Mexico Unveils New Deportation Campaign

Mexico announced this weekend that it will start deporting migrants from cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and restricting migration throughout the country.

Mexico is about to step up its deportation game. According to CNN this morning, the Mexican government is starting a new campaign to restrict migration through the country and to deport migrants in border cities along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The new policy is described as a response to growing numbers of migrants arriving at the border, with reports claiming several thousands of arrests each day. I’m sure that’s the case, although I wonder whether the focus on the number of arrests is akin to focusing on symptoms rather than examining the underlying cause.

Mexico refers to deportations from border cities as “depressurizing”, which I suppose means that immigrants are evaporated steam that must be released from a closed container rather than human beings with humanitarian needs that both the United States and Mexico have failed to adequately address. Mexico, as the article notes, has become more violent in some parts which continues to drive migration.

In recent years, we’ve seen Mexican authorities step up their enforcement on the Mexican side of the border. I am not a border historian, so my notion that the Mexican side of the border used to be relatively un-policed may be wrong or exaggerated. But during my last visit to Matamoros, for instance, the Mexican National Guard was armed and stationed on the Mexican side of the bridge to check people and cars coming into the country. When I visited Juarez, I heard stories of local and national authorities rounding up migrants on the streets and clearing short-term migrant shelters. But these new policies appear to go far beyond that.

Mexico will, among other things, more carefully monitor and police trains leading towards the border, coordinate with other Latin American countries to deport migrants back to sending countries, and work more closely with Customs and Border Protection to allow the agency to deport more migrants back into Mexico.

Although we have yet to see what all of this will mean in practice and whether it will be effective, it nonetheless represents not so much of a shift in policy (Mexico has been serving as a second border for the U.S. for years) as an intensification of coordinated state projects to regulate and punish human migration both at the border and beyond.

ICYMI: In Case You Missed It

I published an article last week on The Immigration Lab Blog titled “Asylum Seekers Encounter a New Digital Border: Their Smartphones.” In the article, I discuss the concerns I have over Customs and Border Protection’s use of a smartphone app to manage asylum seekers. Check it out here.

In the context of Mexico’s policy announcement above, I’m wondering if, when, and how the Mexican government will also use smartphone technology for tracking and monitoring migrants. We already know the government used Pegasus against activists in the past, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t do something similar to track and intercept migrants. If you have thoughts about this, let me know below.

In other news

• Records show California prisons are reporting U.S. citizens to ICE, ACLU says. Click for article on the LA Times

• Families crossing U.S. border illegally reached all-time high in August. Click for article on the Washington Post.

• CoreCivic Signs $20 Million Deal To Jail Immigrants for ICE in New Jersey. Click for article on Documented NY.

• Afghan students rocked by US visa denials. Click for article on The Guardian.

The boundary between the US and Mexico at the New Mexico port of Columbus. Author’s photo.