Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: The return of Trump
by
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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Donald Trump’s election points to a return, and likely intensification, of ultra-hardline border and migration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere. We can expect a suspension or curtailment of most legal migration pathways, from CBP One to asylum access to humanitarian parole. We can expect a “mass deportation” campaign in the U.S. interior. This section lists and explains some of the president-elect’s promised and likely initiatives, and what they mean for U.S.-Mexico relations.
Trump’s victory creates an incentive for some migrants to try to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day, January 20, rather than await CBP One appointments. In Mexico, “caravans” are already forming, while migrants in shelters along the route voice anxiety about their future.
Members of Mexico’s National Guard, a recently created force made up mostly of transferred soldiers, opened fire on a vehicle carrying migrants along the border east of Tijuana. Two Colombian people were killed. It is the second such incident since October 1, when Mexican Army soldiers killed six migrants in Chiapas. In both incidents, military leadership claims that the soldiers were returning fire, or thought that they were; witnesses dispute that.
Migration through the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama appears to have dropped modestly from September to October. However, reports are pointing to an increase in people entering Colombia from Venezuela. Since August, Panama has operated 25 deportation flights, with U.S. support, to Colombia, Ecuador, and India.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” said Donald Trump, as U.S. voters elected him to the presidency with a majority of the electoral and probably the popular votes, while giving the Republican Party a majority of the U.S. Senate and the possibility of a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“We’re going to have to seal up those borders and we’re going to have to let people come into our country,” the president-elect said in his acceptance remarks’ only substantive reference to the U.S.-Mexico border. “We want people to come back in, but we have to, we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally.”
Trump’s election “sets the stage for a sharp turn in immigration and border policy that could upend millions of lives and recast the U.S. economy and labor force,” wrote longtime Washington Post border and immigration reporters Maria Sacchetti and Nick Miroff.
Chad Wolf, who headed the Department of Homeland Security during the last Trump administration, told the Post that U.S. public opinion is more favorable now for Trump’s hardline policies: “You’ll see a different mindset, and over time it’ll be possible to remove large numbers of people.” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU said, “We anticipate it will be much worse this time and are particularly concerned about the use of the military to round up immigrants.”
Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing a large majority of Border Patrol agents, told Newsweek, “We consider today’s victory for President Trump not just a victory for himself, but a victory for the entire country.” The union endorsed Trump in every election since the 2016 primaries.
Based on statements of the president-elect and his surrogates, the list of policies, programs, and migration pathways that a second Trump administration would be likely to end, curtail, or sharply reduce include:
Asylum seekers awaiting CBP One appointments in Tijuana voiced a fear that this opportunity will disappear on Inauguration Day. Casa del Migrante shelter director Pat Murphy told Milenio that dangerous irregular migration will increase if the CBP One pathway disappears: “People are going to keep trying to cross and there will be more deaths at the border.”
On the eve of the U.S. election, CBS News spoke with migrants awaiting CBP One appointments at shelters in Nogales, Sonora. They also feared that a Donald Trump victory would end the CBP One program. “They’re very scared. They think that the asylum system is going to close,” said immigration attorney Alba Jaramillo.
Reporting from just north of Mexico City, the Los Angeles Times Patrick McDonnell spoke with migrants determined to come to the United States regardless of who is elected. “If you’re a migrant, you’re going to suffer whoever is president,” a Honduran man said.
The app is very far from a perfect solution in the first place. San Diego-based iNewSource reported from Tijuana where large numbers of migrants, including Mexican citizens fleeing violence in their own country, are enduring long waits for appointments. While they wait, children are showing signs of regression and trauma, while parents struggle with emotional distress. One family interviewed by reporter Sofía Mejías-Pascoe has waited over a year for a CBP One appointment. “Asylum isn’t something you can schedule,” said Christina Asencio of Human Rights First.
“The president has a lot of discretion when it comes to the refugee program,” said Mark Hetfield, the CEO of HIAS, one of several advocates and service providers interviewed by Voice of America. “And for asylum, [he’s] going to make it impossible to apply at the border as he did with Title 42 and his Remain in Mexico policies.”
Initiatives that may be coming after Trump’s January 20 inauguration may include the following policies, or attempts to implement policies:
The Associated Press noted that Trump’s plans to massively deport as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants lack any detail. However, Trump and advisors have referred to using the National Guard or the military and invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. “We all have to have our eyes wide open to the fact that this isn’t 2016,” Heidi Altman of the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund told the AP. “Trump and Stephen Miller learned a lot from their first administration. The courts look very different than they did four years ago.”
The Dallas Morning News recalled that Trump advisor Stephen Miller said last year that mass deportation could involve detention camps built “on open land in Texas near the border.”
At USA Today, Nick Penzenstadler and Lauren Villagrán examined how much the federal government might have to pay to carry out Trump’s plan, and how handsomely its private contractors would profit.
At Palabra, Dianne Solís reflected on the United States’ history of migrant deportations, which Donald Trump proposes to step up massively. For asylum seekers, “Their deportation could be a death sentence,” Jenifer Williams of Dallas-based Migrant Emotional Health told Solís. “They live with a lot of anxiety, usually in the form of PTSD.”
Melissa López, director of Estrella del Paso (formerly known as Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services), told Border Report that her organization is urging migrants in the United States “to be getting legal advice as soon as possible so they can find out where they stand” before Trump is inaugurated.
At the Progressive, Jeff Abbott examined the harm that a “mass deportation” campaign would do to economic and political stability in Central America. Sending millions of Central American migrants back to impoverished countries, thus halting remittance flows, “would be the worst catastrophe that could possibly occur. It would be worse than a major earthquake,” said a former president of El Salvador’s central bank.
A Politico article by Myah Ward told the story of Angelina and her father Teodoro, a Guatemalan migrant family separated for seven months by the Trump administration’s family separation policy in 2017, when Angelina was eight. Both continue to suffer trauma symptoms. “It will happen again if Trump is the president,” Angelina said. “He will do much worse than he did to us.”
In Laredo, Texas, a border city whose voters have opposed having a border wall built along its riverfront, local leaders worry about such construction happening if Donald Trump wins the election, the Laredo Morning Times reported.
Mexico’s government is bracing for threats, including Trump’s campaign promise to impose tariffs, the Los Angeles Times reported. On November 4, the final day before Election Day, Trump vowed, if elected, to impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods, escalating to 100 percent, if Mexico’s government does not act to stop migrants and fentanyl from crossing its northern border. He said that if he wins the election, his first call will be to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to convey this threat.
“There’s no reason to be worried,” Sheinbaum told a morning press conference on November 6. “There’s going to be dialogue.” Trade between Mexico and the United States exceeded $800 billion in 2023.
“Mexico gave in to the pressures back then [during Trump’s last term, when Mexico agreed to take back 72,000 non-Mexican asylum seekers under Remain in Mexico and over 450,000 Title 42 expulsions], and the question is whether Mexico will give in again,” Tonatiuh Guillén, a migration scholar who headed Mexico’s migration agency at the beginning of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term in 2018-19, told the New York Times. “I think the likelihood it will is high.”
The Times analysis noted that massively deporting people back to Mexico would severely damage the country’s economy by increasing the unemployed population and slashing remittances. “We’re going to see deportees who are harder to reintegrate,” said Eunice Rendón of the advocacy coalition Migrant Agenda.
Border Report’s Julián Resendiz talked to political and economic leaders in Ciudad Juárez, including Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuellar, before the U.S. voting began. They worry about Trump’s tariff threats, Mexico’s ability to absorb millions of forcibly deported people, threats to “close” the border, and rhetoric bullying Mexico. A finance sector leader doubted Mexico’s ability to meet Trump’s demands to secure its northern border, since the country has been unable to get a handle on its own public security challenges. Mayor Pérez Cuéllar concluded, however, that “the level of interdependence between the two countries is so large that it is practically impossible” to break.
In Guatemala, analysts and former officials interviewed by Prensa Libre expect a big increase in U.S. pressure to halt migration and accept more deportees after Donald Trump moves into the White House. The same newspaper noted that hopes for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Guatemalan citizens in the United States have evaporated.
Even as Trump and the Republican Party made sharp Election Day gains in border counties, especially in Texas, incumbents won all races in House of Representatives districts along the border. Among the narrowest victories are those of Reps. Vicente González (D) in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Gabe Vásquez (D) in New Mexico, and Juan Ciscomani (R) in southeast Arizona. Ciscomani won by about 1,600 votes over Democratic challenger Kirsten Engel; a Green Party candidate won 6,600.
The Republican Party made historic gains in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley border region, until recently a solidly Democratic area. Rep. Mónica de la Cruz (R), the first Republican elected in the region in many years, won re-election. Rep. Henry Cuéllar (D), who is under indictment on bribery charges, won re-election by a narrower margin than ever. No call has been made in Rep. Vicente González’s (D) re-election bid.
In Arizona, 63 percent of voters approved Proposition 314, a ballot measure that makes unauthorized border crossing a state crime. It appears to have won more than 60 percent of the vote. The measure is similar to Texas’s S.B. 4, a law passed in late 2023 that remains on hold pending legal challenges, including from the Biden Justice Department.
Opponents of these laws point to the chaos that could result if states adopt and carry out different immigration policies, and the likelihood that the law might empower local and state police to stop people who look like they are of Latino descent merely on suspicion of having crossed the border illegally.
The Arizona Daily Star’s Howard Fischer noted that Prop 314 passed “without organized campaign support. But the measure, put on the ballot by Republican state lawmakers, could have benefited from years of headlines and videos about people entering the country illegally.”
Speaking with Cronkite News before the vote, border-area political and law-enforcement leaders voiced reluctance to finding themselves having to use scarce resources to enforce immigration laws, a mission for which they are not trained, if Proposition 314 passes.
The New York Times talked to Democratic-leaning voters who voted for Donald Trump because they disapproved of the Biden administration’s handling of the border and migration. “There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute told the Times’s Miriam Jordan.
Still, exit polls from CNN and NBC News showed that immigration dropped on voters’ list of priority issues, well behind the economy. “There has also been growing unease among voters about deporting those who have been in the country for several years,” noted a Newsweek analysis of poll data.
Fearing an end to CBP One, asylum access, and other migration pathways after Trump’s January 20 inauguration, approximately 2,500 to 3,000 people formed a “caravan” in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula on November 5. Participants voiced concern to Reuters that Donald Trump’s election may end their hopes of seeking asylum or protection in the United States.
While a few turned back to Tapachula, the daily Milenio reported that others may be trying to pick up their pace to reach the U.S. border before Trump takes office.
We can expect an increase in migration over the next few months as people seek to get to U.S. soil before the new administration starts closing down existing legal pathways. Three unnamed U.S. officials told CBS News that migration to the U.S.-Mexico border could “spike” if Donald Trump wins tomorrow’s presidential election, as migrants race to get to U.S. soil before Inauguration Day.
NBC News reported that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is making contingency plans ahead of a possible increase in migration as people attempt to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day. “A common theme emerged among multiple users: The time to come to the U.S. is now,” NBC said of WhatsApp groups used by migrants.
For the second time since October 1, Mexican soldiers have shot and killed migrants. Members of Mexico’s recently created National Guard, much of whose personnel were transferred from the Army, opened fire on a vehicle near Tecate, Baja California, along the border east of Tijuana. Two Colombian migrants were killed in the November 2 incident, and four others were wounded.
Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA, the Army and Air Force) contended that the soldiers fired their weapons in self-defense after alleged smugglers fired on them. Witnesses dispute that: “We had no weapons, we are not criminals, they were never shot at,” a survivor told the Tijuana-based investigative publication Zeta. Witnesses say that, before aiding the wounded, the guard members spent a few minutes cleaning up their spent ammunition cartridges, which, if true, would constitute altering a crime scene.
Three guard members who opened fire have been taken off duty while investigations proceed.
On October 1, soldiers opened fire on a vehicle carrying migrants, killing six. In that case, too, SEDENA claimed that the soldiers responded after hearing “detonations,” though witnesses disputed that.
