VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico (news agencies) — “Here, again.”
Yeneska García’s face crumbled as she said it, and she pressed her head into her hands.
Since fleeing crisis in Venezuela in January, the 23-year-old had trekked through the Darien Gap jungle dividing Colombia and Panama, narrowly survived being kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and waited months for an asylum appointment with the United States that never came. She finally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in May, only to have American authorities expel her.
Now she was back in southern Mexico, after Mexican immigration bused her to sweltering Villahermosa and dropped her on the street.
“I would rather cross the Darien Gap 10,000 times than cross Mexico,” García said, sitting in a migrant shelter.
She clutched a crinkled Ziploc bag that held her Venezuelan ID, an inhaler and an apple — her few remaining possessions.
Driven by mounting pressure from the U.S. to block millions of vulnerable people headed north, but lacking the funds to deport them, Mexican authorities are employing a simple but harsh tactic: wearing migrants out until they give up.
That means migrants are churning in limbo here as authorities round them up across the country and dump them in the southern Mexican cities of Villahermosa and Tapachula. Some have been punted back as many as six times.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that the policy protects migrants.
“We care a lot … about keeping migrants in the southeast because crossing to the north is very risky,” López Obrador said, responding to a question from media during his daily briefing.
But the moves have forced migrants, including pregnant women and children, into even more precarious situations. That’s likely to worsen under President Joe Biden’s new asylum restrictions, analysts say.
Mexico’s actions explain a plunge in arrivals to the U.S.-Mexico border, which dropped 40% from an all-time high in December and persisted through the spring. U.S. officials mostly credit Mexican vigilance around rail yards and highway checkpoints.
“Mexico is the wall,” said Josue Martínez, a psychologist at Villahermosa’s only migrant shelter, Peace Oasis of the Holy Spirit Amparito, which was was bracing for a crush of people under Biden’s measure to halt asylum processing when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed.
The small shelter has been scrambling since Mexico’s government began pushing people back two years ago. Last month, it housed 528 people, up sharply from 85 in May 2022.
“What will we do when even more people arrive?” Martínez said. “Every time the United States does something to reinforce the northern border, we automatically know tons of people are coming to Villahermosa.”
Migrants here walk or take buses north toward Mexico City, where they can request an appointment to seek asylum over U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app, CBP One. But most never make it far enough north for the app’s location requirement.
Checkpoints dot southern Mexican highways. Armed soldiers pull migrants off buses and round up those walking along roads and in surrounding mountains. Of two dozen migrants interviewed by the news agencies, all said they were extorted by law enforcement or Mexican migration officials to continue on their journeys. After dishing out hefty sums of money two or three times, families had nothing. They were then bused back south, where most are left on the streets.
Mexican authorities refer to the temporary detentions as “humanitarian rescues.”
But Venezuelan Keilly Bolaños say there is nothing human about them. She and her four children have been sent to southern Mexico six times. The 25-year-old single mother wants asylum so her 4-year-old daughter can get treatment for leukemia, unavailable to her in Venezuela.
Days earlier, she was captured in the northern state of Chihuahua, where she said members of the military beat her in front of her crying children, then loaded them onto a bus for the two-day journey to Villahermosa.
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