In the center of the city of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, some twenty miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala, migrants and locals gather every evening in a small plaza dedicated to nineteenth-century Mexican President Benito Juárez. They sit at the feet of Juárez’s statue, flanked by one of the Mexican political icon’s well-known quotes inscribed in large gold letters: “Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.”
Long after Juárez and his dream of a tolerant, liberal Mexico, Tapachula in the twenty-first century has become an arbitrary host to a kind of extraordinary meeting of nations. Always a transit hub due to its location close to an international border, since about 2015 the number of people arriving to the city from outside Mexico has grown exponentially—from an average of 39,000 annual encounters between migrants and federal migration officials in Chiapas between 2007 and 2014 to 76,333 in 2021 alone.
In 2021 and 2022, Mexico received the third-highest number of applications for asylum in the world, with the vast majority being made in Tapachula. As of late January, most migrants are arriving from ten nations, according to Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR: Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua. Other arrivals include migrants from African countries like Cameroon, Angola, and Senegal, and from South Asian nations including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The transit has transformed the tropical city, with traditional Mexican food and music now mingling with the signs of Central American, Caribbean, South Asian, and African cultures: Salvadoran pupusas, Haitian beats, Indian curries.
Many of the visitors are fleeing for their lives, escaping armed conflict, natural disasters, or economic collapse at home; all are seeking the chance at a dignified life free of violence and poverty in the countries they’ve been compelled to leave—some of them up to a decade ago, like the Haitians who left home in the wake of that country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Many hope to be reunited with family members in the United States; most left home anticipating that the United States would be their final destination. The journey—highly dangerous and sometimes fatal—is largely fueled by the migrants’ religious faith and belief in the American Dream of economic self-determination.
The migrant trail through southern Mexico has always been broadly shaped by the vicissitudes of U.S. border policy and foreign policy, and, most recently, a presidential announcement on January 5 was no exception. Indeed, this time, the edges of the path to asylum were sharpened.
Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in late December to uphold Title 42, the pandemic-era pretext for mass expulsions from the U.S.-Mexico border, President Joe Biden announced that, instead of requesting refugee status on arrival at the border, people traveling on foot who wish to seek asylum in the United States must now do so by submitting their petition through CBP One, an app designed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to streamline customs and immigration processes at the Mexico-U.S. border.
The announcement stipulated that asylum seekers from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, who already had been deported by the thousands under Title 42, could apply for exemption under a “humanitarian parole.” For these migrants, not only must their applications proceed through the CBP One app, but applicants must also meet a strict background check and have a sponsor in the United States. In addition, they must present a valid passport and arrive in the United States by plane. Through this process, the U.S. government said it would grant up to 30,000 visas per month to applicants from these four nations, having already provided the humanitarian-parole avenue to Venezuelan applicants since October.
Since January 5, asylum seekers from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua at the border who could not meet certain criteria have joined the long daily list of people required to remain in Mexico.
Since January 5, migrants at the border who could not meet these criteria have joined the long daily list of people required to remain in Mexico via Title 42 or have been deported to their home countries. The Biden Administration’s announcement also detailed that the Mexican government had agreed to receive 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua who are expelled from the United States under the new arrangements.
As the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) noted, these extra layers of conditions further restrict the right to asylum for those who arrive to the United States land border on foot, amounting to the expansion of legal pathways for “a select number of individuals” only.
The sudden addition of particular requirements for humanitarian parole, says WOLA, “will leave thousands of migrants stranded throughout the route [from a migrant’s home country to the United States, via multiple Central and South American countries] and place additional burden on those countries.”
For Cornelia and her husband, Raúl (not their real names to protect their safety), who left their home in Nicaragua and headed to Mexico in December, the January 5 announcement changed everything.
They had decided to leave after discovering that Raúl’s name was on a list of people targeted for arrest by a vigilante group. Traveling first to Costa Rica, and then flying to Guatemala, the couple arrived in Tapachula in early January intending to travel north through Mexico and cross into the United States.
Speaking to The Progressive in Tapachula in January, Cornelia said that “now with the President’s announcement, it is more complicated for us,” but she was confused about exactly what the new conditions for getting to the United States were.
“I’ve heard about the parole thing, where you need to have a sponsor. A lot of people are making videos about it on the Internet, but it seems to be more about Cubans,” she said.
The forty-five-year-old showed The Progressive a TikTok video made by a lawyer in the United States that a family member had sent her. The lawyer says he can help people from Central America get to the United States and provides a WhatsApp number.
“I’ve been writing to him,” Cornelia said, showing a text exchange on WhatsApp. “But I can’t get a clear answer. Can he help me get to the United States or not? Do I need a sponsor?”
The many social media networks that link migrants to information, services, and each other are full of such offers—legal help, transport, safe passage. Indeed, along with learning any new policy requirements coming from the U.S. border, a large part of life on the journey involves deducing whether an offer of help is serious or a scam. Robbery, extortion, and dead ends are common.
Cornelia counts herself lucky that she has not encountered troubles worse than the “crisis of where to sleep or the crisis of not having money.”
“One hears so many bad stories” of other migrants’ experiences, she said, like being targeted by “bad guys who took money from them, getting beaten, and having all of their things stolen.”
If migrants from Central American, Caribbean, South Asian, and African countries are fleeing from conditions deeply influenced by U.S. foreign policy—from the failure of U.S. aid in Haiti to trade dependence in Bangladesh—the families who arrive at Tapachula from Afghanistan bring that influence into sharp focus.
At the migration station on the outskirts of the city, The Progressive met two Afghan families traveling together—two brothers, their wives, and their four children. The group first traveled to Iran, then Brazil; they had arrived that day from Guatemala, crossing the Suchiate River at dawn, as so many migrants do every day. Their journey had included the Darién Gap, a crossing that some don’t survive—as one brother noted, his young son caught pneumonia and they feared he would be one of them. In the passage from Guatemala to Mexico, he added, they had lost nearly all of their money and belongings at the hands of corrupt border officials.
The brothers explained that they had left Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. A doctor and a businessman, the two said they feared for the lives of their wives and could not stay due to “what [the Taliban] do to women.”
Not counted among the 88,500 Afghans resettled in the United States after U.S. troops left and the Taliban took power, they made the decision to wait in Brazil for an opportunity to get to Mexico as a route into the United States, where they have relatives. Brazil provides humanitarian visas with work and study rights and an option to apply for refugee status.
Having finally arrived in Tapachula, the young families were granted permission by Mexican authorities to keep traveling through the country. The Progressive learned in February that they had made it to the United States.
“We prefer to stay here in Mexico with a little work rather than go back to Nicaragua. If we go back, my husband will go to jail. They took his sister already. What else are we supposed to do?”
This Afghan family’s journey can also be understood through the lens of Mexico’s migration and asylum policies and how they are selectively enforced.
As WOLA puts it, the effective “expansion of Title 42 expulsions into Mexico” announced by the United States on January 5 is “the latest in a long line of rights-violating U.S. border policies to which Mexico’s government has agreed.”
This includes receiving “thousands of people expelled across its northern border under Title 42 without the chance to seek asylum” and “chain expulsions of migrants and asylum seekers to other countries without the opportunity to access protection.”
Mexico’s government has also “imposed visa requirements on several South American nationalities at the request of the United States, and deployed military troops to its borders to block migration.”
WOLA also notes Mexico’s continuing failure to protect migrants from the clear and present dangers faced on their side of the border: “U.S. and Mexican government actions place asylum seekers into the hands of criminal groups waiting to prey on them. In many cases, organized criminals are waiting at the very sites where expulsions take place.”
Asylum seekers on the road in Mexico are also increasingly caught in the web of the country’s ongoing expansion of military powers and personnel, with the incorporation of the National Guard into the armed forces and the deployment of the army into major civil functions, including customs and migration control. As Dawn Paley reports for Truthdig, “In addition to criminal and paramilitary groups, migrants are dealing with an expanded army and police roles in controlling their movement.”
Increased militarization in Mexico is being “sold as necessary to combat organized crime and keep criminals out,” Paley notes, but it “has done little to keep Mexicans or migrants safe.” She adds: “What it has done, at least temporarily, is placated Washington, raised smugglers fees, and shifted Mexico’s migration containment machinery into overdrive.”
Much like the Ukrainian refugees admitted at U.S. border crossings ahead of asylum seekers from the Americas, the passage through Mexico to the United States by the Afghan family interviewed in Tapachula can be mapped onto U.S. asylum priorities. Mexico supports U.S. border policy, which prioritizes asylum for people from Ukraine and Afghanistan, and is currently actively narrowing access for people leaving Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua—like Cornelia and her husband, who have found themselves stuck in Tapachula indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the new restrictions on asylum seekers at the U.S. border are being declared a success. Customs and Border Protection reported that “migrant encounters” have dropped by 40 percent, and the Biden Administration is proposing further restrictions on asylum seeking, including that petitioners must also first seek and be denied protection in countries they pass through en route to the United States.
“We can’t go back to Nicaragua,” Cornelia says. “We prefer to stay here in Mexico with a little work rather than go back to Nicaragua. If we go back, my husband will go to jail. They took his sister already. What else are we supposed to do?”