With a closed USA, migrants start the dangerous journey home home

Half a year after making it 1,700 miles from their house in Venezuela to Mexico, they made the same journey the same: through Central America, where cartels to migrants fell victim to, kidnapped and blackmailed them and through the jungle of the Darién -Lückens in Panama, where travelers died on the way, climbing over their way, which on the way. died.

“How do I feel to go back?” Lucia repeated the question, incredulously. “I feel terrible. But we currently have no choice. ”

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The family is part of a small but growing number of people who return home after reaching the USA. After three years in which the US authorities on the southern border recorded a record (seven million encounters “on the southern border (a hard measure of the number of people who try to cross), their stories represent a rotation of the flood, in the stricter border policy their brand and the word from Nicaragua to Brazil and Chile are closed: the United States are closed.

At the beginning of the last month, the International Organization for Migration, which organized voluntary return flights around the world, reported “increasing demand for return to return in Latin America and the Caribbean”. Many more will be countless because they return to their old life without notifying the authorities. Some have to start from zero again after they have sold everything to finance their shot at the USA.

In his office in Tapachula, ten miles from the crossing point in Talismán, said Samuel Galo, the Honduran Vice-Consul, that he had brought 438 Hondurans home in this border town since the day after Trump's inauguration.

Many had been waiting to receive their CBP one appointment: a program of the bid era that made it possible for people to claim asylum in the United States at a certain time and a certain location at official border crossing points. Trump canceled the program and sealed an executive order that sealed the southern border of the United States to migrants, which he accused due to “penetrating”. It is now actually closed for all asylum seekers.

Trump also stopped a decades of resettlement program that brings refugees to the United States that were checked abroad-a decision that was fought before the courts. Last week, a federal judge published an injunction that Trump essentially ordered to restore the program. It is unclear whether the administration will meet. International organizations and migration analysts estimate that more than 200,000 migrants, most of them, were non-Mexicans on their way to the USA when Trump scrapped CBP one-term.

“It was like a bucket of cold water” for the Hondurans stranded in Tapachula, said the Vice Consul. “Most of them realized that they could not get to the United States and introduced themselves here for a voluntary return.”

The 23 -year -old Sonia and her sister Eilin, 16, had hoped to reach New Orleans with her mother and four other relatives from Hondura's New Orleans when they heard on January 20 that their CBP -Oone date, which was planned a few days later, was canceled. “We cried, it was terrible,” said Sonia.

They are still trying to find out what to do next.

Others in Tapachula still have much further. There are Ghanaian women who are dressed in long robes who stop their laundry, Chinese families who are several centimeters larger in restaurant doors and young Cuban men than most Mexicans who are streets.

The vice consul regretted Trump's defamation of migrants, but agreed that the measures taken were effective. “People will think many times before going [their home countries] Now, ”he said. “It is not comfortable to go.”

Autumn began a year ago when the bidges administration, which had overwhelmed the record number of migrants who crossed the border, urged Mexico to drive them through the country towards the USA. Last summer, Trump's predecessor performed strict limit restrictions, which further lowered the numbers.

“The fact that you have made some changes … that have led to the lower number at the border is actually an indictment against her previous three years of politics,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports Trump's border policy and pronounces for stricter control over immigration. “You could have done that at any time and you just didn't choose anything.”

In the past year, the bidges administration also increased the deportations and more than a quarter of a million people removed people from the United States, almost twice as many as in 2023.

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During his presidential campaign, Trump promised the “greatest deportation” campaign in US history. This has not yet come to the obvious frustration of his administration, also because the responsible agency “still works with the resources,” said Adam Isacson, who is working on the border and migration in the office in Washington in Latin America, a non -profit organization.

While the number of migrants who drive north to the United States to the north continue to decrease, the journey has become more enemy for the few who can do it. Outside of his church in Tapachula, next to the river that shares Mexico and Guatemala, Father Heyman Vázquez Medina ran through the strategies of the cartel to blackmail money from the migrants that still crossed the border.

“There was a time when we had entered migrants,” he said. “The parks were full, the church was full. They came across the river here. The groups [cartels] waited for them. They would charge them 1000 pesos [£40] cross over. Then when they were unlucky, they brought them to a ranch nearby. You would call your families. You would have to pay you $ 700 to be published. “

Since the end of January there have been new border protection officers in the region – evidence of an increased enforcement of immigration by the Mexican government, under pressure from the Trump management.

All over Mexico send checkpoints that once wagged migrants. This means that people are determined to have the cartels who control the remaining routes. “I think migration is now becoming more expensive and more dangerous,” said Medina.

A short walk around the corner from the church leads you to El Paso del CoyoteThe smuggler's route. Here the cartels move into the kidnapping and extortion of migrants. But that day, in the sunshine in the morning, it was quiet. The residents for whom the border is nothing more than a line on a card-freely on rafts made of rubber rings with rough boards that are exaggerated, go to work or have come across boxes of yogurt and juice to sell a profit on the other side.

One of the boaters, Elvis, said this was the quietest that he had seen the border for over a decade. “A lot has been lost since December,” he said. “In the past, caravan [of migrants] In the past came north here. Now it is much less. People return home because they cannot go to the USA … with Trump and the cartels are much more complicated. ”

At the bus station, which are printed in basic colors in the south: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. A seat on the bus north to Tijuana, a US border town, was only available for Mexican citizens with a discount.

In a hotel on the outskirts of the city, a group of around 20 Vietnamese was roasted over their phones, smoke menthol cigarettes and drank Coca-Cola. They had arrived on a flight from China to Guatemala ten days earlier, from where they traveled north to Tapachula. Then they found that they were in trouble.

None of them spoke a word Spanish or English and instead communicated about a translation app on their phone. “We can't go home,” wrote one of them, a young man with tattoos, wrote his arms. “I think if the border is closed, we will be homeless.” One of his friends, a young woman with a toddler, wrote a sentence on her phone and stated him: “I'll go back tonight.”

In the Jesus El Buen Pastor Migrant Center in Tapachula, his director Herber Bermúdez ran through the numbers: a few months ago there were 1,700 people. Now there were 150. Nobody came to replace them. “The army and the military have been here since January 20,” he said. “If you want to go north, it will be difficult for you. You will stop you. “

Some Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans – whose home regulations are deeply repressive – consider staying in Mexico, he said. Most others gave up. “They say it makes no sense to stay here because they came for the American dream,” he said.

Emmanuel Amoah, 43, an electrical engineer from Accra, is one of the few who are. He said he had fled Ghana after he was persecuted after his sexuality. He had paid more than 3,500 US dollars to take this far, to take flights, buses and long hikes through the jungle, and had been robbed three times on the way, including his passport.

He knows that he won't make it to the United States. Instead, he is looking for asylum in Mexico. Perhaps American politics will change in the future, and he can remember to return to the long road to the north.

Additional reporting: Natalia Meneses Alis