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Feb 7, 2024 · Mexico was the single most common origin country for US border encounters in 2023, but Mexican nationals made up less than 30% of the total share, compared with more than 60% a decade ago....
Apr 12, 2024 · The rust-colored barrier soars into the cloudless blue sky, a solid and almost impassable marker of the border between Mexico and the United States. But then it stops, when the rough, hilly ...
Sep 13, 2021 · History Of The US-Mexico Border Map showing the border area between the United States and Mexico. The story of the US-Mexico border, as it is configured today, begins with the Treat of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the US-Mexican War.
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- Introduction
- Key Findings
- Mexico’s Security and Migration Deployment in The Border Zone
- Migration Patterns and Smuggling
- The Human Rights Impact of Mexico’s Crackdown
- Migrants and The Local Population
- Asylum and Detention
- Official Corruption in The Border Zone
- U.S. Assistance in The Border Region
- Conclusions
Andrés Manuel López Obrador came into the Mexican presidency on December 1, 2018 promising a new, more humane approach to the migration of Central Americans and others who come to Mexico to either settle there or travel north to the United States. He advocated for the governments of Central America, Mexico, and the United States to coordinate a joi...
Mexico dramatically intensified its migration enforcement after the Trump administration threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican goods in June 2019.As a result of this crackdown, Mexican authoritie...
When carrying out migrant interdiction in Mexico’s southern border region, the National Guard is meant to provide backup and logistical support to INM agents. Large contingents of guardsmen often accompany small numbers of INM agents in convoys led by military vehicles, or at checkpoints and border crossings. According to the Guard’s commander, rec...
Shifts in Apprehension and Deportation Trends
As a result of the crackdown, but also as a result of 2019’s increased migratory flow, Mexican authorities apprehended 66 percent more migrants in Chiapas state during the first nine months of 2019, compared to the same period in 2018. The increase in Tabasco state was 45 percent. In June and July, the period after Trump’s tariff threat, apprehensions rose 132 percent in Chiapas, and 190 percent in Tabasco, over June and July of 2018. Nationally, comparing January-September 2019 to January-Se...
Extra-continental Migrants
The numbers and nationalities of migrants and asylum seekers vary along different parts of Mexico’s southern border. The Tapachula area of Chiapas has seen a steady flow of Central American migrants in recent years. However, it has also been the destination city for a growing number of extra-continental migrants. A large Tapachula shelter reported receiving more Hondurans than other nationalities, but also many Cubans, Haitians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Africans, but no Venezuelans. Unti...
Shifts in Migration Routes
The crackdown has caused a shift in migration routes, for now. Migrants are relying more on “puntos ciegos” (blind spots), unofficial border crossings that are often heavily transited.These may be near an existing official crossing, or may just be a dirt road, a path, or a meeting of Mexican and Guatemalan communities without a fixed presence of immigration authorities. The shift in routes is best understood by thinking of three corridors through which migrants travel: 1. A “coastal” corridor...
Detention facilities
In late June, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission denounced that the majority of Mexico’s 29 detention centers and 23 short-term detention facilities that are currently operating were overcrowded, with some of them 300 percent over capacity. For months, the number of migrants transiting through Tapachula was so high that the Mexican government maintained a former fairground as an impromptu shelter, in addition to the Siglo XXI shelter operating at or above capacity. A local church dioce...
Crimes against migrants
Migrants in Mexico’s southern border zone continue to suffer assaults, robberies, rapes, and kidnappings at the hands of organized crime or common criminals, and almost the entirety of these crimes go unpunished. The majority of shelter workers and human rights defenders that we interviewed told us that the problem, while at serious levels, did not worsen with the 2018-19 increase in migration and subsequent crackdown. In Tapachula, Central American migrants face threats from gangs affiliated...
“There are domestic political reasons why the electorate might want a crackdown on migrants,” a Mexico-based U.S. official told us. Indeed, a July Washington Post-Reformapoll showed Mexican public opinion souring on migrants and demonstrated broad public support for the López Obrador government’s crackdown. In the southern border zone, respondents ...
Why migrants are fleeing
As WOLA has documented in multiple reports, many factors are contributing to the surge in migrants traveling through the region. An individual or family is likely not motivated to leave based on just one factor, but a combination of reasons driving them from their homes. For Central Americans, it is a combination of violence and insecurity, poverty and lack of economic opportunity, and corruption, among others. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador continue to rank among the nations with the wo...
Mexico’s asylum system
Mexico has seen a stratospheric rise in migrants seeking asylum within its refugee protection system. As of the end of November, COMAR reported that Mexico had received 66,915asylum requests for the year. This is more than double the requests that Mexico had received in 2018. Just four years ago, in 2015, Mexico only received 3,424 asylum requests. In Tapachula, staff from a shelter told us that about 90 percent of their current population are people awaiting decisions on their asylum cases i...
COMAR on the brink
The surge in asylum seekers in Mexico has put COMAR on the verge of collapsing, a warning originally raised by the CNDH in 2018. COMAR continues to have only three main offices nationwide (in Tapachula, Chiapas; Acayucan, Veracruz; and Mexico City) as well as a presence in Tenosique, Tabasco, while COMAR agents also travel to other regions on a regular basis. Even with essential support from UNHCR, COMAR staff is overworked and under-resourced. Given that over half of claims are being process...
In most of the southern border territories we visited, observers agreed that undocumented migration depends on security forces’ and migration authorities’ corruption. “The communities say, ‘we see these cars go by, but they’re not the ones that migration is stopping.’ They [the coyotes] are basically accompanied by the authorities” due to corruptio...
U.S. assistance to Mexico is well below the levels of ten years ago, the initial years of the “Mérida Initiative” aid package, after many years of gradual reductions in new appropriations. 2019 appropriations for Mexico in annual foreign aid legislation, for both security and economic initiatives, totaled USD$166.66 million. USD$110 million of that...
U.S. and Mexican authorities combined apprehended over a million migrants and asylum seekers in fiscal year 2019. Hundreds of thousands of these individuals fled endemic violence and persecution in their home countries, while others sought to escape crippling poverty that had hindered their ability to meet even their most basic needs. Rather than s...
Apr 8, 2021 · About one of every three encounters with families in March resulted in expulsion, bringing families to the border with hopes they can remain in the U.S. Mexican authorities have resisted taking back Central American families with children 6 and under from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings.
the levels of illicit border crossing. In the mid-2010s, however, the profile of migrants arriving at the border changed with the arrival of Central American families and children, which morphed into unprecedented flows of asylum seekers from Central and South America and beyond. This shift has sparked an intense
Aug 4, 2022 · All of the dead came from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras – the three most common origin countries of migrants encountered by the Border Patrol in 2021 and so far in 2022. Such fatalities result ...
