On the eve of President Trump’s deadline to impose tariffs on Mexico, one thing is hard to miss on the Mexican side of the border: The migrants are gone.
In what were once some of the busiest sections along the border — Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Matamoros — shelters that used to overflow now hold just a few families. The parks, hotels and vacant buildings that once teemed with people from all over the world stand empty.
And on the border itself, where migrants once slept in camps within feet of the 30-foot wall, only dust-caked clothes and shoes, rolled-up toothpaste tubes and water bottles remain.
“All that is over,” said the Rev. William Morton, a missionary at a Ciudad Juárez cathedral that serves migrants free meals. “Nobody can cross.”
Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced that Customs and Border Protection had apprehended only 200 people at the southern border the Saturday before — the lowest single-day number in over 15 years.
Mr. Trump has credited his crackdown on illegal immigration for the plunging numbers, even as he has also announced he will send thousands more combat forces to the border to stop what he calls an invasion.
But according to analysts, Mexico’s own moves to restrict migration in the last year — not just at the border but throughout the country — have yielded undeniable results. In February, the Trump administration said it would pause for a month the imposition of 25-percent tariffs on Mexican exports, challenging the government to further reduce migration and the flow of fentanyl across the border.
That progress has put Mexico in a far stronger negotiating position than when Mr. Trump first threatened tariffs, during his first term.
“Mexico has new leverage compared to 2019,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Andrew Selee, analysts with the Migration Policy institute, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote in a report. Mexico’s cooperation, they said, has made it “indispensable” to the United States.
In recent years, the Mexican government has significantly stepped up checks on migration. It has established checkpoints along migrant routes, imposed visa restrictions, dispersed migrant caravans and bused people who arrived from places like Venezuela to remote corners of southern Mexico to stop them from reaching the U.S. border. All of that has vastly reduced the number of migrants at the border.
Since last spring, the Mexican authorities have been apprehending more people than their American counterparts every month. Now, the numbers at the border have fallen to almost nothing.
“We no longer have major flows of people coming — they have declined by 90 percent,” Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for migrants, in Juárez, said last week.
And those migrants who do make it to the border are no longer trying to enter the United States, shelter operators say.
“They know they can’t cross,” said Father Morton, in Juárez. “All the holes underground, the tunnels, the holes in the wall, they’ve virtually sealed it — it’s much, much more difficult.”
Empty Shelters
In Mexican border cities, the scene at migrant shelters is much the same: tables sitting empty at meal time, bunk beds, unused.
Even before Mr. Trump took office, the number of people apprehended trying to cross the border had been dramatically dropping, according to U.S. government data.
Many of those waiting in border cities had appointments through CBP One, an application that allowed people to make asylum appointments with the authorities rather than to cross the border, shelter operators say.
After Mr. Trump canceled the app on his first day in office, people gave up after a few days and headed south to Mexico City or even for the southern border, said the Rev. Juan Fierro, a pastor at the Good Samaritan shelter in Ciudad Juárez.
At a once-crammed shelter in Matamoros whose name translates to Helping Them Triumph, only a handful of Venezuelan women and their children remain, according to its directors.
In Tijuana, at a shelter complex within view of the border wall, the Foundation Youth Movement 2000, which once held hundreds of people of all nationalities, there are now just 55, according to its director, José María Lara.
They are the same people who have been there since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“There have been the same number” Mr. Lara said. They include people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, as well as Mexican migrants from states considered dangerous to return to, such as Michoacán.
There are no figures available for how many migrants like these may be living in the border’s shelters, hotels and rented rooms, and biding their time.
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“We are going to wait to see if God touches Mr. Trump’s heart,” said a 26-year-old woman from Venezuela, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Maria Elena, as she sat eating with her 7-year-old son at the cathedral in Ciudad Juárez.
Guardsmen on the Border
In response to Mr. Trump’s demands last month, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, dispatched 10,000 national guardsmen to the border and sent hundreds more troops to Sinaloa state, a major fentanyl trafficking hub.
Officials and those who work with migrants are split on whether the troops, several hundred of which began to appear in and around every border city over the last month, have had an effect on illegal border crossings.
At the end of the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego, Calif., the National Guard has set up large tents on the Mexican side, in an area called Nido de las Águilas. About 15 miles from downtown Tijuana, it has long been used by coyotes, the smugglers who take advantage of the steep hills and lack of police presence to lead migrants into California, the authorities say.
The guard has also placed checkpoints at spots up and down the border.
In Tijuana, José Moreno Mena, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Defense of Migrants, said that the presence of the guard has been a major deterrent to migration, along with Mr. Trump’s promised mass deportations in the United States.
“This doesn’t mean that they won’t keep coming,” Mr. Moreno said. “It’s just a pause, perhaps, until they see better conditions.”
But in the state of Tamaulipas, where more than 700 guardsman arrived last month in places like Matamoros, the guardsman do not appear to be curbing migration, residents say. They seem to be concentrated on the bridge into the United States, while migrants are now seeking to enter through the desert or other rural areas.
In Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds of guardsman were also dispatched in early February, the troops and military personnel have been stopping cars to inspect them, and searching for border tunnels.
“They have inspection spots at night, in the street,” Father Morton said. “There are more here, ostensibly to stop the fentanyl, but I doubt they know where it is.” He said they mainly stopped young men who were driving souped-up cars or had tattoos, creating an environment of “low intensity conflict.”
The real work of curbing migration has been happening far from Mexico’s northern border.
At the southernmost point in Mexico, in Tapachula, few migrants are entering. Shelters that recently housed 1,000 people now serve just a hundred or so, according to operators. Waiting for visas that allow them to head north, and dispersed if they try to form caravans, these migrants are all but blocked.
Many are weighing their options. Some have even asked the Mexican government to deport them on flights back to their country.
Staying Put in Mexico
The migrants who now sit on the U.S. border are generally those who come from places they cannot return to.
“They can’t go back,” said the Rev. Francisco González, president of a network of shelters in Juarez called We Are One for Juarez.
While his 12 shelters housed only 440 people last week after often being filled to their capacity of 1,200 in recent years, the people who are arriving are staying longer, he said.
Some are starting to fill out forms to gain asylum in Mexico, fearing they could be caught and deported if they have no legal status, Mr. González said.
“We still have faith and hope that at some point Trump will recover from his insanity,” said Jordan García, a former mining worker from Venezuela who said he and his wife and three daughters had spent seven months making the journey to Ciudad Juárez.
Mr. García carried his infant, Reina Kataleya, through the dangerous jungle pass known as the Darién Gap when she was seven months old. Now the family’s makeshift home consists of a bunk bed in one of Mr. González’s shelters on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, draped in plush blankets for privacy.
But shelters at the border have started to shut down. In Ciudad Juárez, 34 were open in November; by last month, that number had dropped to 29. Shelter operators say that not only are there significantly fewer arrivals but that they are losing backing from international groups such as the U.N. International Office for Migration, and UNICEF, which relied on foreign aid frozen under Mr. Trump.
Before the new American administration, “there were more people, and there was more support,” said Olivia Santiago Rentería, a volunteer at one of the shelters run by We Are One for Juarez. “Now,” she said, “everyone here is living with that uncertainty.”
Reporting was contributed by Rocío Gallegos from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Aline Corpusfrom Tijuana; Enrique Lerma from Matamoros; and Lucía Trejo from Tapachula.
