Mexico’s immigration chief has vowed to slash the number of migrants entering his country by 60% and prevent Mexico from being used as “a trampoline” to the United States, as the Mexican government scrambles to satisfy Donald Trump’s demands to curb migration.
Trump has given Mexico a 45-day deadline – which ends on 22 July – to reduce the flow of undocumented Central American migrants to the United States’ southern border, leaving the Mexican government racing to meet those demands and avert the threat of tariffs.
This week – as Mexican security forces intensified an ongoing crackdown on migrants – authorities said more than 6,000 members of Mexico’s National Guard had been deployed to “seal off” its southern border with Guatemala.
Trump has not publicly specified by how much he expects Mexico to reduce migration in order to escape punitive tariffs.
But in an interview with the Mexican newspaper La Razón, Mexico’s newly appointed immigration chief, Francisco Garduño, said he hoped to prevent hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the country each year as part of a “containment” drive designed to cut of arrivals by 60%.
The influx of so many migrants from Central America, Asia and Africa was “no longer a normal phenomenon” and had to be reduced, Garduño said.
The latest US-Mexico crisis erupted at the end of May when Trump unexpectedly announced the imminent introduction of tariffs on Mexican goods “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP”.
Those tariffs – which experts warned would inflict serious pain on both countries’ economies – were averted after an agreement was reached for Mexico to reduce the number of migrants reaching the US border and host an increased number of Central Americans while their asylum applications were processed in the US.
And since that deal was struck, on 7 July, the Mexican government has been battling to demonstrate it is working hard to rein in migration.
On Saturday police and immigration officials reportedly detained 791 migrants heading north towards the US border in lorries – an operation authorities hailed as “unprecedented” in size.
During a visit to Mexico’s southern border on Thursday the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said Mexico had given the US an undertaking that there would be “more control” over migration, while insisting he still favoured a “humanitarian” approach.
“There’s an effort here to convince the United States that they are taking this very seriously and taking immediate action to head-off a potential 45-day crisis,” said Eric Olson, a Mexico specialist from Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Centre.
But Olson said it was wrong to imagine Mexico had only decided to start policing its southern border because of Trump’s threats.
“There is a narrative – at least in the United States and from Donald Trump – that Mexico is doing nothing. That is patently false,” he said.
“The threat of tariffs certainly elevates it in terms of urgency. But it’s not like they were like: ‘Oh my god! I guess we’d better do something!’”
In fact, Olson said López Obrador was facing a growing backlash against migrants from Mexican citizens, as well as Trump.
“There is increasing push back from [Mexican] communities and from the people who are being most affected directly by the growing number of Central Americans and you see that on the two borders, but also along the route.”
Observers believe that backlash is likely to intensify as Mexico accepts greater numbers of Central American migrants because of its deal with the US.
“Mexico is not well-prepared to receive potentially tens of thousands of Central Americans,” in dangerous and over-crowded border cities such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros, Olson said.
In an interview with the BBC, the former US ambassador to Mexico, Roberta Jacobson, said she also feared Mexico would struggle to feed, house and find jobs for so many arrivals.
López Obrador would have to learn he could not always acquiesce to “the demands of a bully like Trump”, Jacobson added.
