Asylum requests surge in Mexico amid U.S. border crackdown
- Share via
- Over the last decade, the annual number of asylum applications in Mexico has grown a hundredfold.
- There are growing fears that Mexico’s asylum system is unprepared to deal with the increase.
NAUCALPAN DE JUÁREZ, Mexico — It wasn’t long ago that record numbers of migrants were claiming asylum at the U.S. southern border, overwhelming federal agents and backlogging the immigration courts.
Now the border is the quietest it’s been in years, largely because the Trump administration has stopped processing asylum claims there — and pushed that responsibility farther south.
Mexico has seen more asylum applications over the last several weeks than at any time in recent memory, its refugee agency thronged by recent U.S. deportees, as well as migrants who were headed north but wound up stranded by President Trump’s crackdown.
The Mexican government has not released recent data on asylum claims, but an official familiar with the figures said that the numbers are three to four times greater than before Trump was elected in November, with as many as 1,000 migrants a day starting the process.
The surge underscores the ways Trump’s border policies are putting new pressure on Mexico. Previously a country where migrants simply passed through en route to the United States, it is increasingly seen as a Plan B for those who don’t make it or have been deported and feel they cannot return to their homelands.
But there are growing fears that Mexico’s asylum system is unprepared to deal with the increase. And matters have been made worse by the Trump administration’s 90-day freeze on U.S. humanitarian aid.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has won praise for how she deals with Trump. How long can her success last?
Around $2 billion in annual U.S. aid destined for Latin America and the Caribbean is now on hold, forcing nonprofit shelters, legal aid providers and other groups that work with migrants in Mexico to lay off staff members or suspend their operations at a time when they are needed most. The freeze is also expected to result in cuts to Mexico’s refugee agency, which was indirectly funded with U.S. money channeled through the United Nations.
“This is worse than anything I’ve ever seen,” said Gretchen Kuhner, director of the Institute for Women in Migration, a Mexico-based nonprofit that advocates for migrants, referring to both the shift in U.S. border policy and the sudden withdrawal of aid. “There’s just a lot of frustration and confusion.”
The U.S. has turned to its southern neighbor for help blocking migrants since at least the Obama administration, when Mexico agreed to increase deportations and dramatically militarize its border with Guatemala. More recently, the Biden administration and the first Trump administration struck deals with Mexico to require asylum seekers to wait there while their claims were processed.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has acknowledged that her country is receiving non-Mexican deportees and is repatriating some to their homelands.
“This is what Mexico has done for years,” said Josue Leal, who runs a migrant shelter in southern Mexico called Oasis De Paz del Espíritu Santo Amparito. “We have been doing the dirty work for the United States.”
Get up to date on the latest immigration news, policy changes and other developments out of LA, California, and around the world.
Leal once worked alongside 11 others at the tin-roofed shelter in the city of Villahermosa. After the U.S. aid freeze, he was forced to lay off half of his staffers. At the same time, demand for legal services has surged, he said. In January, the shelter’s paralegal helped 224 people apply for asylum in Mexico, up from 106 the month before.
It appears that most of those seeking refuge here are among the estimated 270,000 people who were waiting in Mexico while they sought appointments at the U.S. border using a Biden-era cellphone application known as CBP One. Trump abruptly ended the program on his first day.
At a branch office of Mexico’s refugee agency in Naucalpan de Juárez, a suburb of Mexico City, the line of people waiting for appointments on a recent morning wrapped around the building. Most were from three countries beset by poverty and political repression: Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela.
Nereida Carrera, 40, a political activist who worked on the campaign of an opposition leader in Venezuela’s presidential election last year, fled with her family after the nation’s authoritarian leader claimed victory despite ample evidence that he had lost.
Carrera’s husband managed to lodge an asylum claim at the U.S. border and was given a permit that allows him to legally work in Florida while he awaits the outcome of his case.
Carrera and her two daughters, 20 and 11, had an appointment to present their asylum claims at the Mexicali border on Feb. 3. The girls were thrilled, Carrera said. After months apart, “they thought they were about to see their father.”
Trump’s cancellation of the app devastated them all. “He’s there,” she said of her husband, “and we’re here with broken hearts.”
Now, there is a vigorous family debate. The daughters aren’t ready to give up on the U.S. Their father, meanwhile, is considering “self-deporting” to Mexico to reunite with his family.
The Trump administration wants to use the military to fight Mexican drug cartels.
Carrera said she is looking into claiming asylum elsewhere in the world, possibly in Europe.
“I don’t know where to go,” she said. “But we’re going to get refugee status here in Mexico while we figure it out.”
It is unclear how many of those applying for asylum in Mexico now plan to stay here long term, and how many may be using the process to gain legal status that allows them to work and avoid harassment by police while they make other plans.
Carrera and others spoke about the challenges of living as immigrants in Mexico, where work is ample and food is relatively cheap but where xenophobia, violence and corruption are common.
Humberto Briceño, 39, also from Venezuela, said gangs and immigration agents have extorted money from him while he waits in Mexico for a chance to claim asylum in the United States. He eventually found work as a security guard, but said he earns less than $80 for a 72-hour workweek.
Now that Briceño’s dream of reuniting with family in the U.S. seems out of reach, he hopes to stay in Mexico. Returning to Venezuela is not an option. “They would call you a terrorist and put you in jail,” he said. “They would disappear you.”
His friend Carlos Ordaz, 50, also said he would not voluntarily return to Venezuela, even though Mexico has been offering migrants free flights back to Caracas in recent months.
“We sold our houses, our cars, to make this journey,” he said. “We have nothing to go back to.”
Asylum applications in Mexico have skyrocketed in recent years, increasing to a record 140,982 in 2023 from 1,295 in 2013.
Mexico, the world’s 13th largest economy, has the capacity to absorb them, said Andrés Ramírez, the former director of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance.
“There are many countries in the world that have much poorer economies than Mexico and many more migrants,” he said.
As Mexico’s immigration agents have sought to restrict migrants from reaching the U.S. border in recent years, apprehending people en masse and busing them south, many have become caught in bottlenecks in poorer communities near Guatemala. Addressing the needs of those populations — and processing a rising number of asylum claims nationally — will require “strengthening the operational capacity of Mexico’s institutions,” Ramírez said.
Yet the refugee agency is poised to lose resources. It is supported in part by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has long received funding from the United States. U.S. donations to the U.N. are on hold because of the humanitarian aid freeze.
Mexico recently increased the budget of the refugee agency. But it included a much larger increase for the country’s National Immigration Institute, which is tasked with deporting migrants without legal status. Ramírez said that was an indication that authorities are more interested in policing migrants than helping them.
He said the country’s ability to cope with growing demand on its asylum system may depend on whether Trump’s threat of widespread deportations actually materializes.
During his first month in office, Trump deported fewer people than the average every month during the last full year of the Biden administration. But many fear more deportations are coming — both of Mexicans and third-country migrants.
But in the absence of widespread deportations, some migrants may decide it is still worth it to try to reach the U.S., even by illicit means. Ramírez said that migrant smugglers, who are known in Mexico as coyotes, were already making that pitch.
“Coyotes are encouraging people that there is still hope,” he said.
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
