Mexico-US: at the border crossing where Donald Trump’s migrant ban is working
People who once flooded north across the river between Guatemala and Mexico are trickling south again, their dream of reaching the US ended by the president’s crackdown.
The brown churn of the Suchiate river splits Talisman in Mexico from the thick Guatemalan jungle beyond. A few months ago, these waters thronged with migrants crossing north on inflatable rafts, heading for the US, 3220km away. Now, after President Donald Trump announced he had closed the border, there is practically no one, only a trickle of people going in the other direction.
For them, the American dream is over and they are heading home, if they can make it.
An hour after sunrise on a Thursday morning last month, a young Venezuelan mother and father held their three small children firmly by the hand as they walked towards the border. They were dressed for hard travel: boots, backpacks, water bottles. The children were quiet; they had done it before.
“We came here five months ago,” said their mother, Lucia. “We’re crossing back firstly because of the situation at the US border, and the security problems in Mexico.”
Half a year after they had made it 2740km from Venezuela to Mexico, they were making the same journey in reverse: through Central America, where cartels prey on migrants, kidnapping and extorting them, and through the jungle in the Darien Gap in Panama, where travellers climb past the decomposing bodies of those who died on the way.
“How do I feel about going back?” Lucia repeated the question, incredulous. “I feel terrible about it. But we don’t have a choice right now.”
The family are part of a small but growing number of people returning home after giving up on reaching the US. After three years in which US authorities registered a record seven million “encounters” at the southern border (a rough measure of the number of people trying to cross), their stories represent a turning of the tide, one where stricter border policies are making their mark and word has spread from Nicaragua to Brazil and Chile: the United States is closed.
At the beginning of last month, the International Organisation for Migration, which organises voluntary repatriation flights around the world, reported “rising demand for return assistance across Latin America and the Caribbean”.
Many more go uncounted because they return to their old lives without notifying the authorities. Some must start again from zero, having sold everything to fund their shot at getting to the US.
In his office in Tapachula, 16km from the crossing point at Talisman, Samuel Galo, the Honduran vice-consul, said that since the day after Trump’s inauguration he had arranged for 438 Hondurans in this one border town to be taken back home, in buses paid for by the Mexican government.
Many had been waiting to receive their CBP One appointment: a Biden-era scheme that allowed people to claim asylum in the US at a specific time and place at official border crossing points. Trump cancelled the program and published an executive order sealing the United States’ southern border to migrants whom he accused of “invading”. It is now in effect closed to all asylum seekers.
Trump also halted a decades-old resettlement program that brings refugees to the US who have been vetted abroad – a decision being fought in the courts. Last week, a federal judge issued an injunction that essentially ordered Trump to restore the program. It is unclear whether the administration will comply. Analysts estimate that more than 200,000 migrants, most of them non-Mexicans, were on their way to the US when Trump scrapped CBP One appointments.
“It was like a bucket of cold water” for the Hondurans stranded in Tapachula, said the vice-consul. “Most of them realised they couldn’t get into the US, and presented themselves here for voluntary repatriation.”
Sonia, 23, and her sister, Eilin, 16, had been hoping to reach New Orleans with their mother and four other relatives from Honduras when they heard on January 20 that their CBP One appointment, scheduled for a few days later, had been cancelled. “We were crying, it was horrifying,” Sonia said. They are still trying to work out what to do next.
Others in Tapachula have much further to go. There are Ghanaian women in long robes hanging up their laundry, Chinese families eating noodles in restaurant doorways and young Cuban men, who stand several inches taller than most of the Mexicans, sweeping the streets.
The vice-consul deplored Trump’s vilification of migrants but agreed that the action taken had been effective.
“People will think many times before leaving [their home countries] now,” he said. “It isn’t convenient to go.”
The fall began a year ago, when the Biden administration, overwhelmed by the record numbers of migrants crossing the border, pushed Mexico to stop them travelling through the country towards the US. Last summer, Trump’s predecessor imposed strict border restrictions that cut numbers further.
“The very fact that they made some changes … that resulted in lower numbers at the border is actually an indictment of their previous three years of policy,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, which supports Trump’s border policies. “They could have done that at any time, and they just chose nothing.”
Last year the Biden administration also sharply stepped up deportations, removing more than a quarter of a million people from the US, nearly twice as many as in 2023.
During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged the “largest deportation” campaign in US history. That has not yet come to pass, to the evident frustration of his administration, partly because the agency responsible is “still working with the resources they had before”, said Adam Isacson, who works on border and migration at the Washington Office on Latin America, a non-profit organisation.
As the numbers of migrants heading north to the United States continues to fall, the journey has become more hostile for the few who do make it.
Outside his church in Tapachula, beside the river that divides Mexico and Guatemala, Father Heyman Vazquez Medina told how the cartels pounced.
“There was a time we were invaded by migrants,” he said. “The parks were full, the church was full. They were coming here over the river. The groups [cartels] were waiting for them. They’d charge them 1000 pesos ($80) to cross. Then, if they were unlucky, they’d take them to a ranch nearby. They’d call their families. They’d have to pay them $US700 to be released.”
Since the end of January, there have been new border guards in the area – evidence of increased enforcement by the Mexican government, under pressure from the Trump administration.
Throughout Mexico, checkpoints that once waved migrants through now send them back. That leaves people who are determined to push on to the US at the mercy of the cartels who control the remaining routes. “I think migration is going to become more expensive and more dangerous now,” said Medina.
A short walk around the corner from the church is el paso del coyote – the smuggler’s route – where the cartels operate. But that day, in the midmorning sunshine, it was calm. Residents, for whom the border is nothing more than a line on a map, crossed back and forth on rubber-ring rafts, heading to work or to sell yoghurt and juice on the other side.
One of the boatmen, Elvis, said this was the quietest he had seen the border for over a decade.
“Since December it’s gone down a lot,” he said. “Before, caravans [of migrants] used to come north through here. Now it’s much less. People are returning home because they can’t go to the US … it’s much more complicated with Trump and the cartels.”
At the bus station, signs printed in primary colours advertised buses going south: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. A seat on the bus north to Tijuana, a US border city, was going at a discount, available to Mexican citizens only.
In a hotel on the outskirts of town, a group of about 20 Vietnamese were crouched over their phones, smoking and drinking Coca-Cola. They had arrived 10 days earlier on a flight from China to Guatemala, from where they had travelled north to Tapachula. That is when they realised they were in trouble.
None of them spoke a word of Spanish or English, communicating instead through a translation app on their phone.
“We can’t go home,” one of them, a young man with tattoos snaking up his arms, wrote. “I think if the border is closed then we’ll be homeless.”
A young woman with a toddler wrote a sentence on her phone and held it up: “I’m going back tonight (Sunday).”
At the Jesus el Buen Pastor migrant centre in Tapachula, its director, Herber Bermudez, said a few months ago there had been 1700 people here. Now there were 150. Most had either tried to push north (the last on January 20) or turned back. No one was coming to replace them. “The army and the military, since January 20, they’ve been here,” he said. “If you want to go north it’s going to be hard for you. They’re going to stop you.”
Some Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans – whose governments are particularly repressive – were considering staying in Mexico, he said. Most others were giving up. “They say it makes no sense to stay here because they were coming for the American dream,” he said.
Emmanuel Amoah, 43, an electrical engineer from Accra, is one of the few staying put. He said he had fled Ghana after being persecuted because of his sexuality. He had paid more than $US3500 to get this far, taking flights, buses and long hikes through the jungle, and had been robbed of everything three times on the way, including his passport.
He knows he will not make it to the US. Instead, he is seeking asylum in Mexico. Maybe, in the future, American politics will change, and he can think of going back on the long road north.
– Additional reporting: Natalia Meneses Alis
The Sunday Times
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