Mexican authorities have begun building giant tent shelters in the city of Ciudad Juarez to prepare for a possible influx of Mexicans deported under US President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
Temporary shelters in Ciudad Juarez will have the capacity to hold thousands of people and should be ready within days, municipal official Enrique Licon said.
“This is unprecedented,” Licon said Tuesday afternoon, as workers unloaded long metal bracing from tractor trailers parked in the large empty yard across the Rio Grande that separates the city from El Paso, Texas.
The tents in Ciudad Juarez are part of the Mexican government’s plan to prepare shelter and welcome centers in nine cities in northern Mexico.
Officials at the site will provide deported Mexicans with food, temporary housing, medical care and assistance in obtaining identification documents, according to a government document outlining the strategy called “Mexico Embraces You.”
The government also plans to prepare a fleet of buses to transport Mexicans from reception centers to their hometowns.
Trump has vowed to carry out the largest deportation effort in US history, which would remove millions of immigrants. However, an operation of that scale would take many years and would be extremely expensive.
Nearly five million Mexicans are living in the United States without authorization, according to an analysis by Mexican think tank El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) based on recent U.S. census data.
Many are from parts of central and southern Mexico struggling with violence and poverty. According to the COLEF study, about 800,000 undocumented Mexicans in the United States are from Michoacán, Guerrero and Chiapas, where fierce fighting between organized crime groups has forced thousands to flee in recent years, sometimes entire towns. is abandoned.
mexico may struggle
The Mexican government says it is prepared for the possibility of mass deportations. But immigration advocates are skeptical, fearing that the combination of mass deportations and Trump’s measures to prevent migrants from entering the U.S. could quickly saturate Mexican border cities.
The Trump administration on Monday ended a program called CBP One, which had allowed some migrants waiting in Mexico to enter the US legally by getting an appointment on a government app. On Tuesday he said he was reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), an initiative that forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. cases to be resolved.
On Monday, Jose Luis Pérez, then Tijuana’s director of migration issues, became one of the few Mexican officials to raise public concerns about whether Mexico was truly prepared.
“Basically, with CBP forestalling and canceling deportations, the government is not coordinated to get them,” he said.
Hours later, he was fired because he said it was retaliation for issuing such warnings.
The municipal government did not respond to questions about his dismissal.
“Mexico will take every necessary step to take care of its compatriots and do whatever is necessary to welcome those who are returning home,” Mexican Interior Minister Rosa Isela said during her daily morning press conference on Monday. Will allocate.”
But with economic growth projected to slow this year, Mexico may struggle to accommodate the millions of Mexicans deported from the U.S., while a significant drop in remittances could cause “severe economic disruption” in towns and villages across the country. Who are dependent on this kind of income. Wayne Cornelius, Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of California-San Diego.
On Thursday evening in Ciudad Juarez, about two dozen soldiers manned a tent shelter near a towering black cross where, in 2016, Pope Francis held an open-air Mass, warning of a humanitarian crisis and pleading for migrants. Had prayed. In the pitch dark the soldiers began building an industrial kitchen to feed the deportees.
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