Mexico and other countries could hamper Trump border plans

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s plans to seal the U.S.-Mexico border and conduct mass deportations might soon run into a major roadblock: Mexico and the countries where the immigrants come from might not accept some of them back.

Trump on Monday signed an order to revive of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires asylum-seekers to stay outside the United States as their claims are processed. But on the frontlines of the U.S.-Mexico border, that requires a degree of cooperation from the Mexican government, which appears resistant.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters Wednesday she has not agreed to accept non-Mexican migrants seeking asylum in the United States, and such a move would require Mexico to agree, according to report in Reuters.

An expert witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday listed other countries that have refused to take back migrants, such as Cuba, Venezuela, China, India, Bangladesh and Iran.

Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Thursday that getting Mexico to cooperate with the Remain in Mexico policy “could be very problematic.”

“It’s really hard to actually institute that program if the Mexican government doesn’t agree, and I don’t think we can take that for granted, that they’re going to agree,” Peters said.

Peters also said the issue of Mexico being forced to accept migrants who are not from the Western Hemisphere, such as those from China, “complicates things as well.”

“The type of migration we’re seeing is different, and it is coming from outside of Latin America,” Peters said. “Not totally, but increasing numbers are coming from outside of Latin America. People are flying into Mexico. People are flying into Canada, they’re flying into other countries and then coming across the border.”

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., at a hearing last week, enumerated a few of the kinds of migrants Mexico would not be willing to accept again.

“These are folks that are coming in from Tajikistan and other areas the Mexicans are not going to take back,” Lankford said. “These are recalcitrant countries that are not accepting folks back.”

In fiscal year 2024, nearly 38,000 nationals from China were found by Border Patrol to have come into the United States illegally from Mexico, which is a steep climb from the 2,200 encountered in the whole of fiscal 2022.

Lankford said international organizations like ISIS are sending people from Tajikistan in from Mexico because they saw the success drug cartels were having with immigrants coming into the United States.

The senator concluded that “some sort of legal response” is needed, including a legislative change that would give authority to the State Department to put pressure on some of these countries as well.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., during the same Homeland Security hearing last week, questioned why Mexico would be able to resist migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere when they entered Mexico in the first place to try to enter the United States.

“They get into Mexico and then they come to the United States — why shouldn’t that be Mexico’s problem?” Scott said. “Why shouldn’t we just say, ‘You’re the one who let them into your country’? Why [is it] our problem? It’s their problem. You raise their tariffs until they do it.”

The previous versions of the Remain in Mexico policy had some level of agreement from Mexico, some of it the result of the sort of tactics Scott mentioned.

In his first term, Trump announced the Remain in Mexico policy in 2018 with the cooperation of Mexico’s then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The reasoning behind why Mexico initially agreed to accept migrants in 2018 under the program is unclear, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said Thursday.

“We don’t entirely know,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “As a matter of fact, there was a lot of confusion over what the specific boundaries of the deal were, and we are still not entirely clear about it.”

While the program was at first limited to one point of entry and specific nationalities, Trump’s threat in 2019 for 25% tariffs got Mexico to agree to expand it further, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“So very clearly, Mexico played a significant role in deciding the boundaries of the program,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “Nevertheless, the official position of the Mexican government has always been, ‘This actually has nothing to do with us. We didn’t choose to do this.’”

Although Trump has said Mexico has agreed to it, the Mexican government has signaled it has not, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“We don’t have full agreement on this,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “What does that actually mean? It’s a little bit more confusion, and we are waiting to hear more from the Trump administration on how the program will … come back, who it will be applied to, and when.”

Ariel Ruiz, senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, said that whether Mexico agrees to the policy again in 2025 depends on new factors because the “negotiation landscape between Mexico and the United States is very different.”

“Mexico, since May, has been detaining more migrants in Mexico than Border Patrol has detained at the U.S.-Mexico border every month since May,” Ruiz said. “And that’s a really significant achievement, because Mexico has a fraction of the funding that U.S. agencies will receive.”

Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said during a conference call on Tuesday that Trump’s other policies “could really hamper” cooperation between the United States and Mexico on the return of migrants.

“The issue of tariffs on Mexico, imposing 25 percent starting very soon, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, threats to retake the Panama Canal will make it much more difficult for those countries to cooperate with the United States going forward,” Meissner said. “So there are those impediments and those internal tensions, similarly with mass deportations.”

The human cost of forcing migrants to return outside the U.S.-Mexico border is another factor in play. Critics of the policy stay it essentially subjects asylum-seekers to the whims of drug cartels, who exploit migrants for money, rape and kidnapping.

Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at The Washington Office on Latin America, testified at the Senate hearing last week that the policy turned migrants into “sitting ducks for the cartels.”

“Foreigners have to pay just to exist for a long time in cartel-dominated neighborhoods,” Isacson said. “If you don’t pay, it’s not safe to go outside your shelter, even if the United States is helping support.”

Kenneth Cuccinelli, a top official in the Homeland Security Department during the first Trump administration, said at a Senate hearing last week that Mexico has long had “very permissive entry,” but said he agreed with Scott “100 percent” that a tougher approach may be the best one.

“I think Mexico would start to finally develop some vetting for people coming into Mexico if we dumped everybody back into Mexico. And there are people in this room, I’m sure, (who) wouldn’t like that, and it would be ugly for a period of time,” Cuccinelli said. “But if people knew they could not get into the United States, and they wouldn’t be allowed to wait around for the 1,013 days for the hearing that they wouldn’t show up for, they won’t come in the first place.”

Under questioning from Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., at a House committee hearing Wednesday, a witness said the State Department isn’t required to withhold visas to countries that won’t accept these migrants.

“The State Department, historically, has been very reluctant to use visa sanctions to impose consequences on countries that are not fulfilling their international obligation to take their citizens back,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said.

Congress could pass a law that required the executive branch to use visa sanctions or other diplomatic tools, such as withholding foreign assistance, Vaughan said.