The controversial Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measure known as Title 42 was invoked by the Trump Administration to expel more than one million migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. The law is now set to be put on hold on December 21—though nineteen Republican-controlled states are challenging this suspension—after a federal judge reversed a previous decision by a Trump-appointed judge that blocked the Biden Administration from ending the rule.
Ahead of the potential end of Title 42, Mexican immigration authorities have escalated their crackdown on migrants passing through their jurisdiction, detaining nearly 16,000 migrants over four days, according to the country’s National Institute of Migration. Among those detained during the four days were 4,968 migrants from Venezuela, 2,987 from Guatemala, 1,385 from Nicaragua, 1,311 from Honduras, and 1,285 from Ecuador, along with those of other nationalities. Additional operations detained more than 1,000 migrants just days later.
Even prior to the Title 42 reversal announcement, Mexican authorities set a detention record, detaining 52,000 migrants in October 2022—up from an average of about 15,000 per month since 2013. But this figure has been creeping up in the last few years.
“The detention of migrants has been increasing since 2019,” Miriam González Sánchez, who works with the Mexican organization Institute for Women in Migration, tells The Progressive. “In 2021, there was an increase, but this has to do with the policies of containment that Mexico has adopted.”
There were over 300,000 detentions of migrants in 2021 alone, an increase over prior years. These are the result of the adoption of policies pushed by the United States in an effort to contain migration in the region. In 2022, agents detained more than 310,000 migrants between January and October.
Between January and October 2022, more than 83,500 migrants were deported from Mexico. But the most recent detentions of migrants have not contributed to an increase in deportations.
Even prior to the Title 42 reversal announcement, Mexican authorities set a detention record, detaining 52,000 migrants in October 2022—up from an average of about 15,000 per month since 2013.
“It doesn’t appear that they’ve ramped up the deportations despite the ramp up in detentions,” Tom Cartwright, an immigration activist with Witness At the Border, tells The Progressive. “But I don’t know if they’ve done it for publicity reasons or they detained them and then moved them somewhere and let them go.”
He adds, “I see no indication that they’ve actually deported more people.”
According to González Sánchez, only around 60 to 65 percent of migrants who are detained in Mexico are typically deported. There is a significant lack of data about what happens to the remaining migrants, but organizations like the Institute for Women in Migration have continued to seek clarification on the irregularities in the data.
U.S.-backed operations to stem the flow of migrants also extend south from Mexico. Guatemala, has upped its expulsion of migrants under the guise of removing gang members fleeing the nine-month long crackdown on gangs in El Salvador, and the recently declared operations in Honduras to combat extortions.
On November 28, the Guatemalan Ministry of the Interior announced the expansion of inter-agency border operations that began in March 2022. On the first day, at least thirty-six migrants from Venezuela, Bangladesh, China, and Cuba were expelled during operations along the country’s border with Honduras. Days later on December 1, forty-eight people, including migrants from Nepal, Venezuela, Cuba, and Ecuador, were also expelled, according to Guatemala’s Migration Institute.
“The United States continues to try and find ways to constrain the flow of people from Central America and South America into Mexico,” Cartwright says. “That extends all the way through Central America, to Guatemala and other countries.”
Though the Biden Administration pushed for an end to Title 42, Reuters reports it has considered reviving the Trump-era policy that blocked single adults from applying for asylum if they had not first applied in other countries that they passed through.
Such a move signals a continuation of the United States’ efforts to export detention policies south of its border with Mexico. As a result, migrants passing through Mexico have continued to face violence and dangers.
“We have seen violence in many forms and manifestations,” González Sánchez says. “Not only in terms of institutional violence, but in addition to violence in the communities. We have seen how the xenophobic and racist part of societies is much more visible. The discourse that migrants are threats constantly replicates.”
Migrants face deplorable conditions in detention centers, and they often go untreated when experiencing a medical crisis, or lacking the means to denounce violations of rights. “There is no access to justice for migrants who are victims of violence,” González Sánchez says.
Since taking office in 2018, the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has significantly increased the military presence in the handling of migrants in Mexico. In 2019, the federal police and military were fused to create a new National Guard, which was deployed to detain migrants.
“With all these policies of containment that the Mexican government has adopted, since June 2019, migration has been militarized,” González Sánchez says. “We have more than 30,000 National Guard troops, more Army, more Navy, more immigration agents, carrying out immigration containment tasks in the country.”