Mexico must prepare for possible massive return of citizens, experts say // The first to leave will be those accused of a crime

Jim Cason and David Brooks

Correspondents

La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, November 21, 2024, p. 23

Washington and New York. Mexico will have to prepare not only for the possible return of its citizens who have resided in the United States for a long time, but also how to handle a growing number of migrants who are on the Mexican side waiting to enter the United States, experts in this field warn. matter interviewed by The Day.

The promoters of Donald Trump’s immigration policy assure that the changes will be immediate. The moment Trump puts his hand on that Bible and takes the oath of office as president, the occupation ends.said Stephen Miller, the architect of immigration policy and the magnate’s main advisor, yesterday on Fox News, referring to the president’s inauguration ceremony on January 20.

He will immediately sign executive orders sealing the border, initiating the largest deportation in American history, finding the criminal gangs, rapists, drug dealers and monsters who have murdered our citizens and sending them home (their countries of origin).

Measures under consideration to close the border to migrants include executive orders effectively expanding the repeal of the right to asylum implemented by President Joe Biden, reinstating the Stay in Mexico program – although this requires permission from the Mexican government; Also, reactivate the Title 42 emergency declaration that allows immigration officials to deny passage to undocumented immigrants who try to enter the United States without any evaluation process. The representatives of the future president have not reported whether they are already requesting the neighboring country to renew the Stay in Mexico program.

At first fewer crossings are expected

It is expected that immigrant crossings to the United States from Mexico will be substantially reduced in a few months when Trump arrives at the White House, comments specialist Adam Isacson, from the Washington Office on Latin American Affairs (WOLA). In an interview, he explained that on the same day Trump took office for the first time in January 2017, crossings virtually stopped. He added that these plummeted in the first months of that year and that in April 2017 they reached their lowest point so far this century. But the following year, the number of undocumented immigrants intercepted upon entering the country skyrocketed.

The Mexican government, for its part, will face new challenges in how to handle migrants from other countries hoping to enter the United States, the specialist added. Between January and August of this year, Mexico reported 925,085 encounters with migrants, almost triple the total for a full year in 2022, which that year set a record.said Isacson, citing official data from the Mexican government’s Migration Policy Unit.

He indicated that Mexico has not detained or deported a large part of these migrants, but rather has transferred them to the south of the country, where they are waiting for appointments to request asylum in the United States. If the United States does indeed quash asylum applications and, as some Trump advisers have suggested, abandon the app CBP One through which these requests are made, Isacson asks: what will happen to all these people who are waiting in Mexico?

A second problem for Mexico, says Isacson, is that although deportations from the border could plummet, if Trump proceeds with his promise of mass deportations from within his country, there will be an influx of Mexicans who were already residing in the United States for years. and whose reintegration to the country of origin will not be easy.

“We are talking about someone who has been in the United States for a long time, who has been employed, who has his children in school… he is lower middle class, who suddenly finds himself homeless in Ciudad Juárez. It will be very difficult to reintegrate that person,” Isacson explained.

The dimensions of the problem are enormous. If they really try to achieve (the deportation) of up to a million undocumented migrants each year and the projections are that 40 percent of the undocumented population in the United States is Mexican, that could imply the return of 400 thousand Mexicans each year; and it could even be larger, since they are the easiest to deportIsacson warns.

Disagreement on using the army

If the incoming Trump administration quickly accomplishes its mass deportations, how it will do so remains unknown. Yesterday, Republican Senator Rand Paul said he opposes proposals by Trump and others to use military forces to capture and deport undocumented immigrants. That’s not what we use our military for, we never have, and it has actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring soldiers into our cities.the Kentucky senator declared to the right-wing television network Newsmax.

The army and our troops are trained to shoot at the enemy… Those who expel people from our country need to be from a police agency, not the military. He concluded: I support President Trump, I support removing those who are here irregularly… but I am not in favor of the army marching up and down our streets.

Trump and several of his advisors have assured that they will begin deportation with migrants who have been accused or convicted of a criminal offense. Yesterday, where a Venezuelan migrant in Georgia, José Antonio Ibarra, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a university student, Republicans continue to accuse that undocumented immigrants are criminals, although official statistics themselves show that migrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens. .

The president of the House of Representatives, Republican Mike Johnson, charges that there are between 3 and 4 million criminal aliens in the United States that Trump will seek to deport. But in June, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) reported that it only has a record of a total of 662,566 noncitizens with criminal records, according to the Washington Post. Another problem is that some of them arrived from countries with which Washington does not have agreements and that do not accept deportees from the United States, such as Russia, China and Pakistan.

For the moment, the main objective of the next Trump administration is to demonstrate that they are acting on the problem that during the campaign they accused is the origin of all evil in their country. Therefore, the most likely thing, analysts here suggest, is that the Trump government will begin with spectacles such as military-type raids in some places in the country that lend themselves to television images. Although it is not yet known what would follow, with the arrival of the Republican to the White House, the only certain thing is that life for the undocumented will immediately be much more difficult.