A group of tired Colombians and Venezuelans carrying backpacks approached a checkpoint on a Mexican highway heading toward the northern United States, then suddenly veered to the left to avoid it.
“They can send us back and make us walk again,” said Víctor, a 33-year-old Colombian carrying his baby on his shoulders.
National Guard officers stationed at the outpost remained at their posts, appearing unaware of the maneuver, even though migrants say Mexican authorities are unpredictable. Sometimes agents push them south, to start all over again. Other times they ask for bribes. Sometimes they offer bus rides to towns further north.
As the United States prepares for the November presidential election, immigration is inevitable. Voters cite it as one of their most pressing concerns, and Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has made “invading” the country’s southern border a part of his campaign. In turn, President Joe Biden has leaned heavily on Mexico to step up efforts to reduce the record number of people crossing the 2,000-mile-long border with the United States.
Over the past decade, Mexico has tightened visa rules, deployed the military and set up checkpoints. In January and February, it arrested a record number of migrants from more than 100 different countries. Some U.S. commentators have called Mexico a “wall” against migrants and say President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is extorting Biden by opening and closing the flow of migrants as he pleases.
But while Mexico’s efforts make migrants’ journey north riskier, more expensive and slower, spotty controls and widespread corruption are disrupting efforts to stem the steady flow of groups crossing into Mexico in their quest to reach United States.
Most detained migrants are quickly released thanks to legal protections, and a lack of resources for the large numbers of migrants crossing the border means many end up crossing the border.
“They’re stuck in this sort of kabuki pantomime of trying to pretend to block people, which they’re pretty good at,” said Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a non-governmental organization. organization. Mexico can delay arrivals at the U.S. border for just a few months, he added, but “corruption and organized crime” limit its effectiveness.
Mexico is detaining more migrants than ever, but most are then given an administrative order to leave the country and released, according to government statistics. Of a record nearly 120,000 migrants detained in Mexico in January, only 3,000 were transferred to another country.
This dysfunction is more than a diplomatic challenge for Biden: it threatens his re-election this year. After months of being criticized by Trump over his handling of the southern border, and even receiving criticism from some Democrats, the president has shifted to the right on immigration and is now considering executive action to crack down on migrant arrivals.
Biden supported a bipartisan border deal reached in the Senate earlier this year. But after Trump opposed it, many Republicans did as well, making it politically unviable.
While Congress bickers, people traveling north through Mexico are buffeted by the country’s capricious authorities.
Recently, on the Mexican side of the porous southern border with Guatemala, agents of the National Institute of Migration (INM), a government unit, called a list of migrants, mostly Venezuelans, to take them by bus to a town located a few hundred kilometers to the north.
“They are playing with people’s hopes,” said Mauro Pérez, president of the Citizen Council of the INM, a monitoring body and legal director of the Pastoral de Movilidad Humana. “What the institute does is let them in and then, along the way, stop them and ask them for money.”
“It’s discretionary and lends itself to a lot of corruption.”
Human rights groups say the checkpoints focus on vehicle inspections, forcing migrants to walk for hours, often with little food and water, and board and disembark transports in groups. times, which increases the cost. The government has hired coaches to transport migrants – but sometimes people are transported further north; generally towards the south.
Gretchen Kuhner, director of the civil society group Imumi, said: “The policy has basically been to exhaust people, so send them from the north to the south and throw them in the south so that they have to go back up. »
Guatemalan migrants also face rapid expulsions that are not published in official statistics, two people with knowledge of the practice said.
The threat of detention pushes migrants into the arms of organized crime and taking riskier routes to avoid detection. Several migrants reported having to pay bribes at checkpoints across Mexico. An Ecuadorian couple with a 1-year-old child said they spent about $8,000 on smugglers, transportation, bribes and ransoms as they crossed from Mexico.
The INM has repeatedly been accused of corruption and poor practices, including following a fire at a detention center last year that killed 40 migrants who died in their cells. The INM and National Guard did not respond to requests for comment. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said focusing solely on containment was dysfunctional given complex migration flows from the region. He advocates for more legal avenues for workers and attention to the causes of the problem. “No country, however powerful, can manage an intrinsically transnational and multidimensional phenomenon. »
The Biden administration introduced a system last year allowing migrants to use an app, called CBP One, to make an appointment to cross legally and seek asylum — an attempt to regulate the process and eliminate smugglers. In the first three months of 2024, fewer migrants crossed the irregular border than before as more people crossed ports of entry via the app.
On a recent flight from Mexico City to Reynosa, which borders Texas, about 35 people aboard a 186-seat plane were separated upon arrival because they had appointments with CBP One.
Court rulings in the United States and Mexico have also placed limits on authorities. Mexico cannot hold children in detention, for example, and last year its Supreme Court ruled that migrants can only be detained for 36 hours – often not long enough to reach a consular agreement for a transfer to another country.
Migrants now come from more countries than ever before, making deportations even more difficult. In fiscal year 2023, more than half of irregular arrivals at the U.S. southern border came from countries outside Mexico and northern Central America for the first time, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Biden’s Republican opponents say he is too soft on the border — and on Mexico’s failure to solve the problem. Trump — who launched his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexicans criminals and rapists — is vowing to force asylum seekers to wait for their cases to be resolved south of the border.
“Mexico will do as much or as little as we ask it to,” said Carlos Trujillo, who was Trump’s ambassador to the Organization of American States. “Quiet diplomacy, ‘we’re going to change the hearts and minds of Mexicans without any muscle or teeth behind it’ – that didn’t work.”
The Biden administration says it wants to encourage investment in countries of origin, expand legal migration options and improve regional enforcement. The United States National Security Council said the United States had a collaborative partnership with Mexico and that joint efforts helped reduce the number of irregular migrants in the first three months of 2024.
The NSC said: “As neighbors and sustainable partners, we remain committed to humanely reducing unprecedented irregular migration flows. »
Mexico and other countries in the region will likely face pressure from the White House to do more, whoever wins in November. Tyler Mattiace, a Mexico researcher at Human Rights Watch, said U.S. policy revolved around the idea of making migration as painful as possible, but ultimately wasn’t that effective.
“People who are fleeing for their lives, who are fleeing violence and extortion, gangs and failed states, are very determined,” he said. “It’s a broken system with broken incentives.”
Additional reporting by James Politi in Washington