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Mexico to set up shelters along the border to receive deported Mexican nationals

Nogales Border
Murphy Woodhouse/KJZZ
Several students walk along the border wall in Nogales, Sonora, in 2019.

Mexico is preparing for a possible mass deportation of its citizens from the United States with a federal program called “Mexico Embraces You.”

The program sets up centers in each of Mexico’s six states along the border with the United States to receive Mexican nationals who are deported.

There will also be buses available to transport people from the border to those centers and from the centers to their home states.

The center in the state of Sonora, which borders Arizona, is in the border city of Nogales. There will be nine centers in total, including centers in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.

The centers will provide medical attention, food and shelter.

President Donald Trump has promised mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants. He took office on Monday.

Mexico’s president has said the country will welcome any citizens forced to leave the United States back with open arms.

In a statement, Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior Rosa Icela Rodríguez said migrants aren’t criminals.

“The country that they left is different from the one we’re building; today it is more fair and egalitarian,” Icela Rodriguez said. “For us, repatriation is a return home to our roots.”

According to the Pew Research Center, about 4 million of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States were from Mexico in 2022. Each year, Mexican immigrants send billions of dollars worth of remittances back to their home country.

More Fronteras Desk news

Nina Kravinsky is a senior field correspondent covering stories about Sonora and the border from the Hermosillo, Mexico, bureau of KJZZ’s Fronteras Desk.