On the eve of the deadline of President Trump to impose tariff Mexico, one is hard to miss on the Mexican side of the border: migrants are gone.
They used to be some of the most prominent parts along the border – Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Matamoros – shelters that once overflowed now only a few families. Parks, hotels and empty buildings that once have been full of people from all over the world are empty.
And at the border, where migrants once slept in campsites inside the foot of 30 feet wall, only clothing and shoes with dust, valid toothpicks and water bottles remain.
“Everything that is over,” said Rev. William Morton, a missionary at Ciudad Juárez Cathedral serving migrants of free meals. “No one can cross.”
Last week the US Ministry of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, announced This customs and border protection captured only 200 people on the southern border on Saturday the former one-day number in more than 15 years.
Mr. Trump earned his suppression of illegal immigration because of the falling numbers, even while he also announced that he would Send thousands more combat forces to the border to stop what he calls an invasion.
But according to analysts, Mexican moves to limit migration in the last year – not only on the border, but throughout the country – have given undisputed results. In February, Trump’s administration announced that she would pause a 25 percent of Mexican exports for a month, causing the Government to further reduce migration and the flow of the fental across the border.
This progress put Mexico in a far stronger negotiating position than when Mr Trump first threatened tariffs, during his first term.
“Mexico has new levers compared to 2019,” wrote Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Andrew Selee, analysts with the Institute of Migration Policy, Unforient Research Center, wrote in Report. Mexican collaboration, they said, made “necessary” for the United States.
In recent years, the Mexican government has significantly increased migration checks. He established checkpoints along the migration routes, imposed visa restrictions, scattered migrant caravans, and transferred people who arrived from places like Venezuela to the remote corners of southern Mexico to prevent them from reaching the US border. All this significantly reduced the number of migrants at the border.
Since last spring were Mexican authorities Catching more people than their American colleagues every month. Now the numbers on the border have fallen to almost nothing.
“We no longer have the big flow of people who come – they rejected 90 percent,” said Enrique Serrano Escobar last week, leading the CHIHUAUA CHIPPERS responsible for migrants, in the hedge.
And those migrants who come to the border are no longer trying to enter the United States, the shelter operators say.
“They know I can’t go,” Father Morton said in Juárez. “All the holes underground, tunnels, holes in the wall, practically sealed it – it’s a lot, much harder.”
Empty shelters
In Mexican border cities, scenes in migrant shelters are almost the same: tables sitting empty during meals, bunk beds, unused.
Even before Mr. Trump took the duty, the number of people arrested trying to cross the border was dramatically fallAccording to the US Government.
Many of those who waited in border cities had meetings CBP oneAn application that made it possible for people to perform meetings with asylum with the authorities, not to cross the border, the shelter operators say.
After Mr Trump canceled the app on the first day in power, people gave up after a few days and headed south to Mexico City or even to the southern border, said the Reverend Juan Fierro, Pastor at the Good Samarita shelter at Ciudad Juárez.
In a once -affected shelter in Matamoros, whose name translates to help them triumph, only a few Venezuelan women and their children remain, according to his directors.
In Tijuana, in the shelter regarding the border wall, the Youth Foundation for Youth 2000, which once held hundreds of people of all nationalities, now has only 55 of them, said its director José María Lara.
They are the same people who were there from Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“There were the same number,” Mr. Lara said. They include people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, as well as Mexican migrants from countries that are considered dangerous to return, such as Michoacán.
There are no figures at their disposal of how many migrants like this may live in shelters, hotels and rented rooms, and they lower their time.
.
“We will wait to see if God will touch Mr. Trump’s heart,” said the 26-year-old woman from Venezuela, who asked to identify her name only, Maria Elena, while sitting with her 7-year-old son in the cathedral In Ciudad Juárez.
Guardians on the border
In response to Mr. Trump’s requests last month, President of Mexico, Claudia SheinbaumHe sent 10,000 national guards to the border and sent hundreds of more torso to the state of Sinalo, the great center of the Fentanil trade.
Officials and those who work with migrants are divided into whether the troops are, several hundred of which began to appear around each border city during the last month, affect illegal border crossings.
At the end of the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego, California, the National Guard set up large tents on the Mexican side, in an area called Nido de Las águilas. About 15 miles from the center of Tijuana, used for a long time by coyots, smugglers who exploit the steep hills and a lack of police presence to keep migrants in California, authorities say.
The keeper also put control points at the towns up and down toward the border.
In Tijuana, José Moreno Mena, a spokesman for the coalition for the defense of migrants, said the attendance of the guard was a great distraction from migration, along with the promised mass deportations of Mr. Trump in the United States.
“That doesn’t mean he won’t continue to come,” Mr. Moreno said. “It’s just a break, maybe, until they see better conditions.”
But in the state of Tamaulipas, where more than 700 guards arrived last month in places like Matamorosa, the guards do not seem to suppress migration, residents say. They seem to be concentrated on the bridge to the United States, while migrants now want to enter the desert or other rural areas.
In Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds of guards, troops and military staff stopped cars in early February to inspect and search for border tunnels.
“At night, on the street, they have inspection sites,” said Father Morton. “There are more here, allegedly to stop Fentanil, but I doubt they know where it is.” He said they mostly stopped young men who were driving conflicted cars or had tattoos, creating an environment of “a conflict with low intensity”.
The real functioning of migration suppression happens far from the northern border of Mexico.
At the southernmost point in Mexico, Tapachuli, there is some migrants. Shelters recently located 1,000 people are now serving only a hundred or more, according to the operators. Waiting for visas that allow them to move north and scatter if they try to form caravans, these migrants are only blocked.
Many weigh their capabilities. Some even asked the Mexican government deport them on flights Return to their country.
Staying placed in Mexico
Migrants who now sit on the US border are mostly those who come from a place they can’t return to.
“I can’t come back,” said Reverend Francisco González, president of the Juarez shelter network, entitled one for Juarez.
While only 440 people were located last week after his 1200 people have been housed last week after they have often met up to 1200, people who come longer, he said.
Some begin to fill in patterns to acquire asylum in Mexico, fearing that they could capture and deport them if they have no legal status, said Mr. González.
“We still have faith and hope that Trump will recover from his madness at some point,” said Jordan García, a former Venezuela mine worker who said he and his wife and three daughters spent seven months moving to Ciudad Juárez.
Mr. García wore his newborn baby, Rein Kataleya, through a dangerous passage from the jungle known as Darién Jaz When she was seven months old. Now the family improvised home consists of a floor bed in one of Mr. González’s shelter on the periphery of Ciudad Juárez, drawn into Plišani blankets for privacy.
But shelters at the border began to close. In Ciudad Juárez, 34 were opened in November; Until last month, this number has decreased to 29. Shelter operators say that not only is there not much less arrivals, but also to lose support from international groups such as the UN International Migration Office, and UNICEF, which relied on the aid of aid frozen under Mr. Trump.
Prior to the new American administration, “there were more people, and there were greater support,” said Olivia Santiago Rentriería, a volunteer at one of the shelters who managed We One for Juarez. “Now,” she said, “all live here with that uncertainty.”
Reporting contributed Rocío Gallegos from Ciudada Juárez, Mexico; Alinian corpusfrom Tijiana; Enrique Lerma from Matamorosa; and Lucía Trejo from Tapachula.
