How Mexico is dealing with the Trump's administration deportation campaign

The Trump administration says it’s deported more than 600,000 people in the first year of its aggressive deportation campaign. And, a whole lot of them have gone to Mexico.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico has received more than 150,000 deportees from the United States since Trump took office — including thousands from other countries.

So how is our neighbor to the South handling all of this demand? And what lies ahead for the new year?

For more, The Show joined Nina Kravinsky with KJZZ’s Hermosillo Bureau south of the border.

KJZZ

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Nina. Thanks for coming on.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

GILGER: All right, so let's start with this 150,000 deportee number. That sounds like a lot of people going to one country. How does it compare, though, historically?

KRAVINSKY: Yeah. So when Sheinbaum announced that number last month, she said it was actually lower than in 2024 under the Biden administration. But experts will tell you that a higher proportion of deportations in 2025 happened from the interior of the U.S. rather along the border. So these are people who are more likely to be, you know, longtime residents or folks with deep ties to their communities in the U.S. And a lot of them, like you said, are going to Mexico.

GILGER: So what is Mexico doing with 150,000-plus deportees? Like, where are they going? What's the response like from the government?

KRAVINSKY: Yeah. So right at the beginning of the Trump administration, Mexico launched this program that it calls Mexico de Abrasa, or Mexico Embraces You. It set up these sort of reception centers along the border that provide recent deportees with resources like helping access social services or money for bus tickets back to the Mexican states where their families are or where they're from originally.

And sources that I've talked to in Nogales, you know, right along the border with Arizona and Sonora, where I am say the center there, hasn't seen these huge daily numbers that it was set up to be able to handle.

But certainly Mexican nationals are being deported through that port of entry. And, you know, they are passing through that facility and have been since the start of the Trump administration.

GILGER: Right. So Mexico says, Nina, that as many as 12,000 of these 150,000 deportees are not from Mexico. So what's happening with these kind of non-Mexican migrants who are ending up deported to a country they're not from?

KRAVINSKY: Yeah. So Mexico does have an understanding with the U.S. that it will take people from other countries. We don't know exactly what their agreement is, but we do know that it's happening.

You know, it's not clear exactly what's happening with every person, you know, from a third country, not Mexico, who's being deported to Mexico, but we do know that Mexico does transport some of them back to their countries of origin.

Other people, sources tell me, you know, are now attempting to seek asylum or refugee status in Mexico. That's the same route that some migrants that I've been speaking with here in Sonora. These are people who plan to seek asylum in the U.S. before the Trump administration closed the door are taking.

You know, there are thousands of people like that who came to Mexico in 2020 from countries in Central America especially, who have deemed it unsafe to return to their home countries. But now they also can't get into the U.S. you know, many of them, like I said, are now turning to Mexico for asylum. Originally their plan was to go to the U.S. but now they're turning to Mexico.

But that system in Mexico for processing those claims, experts have told me, is already even before this pretty under resourced and overburdened. So while they wait for their asylum and refugee claims to process their essentially, essentially undocumented here in Mexico, and that's making it hard for a lot of these people to make a life here and to become safe.

It makes them vulnerable to abuse by employers or organized crime, you know, or scrutiny and possible deportation by Mexican authorities.

GILGER: Yeah, you mentioned some migrants you've been talking with there in Sonora. Can you tell us about some of them?

KRAVINSKY: Yeah, totally. You know, these are our folks that I've met in shelters over the past year. I guess maybe one person to focus on specifically is a woman named Jessica, who I've been talking to for the past, you know, almost a year at this point.

She came to Mexico, to northern Mexico, to Nogales after a really long and arduous journey from El Salvador. And she arrived for her CBP One appointment, this appointment to have a meeting with an asylum, a U.S. asylum officer, and try to claim asylum on the border.

That appointment was for Jan. 18, and she was like 45 minutes late after, you know, being facing all of these difficulties and being detained by Mexican authorities.

She was just a little late for this asylum appointment. And then it was rescheduled for after the inauguration, so it was canceled.

So now she's been stuck in Mexico for, at this point, over a year, considering her long journey up to Nogales. And, you know, her and her husband have been trying for, for this whole year to figure out what to do.

They can't get into the U.S. but they, you know, are struggling with the asylum process in Mexico. And so they've had to move out of a shelter and into an apartment. But it's, you know, opens them up to a lot of vulnerabilities and dangers like I talked about before,

GILGER: I'm sure it's a familiar story there.