MEXICO CITY — There is almost nobody left at the parish canteen run by the Father Heyman Vázquez Medina, along the Mexico-Guatemala border. The kitchen here used to serve passing migrants, but even the cooks have gone. As the migratory flow toward the United States slows to a trickle, the 60-year-old padre who has been helping migrants for 22 years did not expect such a sudden change.
“In late February, we’d initially receive 10 to 15 and in March, we began receiving two or four at the most. In April, we might get two a week, but not anymore,” he says. “We used to provide a meal at the canteen to those passing through. Last October we had about 400 people eating here every day.”
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The reason, of course, is Donald J. Trump, who became U.S. president on January 20 with a promise to clamp down on the “disaster” of immigration, which he blamed on the soft approach taken by the previous, Democratic administration of President Joe Biden.
The criminals and thugs who would extort money from those trying to cross into Mexico at the nearby Suchiate river, says Vázquez, have also vanished. They would charge migrants 1,000 Mexican pesos ($51), for a promise to take them across as far as Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas. Anyone saying they had no money was sent back to Guatemala.
“We know that with a lot of people they wouldn’t even take them to Tapachula, but kidnapped them instead to ask for another $700,” Vázquez says. “They’d release and stamp those who paid, so they could continue.”
Very few people are seen now trying to enter Mexico, he says, and they are mostly young males and alone, and certainly no families.
Sandra Álvarez, head of Sin Fronteras, an NGO that aids migrants and their families in Mexico, confirms this, saying “the migration we observed in late 2024 was of entire families, including the grandparents. Since Trump became president, this migration has diminished and the only ones trying now are a limited number of teenagers and single men. The fear of being deported or mistreated in the United States has become bigger than their fear of continuing to live the harsh reality of their home countries, which is deplorable.”
Accelerated expulsions
Trump has certainly acted with vigor, even callous harshness, in enacting his pledge to block migration into the United States. His measures include disabling the CPB One application, which allowed about one million migrants to process residency applications once inside the country, as well as the Humanitarian Parole, another temporary arrangement that aided half a million migrants mostly from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua.
At the same time, the administration has accelerated expulsions — perhaps of as many as 160,000 — upending migrants’ work activities and even their health, as many now fear going to a doctor.
We spoke to Yolany González, a 39-year-old mother of three from Honduras, one hot morning in Mexico City. Before speaking, she asked the children, two girls aged five and six and a four-year-old boy, to go play a little further, so they wouldn’t hear the harsh details of their story.
“There isn’t much work and we need so much for our families,” she said. “That’s why last year I made an appointment for the CBP One application. I thought I would fly with the children as far as (Ciudad) Juárez and hand myself over there. I didn’t want to expose them to the land journey, after I’d heard what happened to someone else from Honduras.”
Horror story
The horror story that González heard from the woman began when she got to the north of Mexico on the U.S. border: they kidnapped and almost killed her. They raped one of her daughters and finally, when she managed to escape from the place where they were forcing her to prostitute herself, they killed one of her daughters.
She had arrived in Mexico fleeing the gang that had kidnapped and murdered her husband for not paying extortion money.
González also shared the account of the last people she knows who reached the border. “At the airport in Juárez, they wouldn’t let them out until they had paid their ‘quota’ to the cartel, which was $4,000. I thought, ‘a good thing it didn’t work out for me since I have no way of paying.”
González had arrived in Mexico fleeing the gang that had kidnapped and murdered her husband for not paying them a “security tax” or extortion money. She knew she had to leave. The local brand of the Mara gangs, active across Central America, would not rest before they had killed her too, because she had dared report her husband’s murder to the police.
After crossing out of Honduras to Guatemala, she somehow reached Mexico City, but not before living through violent episodes. Migrant women must expect it, she says: “In the city, I can only tell you a lot of people have treated me well and others badly,” González said plainly.
She was a victim of sexual abuse while looking for work, having been hired as an assistant at a carpentry workshop. “The gentleman there allowed me to work with the children next to me in a cot. But after the first fortnight, he told me to go pick up my pay at night. That is when the abuse happened and he didn’t even pay me. He threw me out. I had to suffer it for the sake of my children.”
Mexico turns blind eye
Migrants were never a “matter of interest to Mexico,” says Yarima Merchán Rojas, a delegate at the Civil Society’s National Table for Migrations in Central America, an initiative run by the Colombian foreign ministry.
She says crimes and abuses against them “are not investigated nor given importance… from the moment they enter the country, they are stalked by various groups, robbed, kidnapped, they lose their ID papers, which prevents them from going to the police. Very few of them do, for reasons that include the stigma of suspicion of having committed an offense, which is simply to have dared to seek a better future without legal documentation.”
Trump’s message has escalated in Mexico.
Merchán explains that this ambiguous status is what condemns refugees to face a system of impunity, invisibility, risks and danger with no access to justice. And yes, Mexico is significantly more dangerous than the United States. “In Mexico, they kill them, make them disappear, extort money. Their entire crossing is controlled by criminal networks. In the United States you might be mistreated, they can handcuff you, but it’s unlikely you’ll die.”
She admits, nevertheless, that being a migrant under Trump has become far more daunting.
His provocative, xenophobic discourse has consequences beyond the United States, Merchán says. In Mexico for example, she adds, “Trump’s message has escalated there, and there are real problems with xenophobia, hatred of the poor and discrimination,” she explains. “Because in Mexico you may be sure they do not treat all foreigners equally. In fact the biggest number of foreigners there is from the United States, and they can live with tranquility in Mexico without papers. But it’s different with other illegals, especially if they’re from South America or Africa.”
Questionable deportations
President Trump’s mass deportations were not quite as fast as promised while campaigning. In the first few weeks of his presidency, they remained at a similar level to the Biden administration’s, even if they garnered far more media attention. That was partly for the dramatic cases like those of Venezuelans ending up in El Salvador’s chilling “rent-a-prisons.” The fates of many of these people, who in cases were also charged with being gangsters, remain unclear. For Human Rights Watch, such rough-and-ready deportations were in many cases akin to kidnappings.
Camilo Vélez, Operational Deputy Head of Mission in Mexico and Central America for the medical NGO Médecins sans frontières, also confirms a clear drop in migrant numbers heading for the United States. This may be as much as 90% or more in the highly dangerous Darién Gap, where his NGO attends to passing migrants. The Panamanian government, which controls the area, reports an 83% reduction. Honduras in turn reported a 400% year-on-year drop in migrants crossing the country as of March 2025.
They are asking how long it will last.
Juanita Goebertus, a former Colombian legislator now working for Human Rights Watch, believes people may have changed their routes instead of giving up, and that a drop in migrant numbers may be due to various factors, beyond Trump. Which means that if the crossing points seem abandoned and nobody is eating at a frontier canteen, it does not mean migrants have magically vanished. “Many are asking for asylum in Mexico,” says Goebertus, with Honduras and Costa Rica also acting as secondary choices to live in.
It is not the end of migration, in other words, but a pause.
Camilo Vélez says many people are waiting. “They still hope this will change, and are asking themselves as we and other humanitarian organizations do, how long can this last? How much longer can they spread this fear, which they’ve tried to transmit to all those who have a legitimate right to seek asylum in countries that can assure them security, and a basic living standard.“
