Mexico Concerned About Trump Deportation Plans

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

U.S. President Donald Trump has deployed troops to the southern border with Mexico where they will be tasked with carrying out some of the logistics of his crackdown on illegal migrants in the United States. In anticipation, labourers and construction workers in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso in Texas, are building a small tent city.

The Mexican government is preparing for thousands of deportees they expect to arrive from the United States in the coming weeks. Juarez is one of eight border locations along the 3,000-kilometre-long border where Mexico is getting ready for the anticipated influx.

“Mexico will do everything necessary to care for its compatriots and will allocate whatever is necessary to receive those who are repatriated,” said the Mexican Interior Minister, Rosa Icela Rodriguez, on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

For her part, President Claudia Sheinbaum has stressed her government will first attend to the humanitarian needs of those returning, saying they will qualify for her government’s social programs and pensions, and will immediately be eligible to work.

Mexican citizens are by far the largest nationality among the estimated more than 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. They include an estimated five million undocumented Mexicans and the prospect of a mass return could quickly saturate and overwhelm border cities like Juarez and Tijuana.

In recent years, Washington has removed about 200,000 deportees annually to Mexico, mostly via the southwestern land border, but including some ferried by non-military aircraft to the Mexican interior. The number of deportees returned to Mexico is widely expected to increase under Trump’s directives.

Sheinbaum has already accepted Trump’s reinstatement of the controversial Remain in Mexico policy, which forces asylum seekers arriving at the border, including Central Americans and other non-mexicans, to wait in Mexico for adjudication of their cases in U.S. immigration courts.

She has said Mexico would seek financial aid from Washington to reimburse the costs of repatriating third-country nationals to their homelands.

She urged Mexicans to “remain calm and keep a cool head” about relations with President Trump and his administration more broadly, from deportations to the threat of tariffs.

The U.S. is also in talks with Central American countries on immigration, Sheinbaum said, suggesting they could receive migrants from other nations in the region.

“Some countries’ constitutions, Guatemala’s, for example, say that any Central American must be accepted by Guatemala,” Sheinbaum added. “So they’re co-ordinating with the United States, taking into account each country’s sovereignty.”

Guatemalan Foreign Minister Carlos Ramiro Martinez told journalists that he did not rule out his nation becoming a so-called “safe third country” to accept migrants of other nationalities. U.S. military aircraft carried out two flights, each with about 80 migrants, to Guatemala.

Mexico initially refused to allow U.S. military aircraft deporting migrants to land in the country. The idea of giant C-17s flying over Mexican airspace and unloading deportees at Mexican airports is a potentially incendiary prospect in a country with a long memory of U.S. invasions; the nation lost much of its territory in the Mexican-american War of 1846-48.

Though Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico for more than a century, Mexican youth are schooled in Mexico’s “heroic” resistance to past U.S. actions.

Many in Mexico are already unnerved at previous Trump threats to deploy the U.S. military against drug traffickers.

Sheinbaum is under pressure to bend to Trump’s demands in order to safeguard the economy, but she must also take care not to alienate citizens sensitive to perceived slights against Mexico’s sovereignty.

“President Sheinbaum is in a tight spot,” observed Tony Payan, who heads the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The optics of military planes flying deportees back to Mexico would not be good for her nationalist base. But she may not have a choice other than to accept it.”

Meanwhile, Mexican authorities are erecting large-scale new shelters along the country’s northern border with the United States and making other preparations to house and otherwise assist repatriated citizens.

The two neighbours may yet find a workable solution on immigration which is acceptable to both. President Sheinbaum has said the key is dialogue and keeping the channels of communication open.