CIUDAD JUÁREZ — Mega shelters for deportees set up by the Mexican government along the border sit mostly empty, one month after President Donald Trump threatened “mass deportations” on Day 1.
The scenes here and in other border cities west in Tijuana and east in Reynosa underscore the setbacks, thus far, of Trump’s promise to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. Trump campaigned to target an estimated 11 million undocumented persons.
Mexican officials along the border, including here in Ciudad Juárez, appear relieved they haven’t seen a swell of deportees, yet.
“We hope there won’t be a large repatriation,” said Mexico’s Secretary of Welfare Ariadna Montiel Reyes, after a tour of a sprawling, empty tent camp that can potentially hold 2,500 deportees. The federal agency is in charge of providing services for Mexicans returned to their home country in a process often called repatriation.
So far, about 2,000 Mexican migrants have set foot in government-operated shelters, said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. Overall, more than 13,455 migrants have been deported to Mexico, according to Sheinbaum. Among them in a noteworthy negotiation: more than 2,970 migrants from countries other than Mexico, including Cuba and Venezuela, Mexican officials say.
People unload mattresses at a shelter for Mexican deportees in Ciudad Juárez. But Mexican officials along the border say they haven’t seen a big influx of deportees from the United States.
The numbers of deportees in the last month sent to Mexico were higher than the last four weeks under the administration of President Joe Biden, said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Deportations have since stabilized, if not actually fallen in pace, from the first 10 days of the Trump administration, said Ruiz Soto, who has examined data from both the U.S. and Mexico.
“That has a lot to do with the real challenges that ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is facing with limited capacity in the interior,” he said, referring to detention space.
ICE has long told Congress it doesn’t have enough funding to detain all the undocumented immigrants that Trump has promised to arrest. Border czar Tom Homan told CNN on Sunday: “I’m not happy with the numbers, because we got a lot of criminals to find. So what we’re talking about right now is increasing the number of teams, and (increasing) the targeting. … We got to do more.” ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Defense Department didn’t respond to inquiries.
Source: Puente News
