Mexico builds shelters for US deportations
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico—Mexican authorities have begun constructing giant tent shelters in the city of Ciudad Juarez to prepare for a possible influx of Mexicans deported under US President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations.
The temporary shelters in Ciudad Juarez will have the capacity to house thousands of people and should be ready in a matter of days, said municipal official Enrique Licon.
“It’s unprecedented,” Licon said on Tuesday afternoon, as workers unloaded long metal bracings from tractor trailers parked in the large empty lot yards from the Rio Grande, which separates the city from El Paso, Texas.
The tents in Ciudad Juarez are part of the Mexican government’s plan to ready shelters and reception centers in nine cities across northern Mexico.
Authorities at the site will provide deported Mexicans with food, temporary housing, medical care, and assistance in obtaining identity documents, according to a government document outlining the strategy, called “Mexico embraces you.”
Costly
The government is also planning to have a fleet of buses ready to transport Mexicans from the reception centers back to their hometowns.
Trump has vowed to carry out the largest deportation effort in US history, which would remove millions of immigrants. An operation of that scale, however, would likely take years and be hugely costly.
Nearly 5 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 US census data.
Many are from parts of central and southern Mexico wracked by violence and poverty.
Some 800,000 undocumented Mexicans in the United States are from Michoacan, Guerrero, and Chiapas, according to the Colef study, where fierce battles between organized crime groups have forced thousands to flee in recent years, sometimes leaving whole towns abandoned.
MPP after CBP One
The Mexican government says it is ready for the possibility of mass deportations. But immigration advocates have their doubts, fearing that the combination of mass deportations and Trump’s measures to prevent migrants from entering the United States could quickly saturate Mexican border cities.
The Trump administration on Monday ended a program, known as CBP One, that allowed some migrants waiting in Mexico to enter the United States legally by obtaining an appointment on a government app.
On Tuesday it said it was reinstating Migrant Protection Protocols, an initiative that forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for the resolution of their US cases.
