican authorities have begun building giant tent shelters in the city of Ciudad Juarez to prepare for a possible influx of Mexicans deported under U.S. President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations.
Temporary shelters in Ciudad Juarez will have the capacity to house thousands of people and should be ready in a few days, municipal official Enrique Licon said.
“It’s unprecedented,” Licon said Tuesday afternoon, as workers unloaded long metal couplings from tractor-trailers parked in large empty yards from the Rio Grande, which separates the city from El Paso, Texas.
The tents in Ciudad Juarez are part of the Mexican government’s plan to set up shelters and reception centers in nine cities across northern Mexico.
Authorities will provide deported Mexicans with food, temporary housing, medical care and help in obtaining identity documents, according to a government document outlining the strategy, titled “Mexico Embraces You.”
The government also plans to prepare a fleet of buses to transport Mexicans from reception centers back to their hometowns.
Trump has promised to carry out the largest deportation in US history, which would remove millions of immigrants. However, an operation of this scale would probably take years and be very expensive.
Nearly 5 million Mexicans live in the United States illegally, according to an analysis by Mexican think tank El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) based on recent U.S. census data.
Many are from parts of central and southern Mexico plagued by violence and poverty. About 800,000 undocumented Mexicans in the United States are from Michoacán, Guerrero and Chiapas, according to a COLEF study, where fierce fighting between organized crime groups has forced thousands to flee in recent years, sometimes leaving entire towns abandoned.
MEXICO COULD STRUGGLE
The Mexican government says it is prepared for the possibility of mass deportations. But immigration advocates have their doubts, fearing that the combination of mass deportations and Trump’s measures to prevent migrants from entering the U.S. could quickly saturate Mexican border towns.
The Trump administration on Monday ended a program, known as CBP One, that allowed some migrants waiting in Mexico to enter the U.S. legally by getting an appointment on a government application. On Tuesday, it said it was rolling back the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP), an initiative that forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their US cases to be resolved.
On Monday, Jose Luis Perez, then director of migration affairs for Tijuana, became one of the few Mexican officials to express public concern about whether Mexico is truly prepared.
“Basically, with the cancellation of CBP One and the deportations, the government is not coordinated to receive them,” he said.
Hours later, he was fired in what he said was retaliation for issuing such warnings.
The municipal administration did not respond to questions about his termination.
“Mexico will do whatever is necessary to take care of its compatriots and will allocate whatever is necessary to receive those who are returned,” Mexican Interior Minister Rosa Icela Rodriguez said Monday during a daily morning news conference.
But with sluggish economic growth forecast this year, Mexico could struggle to accommodate the millions of Mexicans deported from the US, while a significant drop in remittances could cause “severe economic disruption” in towns and villages across the country that depend on such income , said Wayne Cornelius, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.
On Thursday night in Ciudad Juarez, about two dozen soldiers worked in a tent shelter near the towering black cross where Pope Francis held an outdoor mass in 2016, warned of the humanitarian crisis and prayed for migrants. In the deepening darkness, the soldiers began to build an industrial kitchen to feed the deportees.
(This story has been corrected to add ‘Rodriguez’ to the name of Mexican Interior Minister Rosa Icela in paragraph 16.)
